Hello, 👋

Successful food truck owners all know one thing. Poor food and service quality will kill a food truck business faster than you can say, “Rest in peace” 😵.

And that’s how we kick off this episode about service quality and how to improve it in your food truck company.

Let’s dive in!

After every sale, customers give feedback about your Stand’s quality of service. This feedback increases ⬆️ or decreases ⬇️ the Stand’s total quality 🌟 depending on if it is good 👍 or bad 👎.

What’s Service Quality?

Service quality measures how a business’s service delivery compares to customer expectations. Quality service leaves a strong impression in the customer’s mind. 🤩

For a food truck, this means delivering speedy service in a friendly and helpful manner 😊. That’s why we divided Service Quality into service speed and customer service.

1. Service Speed 🏃💨

This measures how long it takes a Stand’s employee to serve customers. New Stand employees start with an average service speed.

You can improve their speed through training 🧑‍🏫, increased employee happiness 😁, and Stand upgrades 🦾.

Bad customer feedback 👎 and employee unhappiness 😞 will worsen your employee service speed. So it is best to address them immediately.

When a Stand has two employees, the Stand’s service speed is the sum of both employees.

Service speed is inversely proportional to the time ⌚ employees take to serve customers. As service speed increases ⏫, the time (measured in milliseconds) to serve customers reduces ⏬.

We are using milliseconds because we compressed time in the simulation.

The formula for this relationship is:

Here’s a graph showing the result of the formula:

You can observe that the time to serve a customer reduces at higher employee service speeds.

2. Customer Service 🏅

This shows the employee’s ability to charm customers. Excellent customer service guarantees positive feedback 👍 from customers.

Like service speed, new employees start with an average customer service rating. You can improve their rating through training and increased employee happiness.

Bad feedback 👎 and employee unhappiness 😞 will also worsen customer service if left unattended. Unlike service speed, there are no Stand upgrades to improve customer service.

The customer service quality for Stands with two employees is the average of both.

Improving Service Quality

One of the best ways to improve your food truck service quality is to train 🧑‍🏫 your employees. Training helps improve service speed and customer interaction.

Impact of Training on Service Speed

Employees start at training level 0, and you can train them up to level 6. Each new training level increases the employee’s service speed by a certain amount.

In the table below, you can see how different training levels impact service speed. It also shows the time it takes to serve a customer at each level:

A new employee with zero training and no Stand upgrades has a service speed of 40. At this speed, it will take them 4256 milliseconds to serve one customer.

But at training level 4, it will take the employee only 3511 milliseconds 🤯 to serve a customer. As training and speed increase, service time reduces.

Impact of Training on Customer Service

Like service speed, each new training level improves customer service rating. The table below shows the progression:

Customer Feedback

Service Speed
Customers measure a Stand’s service speed by the amount of time ⌚ they are willing to wait to buy a burger 🍔. This time is called Customer Patience, and it’s different for each segment.

For instance, Students 🧑‍🎓, with limited cash and time to burn, can wait for 15000 milliseconds (about 90 minutes in real life) to be served. But Managers 🧑‍💼 will only wait for 6667 milliseconds (40 minutes in real life) before leaving.

Service speed 🏃💨 is one factor that determines how fast your burger queue moves. If the time to reach the front of the queue exceeds a customer’s patience, they will say that the wait is too long 😡 and leave.

The image below shows a manager stomping off because the wait is too long for him.

But if the customer is first in line, they will buy the burger and say that the service is too slow 🐌.

Customers become more patient when the Stand has certain upgrades. Things like sound systems, TV screens, and cooling fans all help to improve patience.

Customer Service
It works the same way for customer service. Each customer segment has a minimum customer service need. Service below this threshold will attract bad customer service feedback 👎.

The customer service threshold for Parents is 25, and 50 for Tourists. If your employee’s customer service is below 50, Tourists will keep complaining about it. But as long as it is not below 25, Parents will be okay with it.

The gif below shows a Tourist leaving a bad customer service feedback while buying a burger. Judging by the previous customer’s reaction, the burger is terrible, and they will complain about that too. 🤣

Great service quality 🌟 begins with paying genuine attention to your customers 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦. When you train your employees to deliver orders speedily and treat the customer well, customers will keep the positive feedback and recommendations flowing.

And a business can’t have too many of those. 😉

That’s it for today, Cheers 🥂

Don’t forget to Wishlist the game if you haven’t: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1429080/Business_Heroes_Food_Truck_Simulation/

Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Kunal & the team

 

Hello, 👋

Welcome to another update on our progress. I certainly hope you had a swell week. 😃 Today we will take a detailed look at how marketing works.

The role of marketing

Marketing helps increase your food stand business’s awareness in a specific locality or city. Because your food stand will have competition, marketing is the only way to protect and grow 📈 your brand while diminishing 📉 that of the competition.

Design

There are five types of marketing available: Pamphlet 📜 and Social Media 📱 marketing affect a Stand’s brand strength in a locality, while Online 🌐, Radio 📻, and TV 📺 marketing affect the company’s brand strength across the city 🏙️.

Each marketing type has a minimum, average, and maximum investment size, cost, and impact. The sizes help to budget and control your marketing investment.

Pamphlet marketing 📜 is the lowest form of marketing. To balance reality and fun for players, we linked its price to a real-life cost element and exponentially increased ⬆️ the impact of marketing in-game. We used each country’s average burger bike cost as the real-life cost element.

Depending on your chosen country, this results in a higher or lower pamphlet marketing cost.

Below, you can see the difference in cost for pamphlet marketing in Australia ($900), the United States ($575), and Canada ($800), respectively.

Tying the pamphlet marketing cost to a real-life cost element also allowed us to use it as the basis for costing the other forms of marketing.

Impact on your Business

The type and size of marketing activity you invest in impacts your Brand Strength. Your brand strength shows your company’s popularity in a locality or city. It forms part of your Stand’s Range of Influence.

A Stand’s range of influence allows it to attract 🧲 more customers farther away from the Stand. We talked more about it in this episode.

Every company 🏢 starts with Zero brand strength. Over time, brand strength can increase to 150 points or decrease to -10 points, depending on marketing investments made and news events that affect the company’s brand. Each type and size of marketing activity increases the Stand’s brand strength by a fixed amount.

The Stand’s brand strength in a locality at any given time is the sum of the impact of its marketing activities and any negative or positive events affecting the brand.

The brand, in turn, forms part of the Stand’s range of influence based on this formula:

As the Stand’s brand value grows 📈, its range of influence will widen, allowing it to attract more customers.

Impact on the Competition

The presence of competition introduces a new element to the brand formula. Recall that marketing is the only way to protect your brand and diminish that of the competition.

Here is how it works.

When you invest in marketing, the competition’s brand suffers an equal deduction ⏬ in brand strength. The impact depends on the type and size of your investment and the competition’s ongoing marketing activity (If any).

If there is more than one competitor, the deduction is equally distributed across all of them.

The same is true when the competition invests in marketing. Your brand strength suffers a reduction based on the type and size of the marketing investment. The brand formula with competition becomes:

Here’s a sample marketing impact distribution and resulting brand strength among competitors in a locality. Event impact is not included in this table because, although they affect brand strength, they are random.

In the table, Player 1 invests in pamphlets 📜, social media 📱, and online 🌐 marketing. Player 2 invests in TV 📺 marketing, Player 3 in Online 🌐 marketing, and Player 4 in Radio 📻 marketing.

Although Player 1 is investing in 3 smaller forms of marketing, the impact from the competition’s marketing is driving down it’s brand strength.

Likewise for Players 3 and 4. Their marketing investment is not enough to withstand the competition’s marketing activities.

Player 2’s heavy investment in TV marketing is sufficiently maintaining its brand strength despite the activities of the others.

You can see that consistent marketing is critical to being successful in multiplayer. Experimenting with different combinations of marketing types and sizes can also provide a unique advantage against the competition.

By maintaining a solid investment in marketing, your food truck company will be able to attract new customers and outcompete other Stands in the city. Hopefully. 😉

That’s it for today, Cheers 🥂

Don’t forget to Wishlist the game if you haven’t: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1429080/Business_Heroes_Food_Truck_Simulation/

Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Kunal & the team