Hello heroes! 👋
You may have heard the phrase "time is money" more times than you can count.
As a food truck entrepreneur, while increasing your efficiency is a great way to boost your profits, there's another factor that can have an equally significant impact on your bottom line: getting customers to wait longer to buy food from your food truck.
This episode is about how customer patience affects a business's performance in the game.
Customers have a default time range for waiting to get their food. This duration is called Customer Patience. Each customer segment's patience is unique. Depending on their lifestyle and daily activities, their default time is more or less.
You can see the default time for each customer segment below. Everything is measured in Milliseconds in-game time, so you can quickly notice the differences.
When customers decide to buy burgers from your stand, and there is a queue, they wait until their default patience time is exceeded.
When that happens, and they still haven't gotten to the front of the queue, they will leave and give a 'wait is too long feedback'.
Customers lost due to a long wait time counts as a missed sale in the Key Performance Indicator section.
Temperature and Weather are the two significant factors that impact customer patience. Customers become impatient when the weather or temperature is unfavourable.
The effect of temperature and weather on the default patience of all customer segments can be seen in the following table:
You can invest in food stand upgrades and employee training to avoid losing customers due to a long wait time and/or bad weather.
Seven food stand upgrades help to increase customer patience. Some entertain customers, while others reduce the weather effect on customers.
Here’s how each of the seven upgrades impact customer patience:
Customer patience upgrades are stand-specific, as some are incompatible with other food stands.
More expensive food stands have wider upgrade compatibility than the less expensive ones. Also, the number of upgrade slots available for each food stand is limited.
For example, here is the compatibility chart for the Burger Bike, Mini Trailer, and Burger Master food stands, respectively, each with three upgrade slots.
The Burger Bike clearly has fewer compatibility options for customer patience upgrades than the Mini Trailer and Burger Master.
So, when running a business with the Burger Bike, investing in improving service speed might be a good idea to avoid losing customers to long wait time.
In summary, increasing customer patience through upgrades or reducing their wait time through faster service speeds is one secret to maximizing sales.
But knowing when to invest in the right combination of upgrades and employee training to produce the best customer outcome makes all the difference in the world.
That's it for this episode!
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Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Team Visionaries