The Wetherspoons App is fantastic

 

Eating a free Big Mac I “won” on the McDonalds app has prompted this download of thoughts.

Over the past couple of years a combination of factors have changed much of customer service either for the better or worse, depending on your opinion. Increasing costs of hiring minimum wage employees either via national insurance hikes or hikes to the minimum wage have prompted employers to alter those jobs to increase productivity though automation. By productivity, I mean more customers served by fewer people. Fast food joints have seen touch screen terminals and app ordering replace counter staff with the human job being to shout out the number you are given on ordering.

I can tell you what I think of those experiences but whether we are talking McDonalds, Burger King or KFC, I’d say the customer experience has degraded considerably through automation.

You could argue these places were never the pinnacle of customer service. The McDonalds brothers devised a quick service system that did away with table service and waiters and put in place a limited menu of pre prepared popular items on a hot plate, counter service and by doing so increased turnover. So much so a milkshake machine salesman called Ray Kroc decided it was a system you could roll out across America and then the world. Whilst the system has changed to a quick prepare and serve model as the menu expanded, it is still considered “fast food”

Maccys was never a place of fine dining and waiter service, but it was a place that in my living memory kept to the Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value (QSC&V) principle established by founder Ray Kroc. When I tell my nieces McDonalds was smarter and even a bit middle class back in the 80s when they arrived in the UK, they laugh, only knowing what they see now.

Whilst claiming my free Big Mac I understood how far these places have drifted from that. Ordering is chaotic, the touch screens don’t dispense receipts telling you your number, the screens don’t work to tell you when your order is ready, the counter is rammed with “none documented” delivery drivers, the place is a mess. At least the outlet I went to wasn’t as bad as some in a city centre. Crackadilly gardens outlet in Manchester is little more than a vagrant hostel if you fancy a morning Mc Muffin among drug addicted tramps.

When I read sales at such places are down and the broad sheet newspapers blame increasing prices, I wondered how many financial journalists at the telegraph ever eat in these places and see they’ve gone downhill in the era of our app order tech overlords.

Fewer staff and a reliance on touch screens have degraded these places and made the customer experience worse. There is one place, where the opposite is true.

I’m a big fan of the Wetherspoons app. I’ll tell you why. It has vastly improved the pub experience and specifically the customer experience of enjoying a cheap pint in the nations favourite pub chain.

Wetherspoons are still run by their founder. Tim Martin has many of the qualities of Ray Kroc. Tim visits his own pubs just as Ray had a repudiation for visiting Maccys and reminding the staff to wipe the tables. Tim runs a tight ship and the impression given is a man that knows how to run a pub chain because he goes in them, not because he receives a daily spreadsheet of KPI numbers whilst sat in a more rarefied environment.

Wetherspoons always got some stick from his critics about understaffed bars and long wait times. His company has devised an app which offers him the ability to have customers wait at tables and not in a scrum at the bar. Service those orders in a orderly fashion. For the customer it offers something akin to waiter service albeit with paying in advance. You either like not waiting to settle your bill, or dislike paying up front. Either way it is an improvement on bar service.

The customer gets a better service, Timbo gets to utilise his staff more efficiently, and if you want to order the old way? Well unlike the fast food joints he’s not removed the counter service and pay by cash route. You’re also welcome at the bar with old men holding their 50p off a pint of bitter token.

He hasn’t installed table tablets, knowing they’d be a maintenance nightmare and instead relied on customers having a smartphone. He knows those that don’t likely prefer cash at the bar anyway.

Wetherpoons has it’s haters, and it’s good that those people like to boycott the chain and go elsewhere. Meanwhile the chain where it’s critics like to moan about understaffing and long bar waits has jumped in front of more expensive pubs and put in place an ordering system far better than waiting at a bar counter. An object lesson in tech improving the customer service experience and not degrading it.

Pubs are dying as they price themselves beyond the mediocrity most of them offer. Much like fast food outlets. I suspect Wetherspoons won’t. It’ll stick around. Because it’s great.