Restaurateurs pretended to be couriers – Kommersant FM

Restaurateurs have taken on the role of couriers. This opportunity was provided to them by Yandex. Food”: the service has launched an ongoing program that will allow restaurant owners, chefs, managers and waiters to become food deliverers for a day or even more. Thanks to the new project, the company hopes to interact more effectively with partners, as well as speed up the work of the couriers themselves. “Kommersant FM” talked to businessmen who took part in the experiment and asked how valuable the experience they gained was for them. With details – Ivan Khorushevsky.

Participants in the experiment say that there was no special treatment for them. Like all couriers, they had to go to the Yandex office early in the morning, undergo instructions, try on uniforms and branded bags, and then, carefully peering at the maps, go out into the city.

Some almost got lost in the courtyards, others got tired in the first minutes of walking with orders at the ready. And the founder of the Bazar Family restaurant group, Evgenia Kachalova, encountered rudeness:

“The guys say that they are not always treated positively when they come to restaurants. In addition, clients often do not communicate with them kindly enough; people also receive food in different ways.

It also happens that very often when placing an order, the address is entered incorrectly, so you call back, and the client gets angry, of course.”

As noted in Yandex. Food,” what irritates real couriers most about their work is something else: often, for example, they are given meals in unsealed containers, and, as a result, food periodically ends up not on clients’ tables, but in backpacks.

Participants in the experiment, by the way, blame the service itself for this, they say, the system sometimes distributes several large orders to delivery people at once. As a result, they have to be literally compacted into a bag, and this does not happen without damage.

Couriers also complain about long waits for food. Development Director of the Guliani Group restaurant group Georgiy Martiashvili, another participant in the experiment, experienced this himself:

“Due to the fact that the restaurant gives priority to guests sitting in the hall, they may delay the preparation of takeaway orders a little, and then the courier will have to sort it out.

The guest interacts with the delivery person, and first of all tries to somehow influence him, and thereby, for example, deprives him of tips.”

The concept that underlies the experiment is not new and is called gemba management. This is a method of management in which top managers go down to the positions of ordinary employees, trying to understand their problems. Otherwise, it is almost impossible to discern what is going wrong in the company’s work.

Donald Trump’s father, for example, worked as a construction worker himself. LVMH President Bernard Arnault sent his children as consultants to stores.

And the co-founder of the Much Salmon company, Alexander Mutovin, as part of his own experiment, tried himself as a delivery man. He called the experience valuable:

“I looked at how training is organized for couriers, what they check, how their programs work from a routing point of view.

I concluded that it would be great to repeat some functionality within my application for delivery drivers, including testing, integration of training materials, multi-point delivery, when a courier can take several orders and at the same time understand exactly the route and how best to deliver them “

Participants in the Yandex experiment. Food” also promise to put their experience into practice: for example, speed up the issuance of orders or check how friendly their subordinates are to delivery workers.

But this will not help change the situation on the market, believes Mikhail Goncharov, manager of the Teremok restaurant chain:

“Will the participants in this experiment or this monitoring come to any serious conclusions that something needs to be changed? It’s not a fact that this will work out, because there are a lot of companies on the market. And, to be honest, I’m not sure that all of them will be able to change their minds and improve their attitude.”

In general, restaurateurs who tried on the courier uniform say that they liked the work: they got to know the city better and took a new look at communicating with customers.

Even the salary of the program participants was quite satisfactory. By their own admission, they could earn up to 120 thousand rubles. per month. But there is a nuance – the businessmen worked as delivery workers for only four hours and are not going to repeat the experience in the near future.

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