In line for success

Venturing down a quiet side street in Hackney, East London, will lead you to a typical Victorian
pub. Although it is an extremely attractive example of the genre there is something rather unusual
about this backstreet boozer.

You can catch the rather unique characteristics of the Chesham Arms in E9 on a Friday and
Saturday evening when there is invariably a queue at its door and a one-in-one-out policy being
implemented by its friendly manager Joe Garcia. Just what is he offering to bring out the locals in
great numbers you might ask? There is no live music, nor is there any fancy food (no food at all in
fact), or any other gimmicks are present. He says the attraction is simply a good selection of
competitively priced drinks served by friendly employees in an inclusive environment.

This environment is also extremely comfortable because what would surprise customers when
they manage to cross the threshold is that the place will be far from rammed. On my recent visit a
queue had formed at 6pm but I found it an oasis of calm inside the compact interior and in its
large garden that houses the bulk of the customers.

Joe has a maximum capacity of a modest 180. Interestingly he had on occasions previously had as
many as 250 people in the place but he found this delivered no more money into the tills. In fact it
had actually worked against him because it annoyed customers because many had to stand when
drinking as well as navigating long queues at the bar – that can only house seven servers standing
shoulder-to-shoulder – and deal with seriously long waits at the toilets. No doubt the lack of
queues outside the women’s toilets is a factor in the Chesham Arms having such a high percentage
of female customers.

He has rather sensibly tapped into the fact that people are attracted to good service even if this
only involves an East End boozer serving drinks and bagged snacks (albeit a great selection).
Recent data from the Institute for Customer Service (ICS) shows that over 30% of people would
pay more for a product or service if they received exceptional customer care. For me in the pub
environment this also means I’m likely to have an extra drink or two as well as returning to the
venue in the future.

This management of numbers and maximising returns from customers while ensuring high levels
of service is a tough balancing act and one that continues to tax hospitality companies, especially
restaurants. One of the more obvious tactics has been to crank-up table turning. I’ve always had a
phobia of places that restrict me to tight timescales at the dining table even though I understand
why it’s being done.

It is not necessarily the only route to go down because restaurants could be using data more
intelligently from their till systems and booking tools to calculate a metric such as sales-per-seat-
hour that considers the two data points of the average spend by the customer and the time that
the person was at the table. Using these figures should enable restaurants to determine whether
tables should be turned quicker or whether diners should be prompted to spend more while they
are at the table.

For customers who have dined with them before or are member of loyalty-type programmes or on
mailing lists the data should also be able to give hospitality companies some clues as to the
character of their guests. Great care has to be taken in these areas though as found out recently
by certain restaurants in St Tropez who had been accused of racketeering by the Mayor of the city
because of their ‘wealth screening’ policies whereby they were selecting guests by the size of their
previous bills and also setting ludicrously high minimum spends.

Against this backdrop it is interesting that the newest high-end restaurant, Cocochine, in London’s
Mayfair is highlighting its superior market positioning by appearing to eschew squeezing revenues
from its guests. It gives diners their table for the whole service, avoids eye-watering tasting menus
in favour of offering a simple a la carte proposition with no minimum spend and bookings have to
be made by phone. Despite its apparent easy-going model it undoubtedly knows its prospective
customers in exactly the same way as the Chesham Arms. Both have clearly worked out a model
that sensitively balances customer service with the sensitive issue of maximising revenues.

Glynn Davis, editor of Beer Insider 

This piece was originally published on Propel Info where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. Beer Insider would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.