We recently spoke with the CEO of innovative hospitality experience platform Favrit to discuss how the industry can deliver a first-class service post Covid-19.
Edwin Fieldtvedt grew up on the Norwegian West coast. At a young age, he started to play handball and became a professional athlete with a career spanning over 10 years. After that he got a job at Expedia’s B2B company, Egencia, and held several positions over the years.
His idea for Favrit started when he realised that he was eating many meals of the day in restaurants around the globe (about 500 times per year) and became more and more irritated with how the guest experience was centered around employees and not guests.
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After analysing the industry, I saw that technology wise it was decades behind other industries and very fragmented. There was no one building a guest experience platform. Take away and last mile delivery had moved fast but dine-in was still stuck on old habits and outdated technology.
After looking into the market, it was all about how can we identify growth enablers to get started on our vision and that’s when self-service was identified as a key first step.
Fantastic guest experiences by empowering magic moments are what we are all about.
Because of the friction I felt being a frequent guest at restaurants and looking into the entire guest journey step by step, I mapped out a service blueprint that was the first important part to figure out. It became clear to us that the bottleneck and the enabler of great service was the staff. We also found that more than 50% of their time was spent on receiving orders, not recommending guests but basically taking an order like “can I have another beer please”, and handling payment. That meant that less than 50% of their time was spent on being proactive and a conductor of a guest experience which is where they really add value to an experience.
So, we tested different ways of removing those reactive tasks to enable more time for proactive tasks through guests being able to add to the bill themselves and pay at the end. It resulted in an increase of spend per customer of over 30% and time spent on payment more or less removed. We also have restaurants who has grown their EBITDA by more than three times over.
We started measuring guest experience through our platform’s data to see if it was only us that experienced this as great service or if there were others. We quickly saw that this is what the guests really like, and you could feel it yourself when you couldn’t get hold of a waiter, instead users just double tapped their phone and in less than a minute later a pint arrived at the table. That was to us the “Aha moment”. Instant service every time and no misunderstanding.
It is an exciting time right now. We are launching some interesting products as a company and moved into a new position. We have seen a lot of our hypothesis proven over the last six months and we are growing in all our markets. The company has grown about five times over the last year.
When increasing complexity from a one-to-one in Norway into a one-to-four across our markets internationally we had to use the same mindset as during covid lockdowns. The organisation needs to run in multiple dimensions which again requires curiosity and responsiveness. The leaders have been good at bringing their teams together and quickly analysis what works and what to stop doing what is not effective. Responsiveness and speed are absolutely key, plus knowing that things will fail on the road to success. Fail fast, learn fast is how we operate, and we have definitely learnt a lot and succeeded a lot due to failure but also being right in many of our predictions and overall strategy. As always failing makes you start questioning yourself and you need to work hard focusing on opportunities and learning to put that puzzle together to get through the challenges. I am really proud of the team and how our grit has made us move forward in a time where macro economics has been rather challenging – we still have managed to grow fast.
Our industry is very disrupted and there is a lot of players. They all focus on what the customers needs and try to solve that. Listening to the customers’ needs does rarely re-invent for the better but understanding their problems does. I don’t think Steve Jobs asked everyone about their needs when Apple designed the iPhone. He was into understanding their needs and problems and not listening to them.
We put our focus on the guest and the guest experience. Understanding step by step throughout the entire guest journey what is working and what can be improved and then work closely with the staff to understand their problems. Starting with the guest makes our guest experience platform exactly that. A guest experience platform and not just a POS. POS is only a fragmented part and as a restaurant owner you should really have insight to the entire end-to-end picture and be curious about how you can improve your guests’ experience. That is the monetiser for a restaurant, and if the staff can use technology to enhance service and be more proactive, the perfect guest experience can be delivered at scale plus staff will get an even greater meaning to how they can do service.
We are a traditional Saas business that is license based. We did try several models to test out what provided the best results over time. The disadvantage with a pure transactional model for instance is that it does not favour the venue when there are quiet times during the day. What happened was that restaurants turned it off to save money because our transactions were more expensive than traditional transactions which removed our possibility of creating guest habits. It needs to be a clear win – win – win for us to create an everlasting change.
In terms of the five insights I would give to the industry to succeed and pivot post-pandemic, I would recommend:
Find your north star metric and flywheel.
There will always be one metric that is more important than others and identifying that will help all prioritisation become easier. You should under that north star create a flywheel of metrics that helps you understand what is working and what is not based on data.
Be agile and responsive.
Not everyone is Steve Jobs or Elon Musk – who can predict what the world wants and just go ahead and build it. Most likely they also learned a lot along the way that made them tweak an idea slightly to bring even more value. Creating real value by solving major problems is what makes a successful business. If that road was straight forward there would not have been written thousands of books about it, one would have been enough. So, in other words you need to build a learning factory that transforms knowledge into value at an incredible pace. That is done by being agile and treating every idea as a hypothesis until proven one way or another.
Build a strong team and culture from scratch.
This is not a one-person show. You need to be curious and open to feedback and team is key to success and to go far. Hire people better than yourself and give them responsibility. Be the coach that helps them grow and build a culture that gives and receives feedback. You need your team members to be coachable so don’t hire those who think they have all the answers and does not stay curious. Culture needs to scale if not I think you will regret that later.
Strategy and execution.
Build a long-term strategy but do not spend to much time on what happens after 18 months. For all you know a pandemic might occur and your perfect 24-month strategy is not worth the paper it is written on. You need to have a strategy for how you are going to achieve what is within your power. Strategy is your plan on achieving exactly that with the resources you have. Build that strategy with your team and make them own it too.
Execute on the here and now. It is tempting to say that once we get to this phase this will be the problem and we need to solve that now. The only problem is that it is not your problem now. Your problem is how to get to that state. Make sure you then have created flexibility to solve it later but focus on the problems right in front of you first.