What the bloomin’ heck is going on with customer service at the moment? My gym runs classes where two trainers who are supposed to be full of the joys of spring, motivating us suckers-in-shorts to sweat like billy-ho. This week, in something of a role reversal, I suggested to one of the trainers, mid-session, she get off her phone and start motivating us. It was the same trainer who a couple of weeks earlier, rather than giving high fives and encouraging words like “you smashed it” as we left a session, turned her back on us and tapped away on her phone on something evidentially much more important. 

 

Another example of naff customer service, closer to our sector this time, is a well-known indie London pub, where I found myself in a time-warp. It wasn’t a time-warp because it was tucked away in a charming little pocket of late Georgian worker’s cottages that survived the railway expansions, the Blitz and the eye of city planners. No, the time-warp I am referring to are the two people behind the ramp, who had all the grace and social skills of bar-staff from the 1970s.

 

I was totally ignored, despite catching the eye of the scruffier one, who just looked right through me. It wasn’t until they had finished their personal, banter-filled conversation, which they both seemed to find absolutely hilarious, that it was back to the inconvenient matter of seeing what the hell that tall bloke at the bar actually wanted. I genuinely think I was supposed to be grateful for the smile-less nod that meant it was time to be served.

 

Another example. It wasn’t long ago when every time I went in to my favourite branches of a sandwich shop (the one that translates to Ready To Eat) that the baristas would enthusiastically raise their arms, beckoning customers over. But I’ve noticed the energy drain out of the place recently, and the once big cheery “we’re-happy-to-serve-you” wave has diminished into a half-hearted fly swat sort of a gesture. And in the branch of the self-proclaimed “nation’s favourite coffee shop” from where I write this column, things seem have gone off the boil as I have just been served a lukewarm coffee by someone with a lukewarm smile. 

 

There’s so much more lacklustreness I would like to tell you about, but Friday Opinion contributors are limited to 800 words. That means I don’t have time to tell of my visit to a restaurant where all I will say is, if there is ever an industry award event with a category for a restaurant that looks great but, in reality, is average, amateurish and “all-fur-coat and-no-knickers”, this restaurant group should enter. It really fits the bill. 

 

But then (and this, my friends, is where the happy ending starts) I was with friends in Blacklock in Shoreditch. Oh, now we’re talking. We had a super welcome, all warm and lovely and genuine. Several different team members served us throughout the evening, each being their true genuine selves. One was flamboyant, one was more serious but seriously efficient, one took real joy and pride in explaining the menu.

 

The service was fantastic. So was the food, all of it, everything. The music was right up my street too, ranging from funky Chaka Khan to Talking Heads to stuff I had to look up on Shazam. The lighting was the type Drew Pritchard (the bloke from Salvage Hunters) would bite your hand off for. Little touches included an old school drinks trolley, hand chalked quirky ditties, the Big Chops countdown blackboard and really clever eccentric menu copywriting.

 

And then there was my favourite quirky lovely touch, the sloppy service (in a really good way) of dessert. It was served from a huge dish, table side, into our individual bowls. And then the best bit, the scraping of the pudding spoon, a ritual that took me straight back to my childhood. 

 

Team Blacklock gets top marks for a top-notch evening that didn’t cost top dollar. My faith in our sector is restored. Now, all I want is that gym trainer to get off her phone and get her act together, because I am going back to Blacklock and I will definitely be scraping the pudding spoon. 

It was a Friday evening, and on a whim, I’d ordered a pizza. But after a long wait and a chase-up phone call, two hours had elapsed, and I’d finally given up and gone to bed after some unplanned toast for dinner. At 11.30pm, I was awoken by a pizza delivery guy suggesting: “It’s only two and a half hours late, mate.” He was genuinely puzzled when I told him I didn’t want his pizza that I’d pretty much ordered yesterday, and thanks very much for waking me up.

 

I was reminded of this incident when, yet again, I endured a dire experience with the delivery of goods from an online retailer. We’ve all had these problems far too many times. The email comes through with the date and time of the delivery, but you are going to be away, so you change the date on the track-your-order page on the courier’s website. 

 

You are enjoying said break when another email comes through from the courier firm congratulating themselves on a “successful” delivery, along with a photo of your parcel prominently placed on your front doorstep. There’s no way that will survive exposed on the step until your arrival back home the following week, but thankfully you have a friendly neighbour who will take it in and look after it until you return.

 

This sort of experience happens all too frequently, because the integration of the technology between the retailers, the delivery firms, the various other intermediary pieces of software and the end customer are invariably badly cobbled together. It will require a lot of work by many parties to address this calamitous state that continues to blight online retail.

 

In complete contrast, my pizza experience is very unlikely to be replicated because it was years ago when it happened. It was before the revolution we’ve seen in the delivery of food. While there is much to gripe about with delivery providers Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats, you have to hand it to them. They deliver a much more agreeable service to the end consumer than the bulk of the retail industry with its third-party courier firms.

 

They undoubtedly benefit from being technology firms at heart, and their app-based solutions have been built from the ground up rather than bolted on to legacy systems. This has enabled them to fully utilise mobile devices, GPS capabilities and so on. Customers have responded accordingly and lapped up the services.

 

They have become fully entrenched in the hospitality industry, which is reflected in the fact that deliveries accounted for 71p in every pound spent by consumers on at-home orders in September versus only 29p for takeaways, according to CGA by NIQ’s Hospitality at Home Tracker. And after a period of 18 months of year-on-year declines after the covid-19 exponential surge in volumes, the last four months have seen year-on-year growth again. 

 

Food operators have had to take note, and even the naysayers and holdouts have been forced to resign to market forces and adopt the delivery providers’ solutions. Recently, Domino’s finally agreed to use the Uber Eats service after holding out for years. It recognised that using only its own couriers was holding its delivery capabilities back and underserving its customers. This followed a similar decision by rival Pizza Hut, which signed up with the firm a year ago. Takeaway food brands now recognise they really do need the third-party delivery firms, whether they like it or not.

 

The way things are going, the delivery guys have more pie to bite into because their technology prowess is being seen in new developments aimed at sucking in even more business. Both Just Eat and Uber Eats are to launch artificial intelligence-powered assistants to help customers customise their orders, while Deliveroo and Uber Eats are both trialling the ability to bundle orders from more than one restaurant in a single delivery.

 

Evidence of their value in the broad food supply chain can be seen by their ongoing inroads into the retail industry, where Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber are all tying-up with the supermarkets to deliver on-demand groceries. They can do it better than the grocery companies themselves and they have also pretty much seen off the rapid delivery firms such as Getir, Gorillas and GoPuff. 

 

Compared with what the retail industry has to contend with, I’d say the hospitality industry should count itself as rather fortunate that it has delivery partners that supply an efficient service for which customers have an insatiable appetite. A few years back, I’d have eaten my hat rather than say that – or a pizza, if I could have relied on it being delivered on time.

Nowadays, the integration of tech in hospitality has become synonymous with success. I talk to companies who mistakenly think they are best-in-class, simply because they use a software package to support operations. That is so far from the truth. As with all tools, having it is one thing, and using it well is completely another. You should see me versus my finance team on Excel!

 

This is certainly true when it comes to using technology to help grow profits. In which case, numbers one, two, three and four on the list are to grow sales. After that, people use tools to help focus on gross profit, and then they give operating costs an inspection. It’s only when all of those areas are exhausted that people look at labour management. 

 

I get it. Labour is hard; labour is people; labour gets a reaction and some resistance. But to be a best-in-class operator, labour can’t be ignored, because it affects both cost and service. With the gap between best-in-class and average accelerating, I think understanding and managing labour better will become the determining factor. 

 

So, how do you measure the effectiveness of your labour management? Labour ratio has been the historic measure of success, but the challenge with labour ratio is that a beer-led operator can run at a ratio of under 20% (coffee and cocktails make it harder), and a fine dining establishment might be heading towards a 40% ratio, so the success of labour management is difficult to measure this way.

 

In our restaurants, our preferred measure is slack, which is a measure of the excess labour over the agreed service standards of the business. For many businesses, whether they are wet-led, food-led, high-end or quick service, 25% slack is good. But even within this, scale matters. 

 

The bigger the business, the lower slack can go. This is because shift patterns can be better designed with more team members, so a slack measure of 15% is not unachievable for large sites.

 

Why is it important? Service and staff. We have repeatedly evidenced that having too many staff on shift leads to worse service than having too few staff. But even so, running shifts with too few staff causes a lot of stress for the team, who will feel no job satisfaction or reward from what could be a really energising session. 

 

That’s why rightsizing your business is important, because it will lead to happier staff and better service. Over the last decade, our attitude to labour management has been forced to change as labour is more expensive and good people are scarcer. People are also less tolerant of an unhappy, pressurised or boring workplace.

 

The tools to become amazing have become increasingly good. We can now measure most of what we need to and design and determine programmes that will improve the quality and profitability of our industry. 

 

Best-in-class has gotten better. Labour is becoming a much bigger differentiating factor between thriving and surviving than it has been historically, so maybe, it might just move up the list.

Brewers, distillers, winemakers. Pubs that keep a good cellar, bars that serve a spectacular gin and tonic, restaurants with a well-curated wine list. You’re all wasting your time. It says here: “There’s no such thing as ‘good quality’ alcohol”. So, you can just slosh any old fermented beverage in a bucket and it won’t make any difference.

 

This bold assertion – that “quality” is little more than a marketing ploy by drinks companies – comes from a recent Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS) blog post. We shouldn’t be too surprised. The IAS, in case you haven’t been keeping up, is a direct organisational descendant of the UK Temperance Alliance, the prohibitionist wing of 19th century temperance, and is still funded by the Alliance House Foundation.

 

Of course, it’s true that alcohol marketing leans heavily on the quality of ingredients and production, and perhaps some overegg it. But producers do invest an awful lot of money in ensuring the consistent quality of the liquid. It’s not all flim-flam. And historically, the science of making products on an industrial scale has made alcohol genuinely safer. Quality, in that way, has reduced harm.

 

There is a softer sense of “quality”, though, that raises more interesting questions around the relationship with alcohol harm that don’t get a lot of attention. The “qualities”, in the plural, of alcohol vary massively. We have the broad categories of beer, wine and spirits (with a few others in between) and within them, lots of different types and styles. I was going to concede that all contain alcohol, but we can’t even say that at a time when alcohol-free drinks are proliferating.

 

People don’t buy “alcohol”. Or not most people. Alcoholic strength may play a part in the decision-making, certainly when it comes to beer, but that seems to be growing less important as consumers become more appreciative of a drink’s quality and qualities. 

 

These are matters that academics are only just getting to grips with. Too much alcohol research continues to investigate the impact of a molecule on the human organism, and the focus of such research is almost exclusively on quantity rather than quality. About how many alcohol molecules are too many, and so on.

 

But humans don’t live in laboratories – we are fundamentally social beings, and this influences what we choose to drink. It’s not simply a matter of personal taste as social context comes into it too. We have a beer in the pub with our mates, then switch to wine when we sit down for dinner at a restaurant.

 

How we drink, what we drink, why we drink and who we drink with all influence how much we drink, how quickly, and the effect it has on us, in both the short and the long term. Some people will, of course, drink merely for the alcohol hit, but that isn’t true for the vast majority. There is a whole symbolic architecture built around the liquid in the glass that talks about who we are, what we’re doing, our values and our ambitions.

 

This is where quality is crucial. There is pleasure and satisfaction in the buzz and the relaxation alcohol brings, but our senses are also occupied in assessing the wider experience of drinking – how it looks, how it smells, how it tastes. 

 

It seems to me that our drinking culture is changing. Increasingly, people are not just sinking booze and getting the alcohol into their bloodstreams. Now it’s touching the sides. The organoleptics – the exercise of our sense organs – are playing a bigger role.

 

There is a trend towards slow drinking – as there is towards slow food and slow travel. We are pausing to reflect on what’s going into our bodies, and we are developing a language to understand that. I wouldn’t want to call it connoisseurship – that’s for the pretentious few – and it’s boring to talk about what you’re drinking the whole time. But we’re allowing an extra friction of consumption to please and intrigue our senses.

 

And drinks producers these days are giving us a wealth of material to work on. Think of all those craft beers bringing strange and exciting flavours to our palates, and think of all those gins!

 

Of course, the likes of the IAS will argue that these arcades of enticing confections are only encouraging us to drink more. And that a single molecule of alcohol is bad for us, however it’s dressed up. I disagree. If we’re serious about harm reduction, slow drinking is a positive development. If we’re letting it touch the sides, and if we appreciate it more, it is less likely that alcohol will get the better of us. It’s quality time.