For partners: implementing a couple of ‘quick fixes’ around missing items, cold food and poor quality/incorrectly prepared food can have a dramatic impact on ratings.
Introduction
On every delivery platform customers give you a rating in response to their food experience. In the world of delivery, rating is king. It shows how customers see you as a brand and acts as a marker of quality (i.e. driving conversion) and it also sets your status and ranking on the delivery platforms.
You should be aiming to achieve 4.2 stars or higher week on week. Scoring above that greatly increases your ranking, and scoring below that decreases your ranking.
Ranking determines your virtual footfall - i.e. how many customers will walk by and see your restaurant. Rating is also one of the biggest drivers of your ranking. It also determines the likelihood of a customer coming in and buying from your restaurant.
Tip: The better your ranking, the higher you appear in customer searches, lists and filters on the delivery platforms - i.e. it gets you footfall. The better your rating the higher your conversion. Achieving both is how you maximise your revenues!
How to get a good rating?
Getting a good rating is about providing customer consistency - i.e. they get what they ordered and each item is consistent with what they see from the images/description when they order on line - deliver this and you will get a 5 star rating.
Things that bring rating down include:
- Missing items - how to fix this
- Cold Food - how to fix this
- Incorrectly prepared/poor quality food - how to fix this
Missing Items - quick fixes
Tip: this is the most common reason for getting a 1 star rating. Missing items doesn't necessarily mean whole menu items - most of the time it is the accompaniments e.g side sauces, drinks, napkins, cutlery. Small details matter to the customer - one missing side sauce and they wont remember how good the rest of the food is!
- Organise the dispatch station - ensure you have a marker, and stapler and clear space to check and pack the contents of the bag. Have sauces pre-prepped and pre-labeled and within easy reach.
- Tick off all items on the invoice - This is a really simple step but attaching an invoice to the bag and ticking each item off allows the customer to see that someone has double checked their order and will make them less likely to complain that something is missing (even if it's not). It also ensures your staff perform the proper checks at dispatch to ensure that nothing is missing.
- Staple the bag - Fold over the top of the bag and staple it. This will keep food warm and will also prevent the drivers from ‘sampling’ your food.
Cold food - quick fixes
Please note: For the most part customers do not expect to not have extremely hot food brought to their door - but it cannot be cold. Cold food happens, and this can be out of our control e.g. the driver takes a longer route in a snowstorm - but if the food leaves the kitchen cold, we have already lost the battle!
- Heat lamps - A small investment that can make a huge difference. Bagged food left out for more than a few minutes without being kept under a heat lamp will get cold.
- Driver pick-up - The driver who collects the food must have their thermal bag ready when collecting food. The walk between your establishment and their vehicle is enough time for food to get cold.
- Align cook time and pick up - ensure cook time aligns with driver pick up time to minimise wait time. If a driver is delayed it is better to recook certain items and claim a refund.
- Minimise production delays - minimise any delays/bottlenecks between your Cooking, Assembly and Dispatch stations.
- Cheese sauce - It is really important that the cheese sauce is kept at 75°C when you use it on the products.
- Temperature of food - Keep temperature probes near cooking equipment and have spares on hand. Make sure that you are checking the temperature of EVERYTHING. You can find cooking temperatures in your training guides.
- Packing the bag - if you can, avoid putting hot and cold items together - when stacking up the bag place any ambient items e.g. salads or napkins/cutlery between the hot main food items and chilled items such as drinks.
Incorrectly prepared/poor quality food - quick fixes
Please note: Customers expect consistency and react badly when food is not made to spec (i.e. what the menu states/how it shows in the imagery) or tastes different to a previous order. This is why it's important to stick to the food specs and never freestyle! A bad rating can occur when they order a product that they have had before and it's not the same now or they order a product and it comes out not what they expected.
- Follow Brand standards - ensure your team regularly review the training guides and watching the training videos available on Partner Portal and make sure any new staff get trained using these materials. This will ensure brand standards are maintained.
- Use the correct ingredients and order via Apicbase - ordering via Apicbase means we can guarantee the quality of the ingredients and the right specifications - which in turn means when your staff follow our cooking guides it will come out just right - no more underdone or overcooked food!
- Refrigerate - Make sure that during times where you aren’t busy ingredients such as salad ingredients/cheese/sauces are stored in the fridge.
- Do not hot hold - when food is cooked in advance and stored at high temperatures the quality is diminished - it either dries out or the flavour is impacted. This also happens if you prepare food in advance and try to reheat it. Fresh is always best!
If you are following all these tips you are sure to get better ratings.
Tip: Once you are confident that you have fixed the underlying causes of poor ratings at your kitchen, leave a hand written note on the delivery bag asking a customer to leave you a rating.