[UK] Square Champion AMA: Turn Customers into Community Featuring Kat from Quokka Coffee

[tranguyen]

Hello Seller Community!

As part of our focus on Seller Community's Small Business Month, we're excited to feature Quokka Coffee for our next Super Seller AMA-style conversation.

Super Seller AMAs are “Ask Me Anything” forum discussions where you can ask business owners and experts about their strategy and lived experiences. Each event showcases a different Square Super Seller and the business topics they've mastered.

This month we welcome Kat, founder of Quokka Coffee, to host a discussion about the tangible benefits of exceptional customer service at your business. We're fortunate to have her share her experience with hospitality and community strategies, online and in-store presence, and Google review management — have a look at their 5-star ratings!

Kat’s the proud owner and operator of Quokka Coffee in Perth, Australia (@QuokkaCoffee in the Seller Community). She and her team have been working since August of 2021 to revolutionise the hospitality industry one coffee at a time by being radically empathetic and ruthlessly kind — to their guests, their vendors, and most importantly to each other.

Ready to participate? Post your questions to this thread now. Kat will address your posts on Wednesday, May 31.

Not sure what to ask? Here are some example questions: 

• How do I ensure that my customers experience consistent standards of service even while I am not present in my business?

• What three things did you wish you knew before you created social media profiles for your business?

• What's the difference between customer service and hospitality — and why does it matter for my small business?
  
  

Please note that Kat Alarkon is not an employee or consultant of Square. The information she provides solely reflects her views and is not endorsed by Square. This Q&A is limited in scope and is only intended as a high-level overview of the topics discussed.

Click 'Reply' below to ask your question ahead of time, and we’ll answer every question on Wednesday, May 31. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

[Greatgelato]

Hello! In addition to providing a friendly service with good quality products, could you give any examples of how you and your team go above and beyond to provide such excellent hospitality to your customers. Thank you ☺️ 

[QuokkaCoffee]

And hello to you too!

Something that I don’t get to talk about a lot is how service and the maximum provision of it is baked into the physical foundation of the shop. Before I opened, I was a working barista who enjoyed working the register more than the bar, and found deep emotional and professional fulfillment in setting the tone of service from the get-go.

And so I built my bar to make sure a friendly face is the first thing you see when you walk in, and that someone is always near enough to say ‘thank you’ as you walk out; it’s also shaped kind of like a racetrack so staff can move and respond to guests with ease. Our POS is structured with conversational modifiers so you get every order absolutely right, and is executable by all stations. If there’s a mistake, we fix it straight away and make sure the customer leaves feeling like their concerns were heard and that we marshaled our available resources to solve their problems.

We often walk people to their cars especially for bigger orders, or if we get parents with toddlers–rare and very much worth getting excited about in our area, especially if the kids are well-behaved/engaged with the staff!–we always offer to run their coffee out to them in the parking lot, or babysit for a bit while they take a break from parenting.

We doodle or write little messages on our Uber Eats bags because it makes us laugh, and so we’re sure it’ll make our customers laugh too.

There’s an intentionality behind everything we do, even if a guest doesn’t fully comprehend the extent of it. It makes us proud of our work, and so we keep doing these almost-insignificant things.

Also, I personally have a thing for language–linguistics, etymology, semantics, semiotics, I love it all!–and so it’s important for me to spell names correctly. You’ll often hear me asking things like, ‘How’d you spell that? Is it Kirstie with an -ie or a -y? Is it Chevonne, or Siobhán?’

I know so many people with ‘difficult’ names and see them die a little inside any time they’re made to spell it out or Anglicize it. It’s like nah, dude, if you were named after your bada** grandma–you should be allowed to be proud of that.

[Bill_Auldbar]

Hi, the information on your business states you have grown your business by "being radically empathetic and ruthlessly kind — to their guests, their vendors, and most importantly to each other".

We have a great team at our café and enjoy a significant guest loyalty and level of repeat business. I would also like to think the team are empathetic and kind, but can you explain what you did as the business owner to encourage and develop your team to provide a radical and ruthless approach to this, and if possible with examples, e.g. how did you incentivise your team?; what did you do within the premises to make it more welcoming? what did you do to make guests want to come back? what was "radically" different in what you and your staff did for your guests, vendors and each other? can you explain what you mean by "ruthlessly kind"?

We actively encourage our team members to get involved in things within their respective communities and that we will support them in whatever way we can, e.g. give them time off to do some voluntary work in their community, offer sponsorship support, but maybe there is more we can do, hence why I am interested in what you have done.

Can you demonstrate what difference the approach made to your enterprise? e.g. have you seen a shift in customer loyalty through action taken?; did you develop a specific social media strategy?; what did you do to create a greater online presence?; did your profitability change a little or significantly as a consequence of any particular action? 

[QuokkaCoffee]

A lot to cover here, and I hope my answers do justice! I’ve talked about my hiring practices with @crystalshopfe, how the shop is physically structured with both customer service and staff efficiency in mind with @Greatgelato, and with @Flowerlady87  on how it’s a fine line between being a people-pleaser and offering great customer service without sacrificing your agency.

Hope you have time to check those out!

I see my job as the owner-operator to take decent human beings and turn them into lean, mean, coffee-making machines. They’re already decent human beings before I even get to know them; my job is to highlight aspects of their personality in a very specific context.

Most of the day to day pressure I feel is to make sure everyone has the resources they need to complete their tasks with dignity and pride; every person also requires a different and ongoing approach to training and development. The fact that you’re able to support, and are encouraging of, extracurriculars shows you’re already an exceptional employer!

The unspoken thing about our mission, vision, and values–the core of which includes being ‘radically empathetic’ and ‘ruthlessly kind’–is that we’re implying a point of difference between us and other cafes.

The area in which we operate makes us the only cafe which uses customer service as our main selling point. We just happen to make really good coffee while we do it.

It’s not easy working in hospitality–the hours are long, the pay doesn’t compare to other industries, and the role demands a level of caregiving some people just aren’t equipped to provide. And so we really lean into that and invite people to chat about their favorite topic: themselves. We get to learn more about them, their spouses, their kids, their pets, their crappy bosses, their amazing coworkers, their D&D schedules… and I guess ‘radical kindness’ is the ability to remember all of that multiplied by the thousands of people our team has collectively served over the course of their careers.

I was moonlighting at a friend’s cafe a few weekends back and a regular from another coffee shop I worked at in 2015 walked in and I was like, ‘Andre! What’s up, my guy? Skinny flat white, right?’ 

And the dude was floored. He’d gotten married and had a kid, literally lived an entire existence since I last saw him. Of course, he had no idea what my name was but he remembered the role I played in his life at the time.

It was just a fun and wholesome service experience, and that’s the kind of contact high I want my team keep chasing. If you can become the fun anecdote a guest recalls over the dinner table with their family, then you’re doing pretty well!

Fun fact for anyone who lives in SoCal: I grew up a Porto’s baby and managed to visit the Glendale branch as an adult, and that pilgrimage tuned me into not just the sheer efficiency of their operations, but the power of generational purchasing.

‘You come to Porto’s, I can make a cake for your child’s first birthday, her communion, her baptism ...

As I’ve mentioned before, these are not novel ideas. But they feel revolutionary because competitors don’t make it a priority.

We just want guests walking away, much like the folks at Cat and Cloud aim to do, ‘feeling happier than when we found them’. (I also use their videos to train the team on what hospitality means in the context of a shop like ours.)

As to great leaps in profitability being attributable to one specific act… there’s no silver bullet, unfortunately. We just have to keep showing up to work every day!

The whole business is just banking on the idea that small gestures of kindness and appeals for genuine human connection, which accumulate throughout the course of a five to ten year lease, help us sell enough coffee and toasties to make a modest profit.