First off, we are blown away by how many of you did our survey. In three days, we had a resounding 620 people take our survey to give us insight on how best to understand the needs of our customer base and innovate our next steps. We haven't made final decisions yet, but we wanted to share the final data points in hopes this will be helpful to our larger community.
As you can see, a lot of us air on the side of caution. We overall prefer ordering without going inside and are pretty flexible with contactless payment. We also found that wearing masks (both staff & customers), thorough cleaning regimens, and social distancing are important precautions to a lot of us.
I am humbled by the number of comments that offered encouragement and feedback. This survey was 100% anonymous, so it gave us insight that we would not normally get.
Comments like:
"You guys ROCK and are leaders in the community. Thank you for keeping our safety as a priority. I will always support you. Thank you for being such an excellent business of integrity and class. Thank you for bringing our community together."
Seriously, gives me life. It re-energizes me and helps me to not fear doing new things because we have customers like you. So whoever you are (and to all of you who shared encouragement like this), THANK YOU. And please keep sharing your kindness to other small business owners as we try to journey through this.
Surveys are not only for warm fuzzies, so we did also receive some good feedback around ordering at the window, punch cards, wait time notifications and general clarity. We will take all those recommendations and address them via social media in the upcoming weeks!
Also, I wanted to mention the trend of comments like this one:
"I think it would be great to have indoor seating with social distancing in place, but I think it's important to take the employees' thoughts and feelings about what is put into place in heavy consideration because they are the ones who will be making the most contact with people. So even if most customers choose indoor seating but employees want outdoor seating only, outdoor seating should win :)"
WE ARE 100% ON THE SAME PAGE. Honestly, it's scary working during these times. Many of us have seen the videos of customers berating, threatening and purposefully coughing on workers because they require them to wear a mask inside their place of business. Fortunately, we only had one comment on the survey demand we get back to normal and seemed to insinuate that they wouldn't follow social distancing. Unfortunately that's all it takes to make this NOT WORK. At the end of the day it's about taking care of each other.
"I think it would be great to have indoor seating with social distancing in place, but I think it's important to take the employees' thoughts and feelings about what is put into place in heavy consideration because they are the ones who will be making the most contact with people. So even if most customers choose indoor seating but employees want outdoor seating only, outdoor seating should win :)"
WE ARE 100% ON THE SAME PAGE. Honestly, it's scary working during these times. Many of us have seen the videos of customers berating, threatening and purposefully coughing on workers because they require them to wear a mask inside their place of business. Fortunately, we only had one comment on the survey demand we get back to normal and seemed to insinuate that they wouldn't follow social distancing. Unfortunately that's all it takes to make this NOT WORK. At the end of the day it's about taking care of each other.
Want to know what's important to our staff in terms of safety? Here is a part of the employee survey we conducted:
I share this because we wouldn't be operating like we are without our team. If we had to train a lot of new employees during the pandemic, it would take a lot of our creative energy that is necessary for innovation. We feel so grateful between the support of our community and the care from our team. So with all this being said, THANK YOU for being a part of our creative coffee community.
Very grateful,
Melissa & Angelo
Very grateful,
Melissa & Angelo