Elsie Harrhy Coffee House’s Service Excellence

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Introduction

Analyzing the operations performance of any organization, irrespective of its size, service, or products it offers for sale, is important in the effort to ensure that it remains competitive in the short and long run. Chase, Jacobs, and Aquilano (2007, p.45) present operational performance as the ‘performance measured against standards or prescribed indicators of effectiveness, efficiency and environmental responsibility such as cycle time, productivity, waste reduction, and regulatory performance.’ With this noble concern of operations management, this paper conducts operational management and service excellence analysis for Elsie Harrhy Coffee House, a small coffee shop located on 82 Poole Road, Westbourne Bournemouth Dorset, BH4 9DZ (Elsie Harrhy Coffee House 2016). Photograph 1 below shows the layout of the small coffee house.

The name of the coffee house is derived from its owner’s grand auntie, Suzanne (Elsie Harrhy Coffee House 2016). It does not segment its customers based on age, gender, or economic status. The cafe is attractive for both the old and the young. It has something attractive for every person. At the time of my visit, each employee served an average of 60 customers during their shift. This figure translates into an average of 10 customers per hour, which is an acceptable number, considering the necessity to build strong customer relationships.

Therefore, under the conditions of regular traffic flow, an employee spends an average of 6 minutes for each customer. An important observation was that after placing an order, an employee spends less than 3 minutes to deliver it to the customer’s table. This observation suggests that more than 3 minutes of the service time is utilized in customer relationship management. Hence, the heart of the operations of the coffee house is on the customer–employee relationship management. In this sense, it is recommended that the coffee house should continue to guarantee employee satisfaction and commitment to sustaining the coffee house’s source of competitive advantage.

After entering the coffee house, customers are taken back to the 1950s. The unique furnishings associated with this period ensure that the coffee house has a warm feel. It makes it lovely and an excellent place to relax and clear one’s mind with a gulp of coffee. Customers sit back on the coffee house’s cozy and lovely armchairs well set out by the fireplace. The coffee house offers unique in-house-made soups, scrumptious sandwiches, and owner’s uniquely made chocolates. Local suppliers serve drinks with homemade complementary delicious cakes.

Operation Management Strategies

Product Quality

The coffee shop ensures that it delivers the utmost quality products while offering excellent services to its customers as the main mechanism for securing repeated sales in the future. Since the coffee house is a small outlet, its owner cannot form strategic partnerships with coffee growers to ensure that she has full follow up of the processing of beans that meet specific standards. However, she takes an initiative to ensure that she sources her coffee from reputable suppliers such as those who supply the products to Starbucks and other big retail chain coffee houses outlets in the UK.

The coffee house employees and the proprietor (Suzanne) ensure that they taste coffee and other products, including tea after the suppliers deliver them to guarantee consistency in standards they claim to offer to customers. This strategy perhaps reveals why the coffee house has several loyal customers who repeatedly stop by to take coffee, cakes, or even Suzanne’s own made chocolates on several occasions. In terms of marketing, perceptions of quality by customers are an incredible constituent of marketing activities (Zithaml 2001). Perceived quality is important in helping to maintain clientele. In the context of Elsie Harrhy Coffee House, the staff member who tests coffee at the premises should confirm that the savor meets the perceived taste for the customers to claim having received the utility of the products and/or value for their money.

LifeStyle Experience

Elsie Harrhy Coffee House is a place where customers sit down to relax by the fireplace. Customers can chat for whatever amount of time they want when they are seated on armchairs. Consequently, chances exist that the coffee house would make more sales of coffee, tea, and other drinks alongside complementary products. The arrangement of the chairs as shown in Figure 1 is evidence that Elsie Harrhy Coffee House is interiorly designed to encourage people to chat face-to-face. To this extent, Elsie Harrhy Coffee House (2016) reveals how taking coffee at the cafe while enjoying the services on offer can take customers back to the 1950s.

At this time, people would meet at coffee houses to make up with friends. One unique attribute about the Elsie Harrhy cafe is that it does not segregate its customers in terms of age, gender, or any other demographic attributes. Consequently, the cafe is a home outside the home. Families can meet and share memorable times at the cafe. For those who have not experienced the Chinese lifestyle as shown in Figure 2, Elsie Harrhy cafe is perhaps one of the best places to watch out for the Chinese way of displaying products in lovely wares that compel customers to make another request.

*Fig. 2: Elsie Harrhy Cafe Style of Products’ Display.*

Quality Customer Service

At the time when I visited Elsie Harrhy, I sat at a random table near two young customers (a man and women in their late 20s). On the same table where I sat was an old man in his 70s. I asked him why he liked the coffee house. The old man responded that a coffee house is a place for the older generation, yet comfortable while taking coffee alongside youngsters. Asking the same question to the two young people revealed that they were regulars who felt attached to Suzanne’s (the owner) own collection of chocolates, plus that brilliant customer service. Certainly, from this random sample, quality customer service is a major score on Elsie Harrhy Coffee House that ensures that customers visit it repeatedly.

The management of Elsie Harrhy Coffee House clearly understands that customers may not be willing to queue while making payments. Consequently, the coffee house prints out bills, which are taken to customers from their sitting position. In case a customer requests more products, another bill is printed out. When satisfied, the staff members at the cafe collect the money or electronic payment cards, which are forwarded to the revenue collection area.

Any change is taken back to the customers. This process ensures consumers come to Elsie Harrhy Coffee House to enjoy. A lot of service time is also utilized in customer relationships to ensure that clients are well guided on the exact products that they want before making an order. This process is accomplished, irrespective of the display of products and their particular prices at strategic locations within the cafe.

Waste Management

The best waste management approach that can be adopted by any organization is the non-generation of waste (Intel Corporation 2010; Mornington Peninsula Shire 2009). However, this situation implies that an organization operates at zero capacity. In the hospitality industry, a huge amount of waste is produced. As part of the legal requirement for any business entity operating in the UK, Elsie Harrhy cafe has established its waste management practices based on recycling and promoting non-generation of refuse, including leftovers. Nevertheless, this approach has several challenges.

For example, the success of waste management approaches requires cooperation between customers, proprietors, and barristers (Price 2001; The World Bank 2013). The cooperation, which is incredibly hard to achieve at a threshold of 100%, can aid in reducing the number of wastes in a landfill, which can be recycled by simply sorting out wastes at the cafe-level. One approach that has proved successful at the Elsie Harrhy cafe is the deployment of reusable cups, instead of packaging in non-reusable hot coffee mugs.

Analysis Using the Five Performance Objectives and Possible Improvements that can be made

Quality

Elsie Harrhy cafe values quality management as a critical element when it comes to attracting new clientele without negating its contribution to keeping first-timers. From my observation, the cafe can ensure strong planning, controlling, and coordinating procedures in its operations to deliver high-quality products. These aspects constitute important resources for the cafe. Although I could not obtain information on whether Suzanne’s collection of chocolates are branded or patented, they comprise unique products, which cannot be obtained elsewhere in the same quality levels.

In the attempt to keep up with competitive forces, business entities develop new products or improve utilities of the products to ensure that customers perceive the entity as the best in terms of providing quality services when compared to an alternative business entity. Nevertheless, I could not identify any initiative by Elsie Harrhy cafe for developing the ability to generate ideas and/or make new products that meet the emerging needs of the consumers. Hence, the cafe should improve in this area.

Apart from seeking growth from a proprietor business entity too big cooperation, an organization should have clear processes for achieving long-term objectives such as opening new branches and internationalization. Such a firm objects to have capacities, including the production of high-quality products, the ability to conduct intensive market studies to determine appropriate success strategies and consumer perceptions of its products, and the capability to position its items. Although quality, which is the ability to produce and deliver with speed and hygienic manner, forms the core competency of Elsie Harrhy cafe, it does not have such clear growth objectives. Therefore, an improvement in this area is necessary.

Flexibility

Flexibility refers to the ease with which a coffee shop can implement changes that correspond to the market environment. Such changes can involve adopting new technologies or processes in the making of coffee. For example, Elsie Harrhy cafe is flexible to the extent that it only uses inexpensive electric jags to prepare quality coffee. Hence, it can easily switch to emerging technologies that boost coffee preparation. Flexibility also means the easiness with which customers can choose from a range of products within the same facility, instead of getting them from a competitor. To this extent, Elsie Harrhy cafe offers a variety of beverages and complementary products.

The cafe is also flexible in terms of changing product suppliers who are sourced locally to provide cakes in case of complaints that touch on quality and other aspects that customers consider important for any particular item from a given service provider. From my observation, Elsie Harrhy cafe is doing well in terms of flexibility. The only challenge that requires improvement is ensuring customers’ flexibility when they are at the cafe. For instance, as noted before, customers only chat either directly or using mobile devices. They have to pay to get internet connections. Elsie Harrhy cafe can consider installing free Wi-Fi to ensure that customers do not shift to competitors who offer such a benefit.

Speed

Elsie Harrhy cafe’s workers emphasize the quality and speed of delivery in their work. The faster the customers receive services, the faster they leave the organization to accommodate new customers, and the more they are satisfied with the service (Murphy 2013). Hence, such clients are likely to come back. Speed relates to the coffee shop’s cash flow. The goal of emphasizing speed is to ensure that delivery lead times are minimal. For this goal to be realized, it is also necessary for Elsie Harrhy cafe to ensure no traffic accumulation at any point of service delivery. This strategy explains why the coffee house has ensured the balancing of service employees with those in the production area. Customers also pay when they are seated. This plan eliminates long queues at the cashier point of service. In terms of speed, Elsie Harrhy cafe is highly competitive in Bournemouth, UK.

Dependability

Elsie Harrhy cafe has been using the same suppliers throughout its history of operation. This strategy has led to the establishment of good relationships with the suppliers. Thus, the cafe benefits through the suppliers’ dependability to provide quality and enough raw materials. Therefore, customers can also depend on the cafe. Dependability denotes the probability that a customer will find a product that she or he intends to buy from a coffee shop (Bellgran & Säfsten 2010). Since Elsie Harrhy cafe’s clientele comprise mainly repeat customers, although it does not offer all products that are offered in big coffee shops, its dependability is a function of customers’ past knowledge that the cafe offers a product, which the client expects to find at any time after visiting Elsie Harrhy cafe. To this extent, the cafe is highly dependable.

Cost

In the recent past, the UK introduced legislation on minimum wage. It also passed another ruling requiring firms to recycle their wastes as a measure of being environmentally green. These two legal legislations have influenced profitability levels in the hospitality industry since extra costs are encountered in waste treatment and recycling. Price is an important aspect of marketing. Khosla (2010, p. 220) asserts, ‘the price of products involves the examination of customer perceptions, rival products, and the cost of manufacturing’. Elsie Harrhy cafe’s product prices are set in a manner that the organization can cover its direct and indirect costs while at the same time earning a profit margin.

The price of the products offered by Elsie Harrhy cafe is set in a way that the target market buys enough products for it to make significant profits that can make it break even and/or deliver value to its owner. However, Elsie Harrhy cafe can offer its products at lower levels than it currently does if the owner invests indirect sourcing, rather than receiving supplies at the cafe’s doorstep.

Elsie Harrhy Coffee House Supply Chain

Irrespective of the size of any production business entity, some levels of supplies and logistics management approaches are adopted. The process involves providing ‘oversights of material, information, and finances as they move in a process from supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer’ (Houlihan 2005, p.23). Supply chain management entails ensuring coordination coupled with the integration of all such flows to and between various organizations.

Many scholars in the discipline of supply chain management such as Houlihan (2005) contend that the overall aim of the supply chain within a business entity is to guarantee limited accumulation of inventories while mitigating costs that are associated with urgent replenishments for an organization to run smoothly and effectively for optimal profitability. Guided by this concern, before closing the daily business activities, Elsie Harrhy Coffee House ensures that arrangements are made for the required raw materials and/or associated products for the next day’s operations. This plan eliminates the need for any urgent replenishment.

An important pillar of Elsie Harrhy Coffee House’s supply chain entails inventory control. inventory encompasses the ‘trading of the level of inventory held to achieve high customer service levels with the costs of holding inventory, including capital tied up in inventory, variable storage costs, and obsolescence’ (Kouvelis, Chambers, & Wang, 2006, p.451). Elsie Harrhy Coffee House arranges for the delivery of raw materials in a manner that minimizes these costs.

Suppliers take raw materials to the coffee house, which upon inspection, are transferred to the store from where they are retrieved when required. Receiving of raw materials is done upon the completion of purchasing, an important activity in the supply chain. The owner of Elsie Harrhy Coffee House is charged with the noble role of recruiting suppliers as per her set of specifications, but considering the food standard rules and guidelines established in the UK.

Elsie Harrhy Coffee House ensures that its supplies are ethical. The owner only purchases coffee, tea, and other materials from authorized suppliers. Such people purchase the materials from product suppliers who comply with the set standards for growing coffee and tea to ensure the products are good for human consumption. For example, farmers must comply with various specified criteria for quality, controlling pests, use of fertilizers, and other growth enhancers (Smith 2013). The process of Elsie Harrhy Coffee House’s supply chain involves planning, sourcing, coffee preparation, and delivery to customers.

Comparison of Quality Processes between Elsie Harrhy Coffee House and Camera –Obscura

Similarities

Upon putting into consideration the sizes of both coffee houses, the process of supply involves the bulky transfer of funds, which must be used optimally. One of the similarities of the two organizations is that as part of the supply management code of ethics, people in charge of supplies ensure transparency, accountability, and honesty. Hence, acts of inflation of prices of materials and products procured or service charges, for instance, transportation charges, are unethical within the practice of supplies adopted by the two small coffee houses. Such acts amount to embezzlements of the organizations’ monetary resources (Maloni & Brown 2006; Skelton 2012).

Although differences are evident in terms of the extent to which any of the small coffee houses can monitor its supplies, they deploy mechanisms for ensuring ethical sourcing of supplies while conforming to standards to meet the anticipated customer utilities for the products sold. In their corporate-level practices, small coffee houses value the importance of customer relationship management as the basis for long-term growth. Both coffee houses have sitting arrangements that ensure flexibility in meeting customers’ sitting preferences. They have quality furnishing that is critical to creating a sense of comfort to their clients.

Differences

The two coffee houses value the importance of clientele satisfaction to warrant a repeated sale. However, they do not have similar standards in terms of service speeds. For example, at Elsie Harrhy Coffee House, one would only expect to place an order and receive it within 6 minutes. However, things are different at Camera–Obscura. During my visit, I could observe customers who would wait up to 20 minutes at Camera–Obscura. Nevertheless, due to facilities such as free Wi-Fi at Camera–Obscura, customers could wait for this long. While Elsie Harrhy Coffee House has no outside sitting spaces, Camera–Obscura has a large outside sitting space that allows customers to have a clear view of nearby shops and the entrance to a park. The sitting space also allows customers to enjoy their coffee under the sunshine.

A significant difference between the two coffee houses is in terms of size. Based on my approximation, Camera–Obscura is more than 10 times bigger than Elsie Harrhy Coffee House. Camera –Obscura has outside spaces, ground floor sitting spaces, and another floor on top. Camera–Obscura sources large amounts of raw materials. Therefore, it has a stronger buying bargaining power from suppliers. The coffee house also manages to deploy cost-cutting strategies such as collecting its supplies from the point of their production. This plan reduces logistics costs, which lower the cost of the final product. However, since Elsie Harrhy Coffee sources some of its products from the neighborhood local producers, costs are much lower than those of Camera–Obscura. Indeed, Camera–Obscura is a higher-price-end coffee house.

Conclusion

In the UK, the coffee sector constitutes one of the most lucrative sectors in the hospitality industry. The nation is marked by a growing demand for places where people can relax while taking a cup of tea and snacks, including cakes. To meet this demand, more people are venturing into the market. One of such players entails the Elsie Harrhy Coffee House. Suzanne owns this sole proprietor business entity.

At the coffee house, customers sit on armchairs chatting with friends, partners, or new encounters at a fireplace. To make the place worthwhile revisiting, the owner and her employees offer best-in-class customer services. At the coffee house, one should not anticipate sitting for more than a minute before an attendant comes over to take orders, which are delivered within not more than 3 minutes, upon the provision of one of the best customer guidelines into the menu. Besides the excellent customer service, Elsie Harrhy Coffee House is a low-price-end coffee house compared to other coffee houses such as Camera–Obscura that is located in the UK.

References

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