Project Management

As an HR Manager for the project “Nubei” which sells drinks on the streets, I manage a team of 20 baristas. The baristas are very good at customer service (such as taking orders, answering questions, dealing with feedback, etc.) but they seem too shy to approach a new customer and invite them to buy drinks. The literature research focuses on the improvement process on the behavior of a barista when seeing a customer passing by. The purpose of the research is to build a habit for the baristas to actively approach the customer within the radius of 5 meters. After these efforts to build a habit, the recommended next step is to have training workshops for the baristas about hard selling skills and how to initiate a conversation.

During my market visits, I observe that once a customer comes, the baristas handle the customer very well. However, when there are no customers, the baristas seem to lose focus as they sit down and look into their phones. A majority of them will not actively come to a customer to introduce and invite the customer to buy our drinks. Therefore, I plan to clearly identify whether this is an issue with the whole team, as well as find out the reason why they behave like that. From that, I can gain insights into how to improve this situation.

Firstly, I collect data on the number of baristas who are active and who are not, as well as their respective sales records. I also ask the sales manager to secretly observe and identify the impact of asking customers on direct sales. Obviously, the baristas who are active have much higher sales revenue than the one who don’t. After that, I interview the baristas to understand the reason why they hesitate to come to customers. My predictions match the answers of the baristas: Many of them wish to come to increase their sales revenue, but they don’t know how. Furthermore, my data also reveals that the number of customers who buy after being introduced by our baristas are not very high, as well as many of...