Hurry Up and Wait: Service Design in Foodservice

So, how important is it to understand queuing, or line, theory when designing foodservice concepts?

When explaining the importance of this topic, I often tell industrial engineering students that life is a series of queues: We are always waiting for something. From the moment we wake up, until the moment we go back to sleep, we are in a constant queue, or wait. Really, our days are a series of waits, composed of many queues within our various activities. At the moment, I am waiting to finish this blog, to go on to my next activity; my next wait.

Similarly, a consumer visit to a foodservice operation is a series of waits, usually sequential, part of the larger series of queues they have been experiencing during their daily routine. Direct customer waits happen when they interact with front-of-the-house employees, and those behind the scenes that get the order ready in the “back-of-house.” Any one of these groups of employees can delay the customer experience.

So if you believe the hypothesis that we are in a constant queue as we go on with life, and that a visit to a foodservice establishment is likewise, then I would submit to you that understanding queuing theory when designing foodservice concepts is very important. Brand managers and foodservice designers alike have to understand the principles behind this topic and the dynamics involved in it, to make sure that the operating system designs will meet the customer’s expectation of service.

Everyone understands that providing slow service adds to a customer’s negative experience due to long waits. Similarly, “speed” can kill a customer’s experience through errors introduced through sloppy execution. How many times have you received the main course, when you are still eating the appetizer? Countless times, while visiting a quick-serve restaurant I have watched the server begin to put together my order by placing the french fries on the tray only to have to wait a long time for the sandwich. Cold fries do nothing to enhance a customer’s experience.

As a foodservice consultant I am constantly analyzing my service experience, no matter the concept or style of service. I always learn something from doing this and encourage you to do the same.

Designing the appropriate service levels requires a thorough understanding of the direct, employee contact aspects, and indirect, production aspects of the experience. Additionally, the designer must understand the service and hospitality expectations of the customer for the specific concept. It is necessary to synchronize all service-related activities, be they front-of-house or back-of-house, so that all the food components are done at the same time, to drive the best customer hospitality and product quality. 

The foodservice designer has to balance and apply the appropriate technology, labor deployment, processes and procedures, station design and station adjacencies, and menu items, to manage the queues and deliver the expected customer experience. Developing this careful balance of the different areas seems simple, but in reality, this task can be simply complex, so to speak, but remains essential to ensure delivering the best hospitality and service to the guests.

How important is delivering good service times by managing the queues?

Most research I have seen in the last 25 years shows that order accuracy is the most important attribute in the service experience of a QSR customer’s experience. Although this may still be the case, looking at the results of the latest QSR Magazine drive-thru results, may help paint an interesting perspective on the importance of service. The range of the results of the QSR Magazine’s ratings of the “drive-thru for service” time and “accuracy” is exactly the same. The range for the other two categories, “speaker” and “menu board,” is much narrower.

One conclusion that one can derive from this is that service may be as important to a drive-thru customer as accuracy, and that improving the delivery of service can get a concept closer to improving their overall drive-thru score ranking in this study.

Hopefully in this blog post, I was able to convince you that delivering good service times is important to the foodservice customers and that it is a must to understand the principles of queuing (line) to be able to design the most optimum service level.

In my next blog, I am going to present some perspectives on how to manage service times and queues (lines).