Ahhh COVID-19. It’s the guest that has overstayed its welcome and the topic we can’t stop talking about. It’s an understatement to say that this novel virus has rocked our world in 2020 and has had a huge impact on the way we live and the way we hoard toilet paper.
But there is some good to come out of it, right?! With everything turned upside down, this experience has taught us to pivot and adapt to change so that we can survive. We’ve seen this happen most specifically with small businesses.
Let’s take a look at the restaurant industry. So many restaurants had to overhaul their operations in order to survive and to fill a need. While The Relevance Path hadn’t been published yet at the start of the pandemic, we can see the parallels between the actions taken and a few of RELEVANCE’s steps that could have been applied to help these businesses stay relevant.
Review
With CDC guidelines advising people to stay home and counties ordering that indoor dining be closed, restaurants had to determine how they could stay afloat in the pandemic. They use the Review step to assess what the challenges they face with the restrictions that have been mandated. How can they afford to keep their staff while losing money? How can they continue to serve their customers when they can’t dine in person? There’s clearly a relevance gap here and addressing these questions can help close that gap.
Engage and Listen
With employees’ jobs on the line, restaurants needed to figure out a way to keep their staff employed while keeping their business afloat. They were also finding their customers were ordering takeout more than ever. The wait staff had no one to wait on in the dining room, but by taking the time to engage and listen to their concerns, management found they were willing to help in whatever way necessary to continue earning income.
No one could have predicted that we’d be living in a world where restaurants needed to completely close their dining areas and operate on a takeout-only business model. But by listening to their staff, it was a no-brainer that restaurants would be able to fill this gap to continue to feed people at home.
Enhance and Visualize
Armed with the ever-changing pandemic restrictions and knowledge of what resources they had, it was time for restaurants to really sit down and uncover the real needs, obstacles, and goals for success.
In RELEVANCE, we have a tool called ToURspective Reviews, an enhancement trends or unique responses review. It’s a full analysis to visualize what trends or unique responses were identified as important when speaking with stakeholders.
We can safely assume that restaurant management did an exercise similar to our reviews to refine their business’s needs and goals.
Analyze
Okay, now for some fun. With all the information at their fingertips and clear goals and needs prioritized, now restaurants can analyze their options to lay out potential successful solutions for the long haul, or at least until restrictions change again. In RELEVANCE, we’re looking at all the pitfalls that can lead a project astray and getting ahead of them.
Addressing the pain points can actually become great opportunities for quick wins. Here’s a restaurant pain point: now everyone wants to order take out, but management doesn’t know how to handle it. Guess what? There are a ton of meal delivery services that will help with the logistics! Sure, the fees may be hefty, but imagine being able to have someone discovering the restaurant in an app, order their meal, pay, and all the restaurant has to do is prepare the meal for a delivery driver or the customer to pick it up.
With these meal services helping alleviate the stress of increased takeout orders, restaurants can focus on the way forward to the bigger picture of creating more revenue, like how they can transition away from the apps to their own model so they don’t have to lose money in service fees. Or modifying the menu to accommodate family style meals or DIY cooking kits. We’ve also seen so many restaurants set up outdoor dining areas for warm weather days.
Let’s also appreciate the fact that we can now order cocktails to go. 😉
There’s clearly a lot more to RELEVANCE, but looking at the first few steps of how the restaurant industry has changed this past year shows us that the Relevance Path is, well, relevant to more than just working with clients. It can be applied to almost every industry and as we’ve seen in this pandemic, so many companies have had to take a good hard look at their business operations and adapt in order to survive.
We’re hopeful that things will return to “normal” again and that the lessons we’ve learned in this experience will help us continue to thrive.
What other businesses do you think could have used RELEVANCE in the pandemic?
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