#data is king

[mondainai]

Climate.us

independent, nonprofit, and immune to politics

If you care about getting good, solid, truthful climate data, visit (and maybe donate if you can!) this site. The people here are the ones Drump and his lackeys removed because they fear (and hate?) science. Absolutely adore the folks doing this.

[shanrk]

https://shan.data.blog/

ShaRK

Data is life

My blog about journey in Datascience

[shanrk]

Not as simple as it looks :)

[shanrk]

Watch "Data Science In 5 Minutes | Data Science For Beginners | What Is Data Science? | Simplilearn" on YouTube

Start Learning

[shanrk]

My First insight about Datascience

[anthemnz]

Restaurant quality data

In which Paul ponders on his many years waiting tables in various restaurants

By now you’ll have seen the story about the New York restaurant that gets complaints for slow service.

Fortunately, the company has been filming the restaurant area for the past decade and found they’d accidentally kept a tape from July 2004. They reviewed the footage and compared 45 diners’ experiences with footage from a similar day in July 2014.

First of all, my hat is off to them for going through this exercise. It’s very easy to base business decisions on feelings about how things seem to be – but if you’ve got hard data you should always use that. Netflix does this – it ignores customer complaints about changes to its front end access and looks instead at the data it gathers. If customers spend more time watching TV and movies, then it’s a success and the changes stay, regardless of whether they’re perceived to be “unpopular” or not.

Here at Anthem we run stakeholder audits and it’s often surprising what people will tell us about the client we’re working for. Sometimes they support the client’s world view but quite often there’s something in the audit the client had no idea about, and would never have thought to look for.  Data is king in this business, and indeed, I’m yet to find a business where hard data doesn’t carry the day.

So, what did they find?

Customers spend longer at the table before ordering, spend longer ordering, spend longer eating and spend longer leaving.

Time in the restaurant is almost double what it was a decade ago and the article, and the restaurant, puts this down to one simple thing: smartphones.

Customers these days come in, faff about with the wifi, muck about on the phone instead of reading the menu, muck about while eating and then walk into each other as they leave, presumably because they’re posting reviews to an online review site.

The restaurant quite rightly points out that this is silly really and that perhaps people should just put their phones down and enjoy their meals.

But I think they’re missing the point here. It’s not the restaurant’s restaurant, it’s the customers’ restaurant and the way people dine out today is vastly different from the way we used to, let alone the way our parents did.

I remember going to my first restaurant. It was a big deal. Dad put on his good suit and tie, mum got all dressed up. My brother and I were on final warning about behaviour before we even got in the car, let alone through the front door. It was a special occasion, up there with a wedding or a trip to grandma’s.

My kids are different. They have a favourite brunch spot. They compare all restaurant service to that delivered by the wonderful front of house crew at Prego. They are comfortable with the process and the surroundings and while they look forward to such outings as a treat, neither of them views it as out of the ordinary. It’s as normal to them as getting fish and chips was to me at their age.

Restaurant visitors have changed, but so have the visits themselves. These days it’s not the utter focus of our time – we’re all too busy for that – and now we treat restaurants far more casually than we ever did in the past.

Instead of complaining that customers are using their smartphones, why not embrace it? Make the wifi easy to join and you’ll save hassles. Does it need to be secured? Tell customers as you’re seating them how to log on.

Get a funky ordering system that lets the customer summon your wait staff from their smartphone, or better still, invest in an app that lets them order directly to the kitchen. Get Vend to put in a point of sale solution for your staff so they can take payment at the table instead of making them queue up on the way out. Integrate the whole thing with your credit card payment mechanism or bank account app so you can take payments directly.

In 2004 the only smartphones around were BlackBerrys or Nokia Communicators. There were no iPhones and no Androids. Wifi was probably called “Wireless LAN” and you needed to know the SSID codes to get access to it. Today we treat it as a human right.

Customers using smartphones is the problem, but maybe it’s also the solution. Maybe the restaurant would be better off following its customers’ lead rather than trying to get them to go back to the old ways.

I still can’t understand why I can order my movie tickets, popcorn and ice cream online but then when I get to the movies I have to queue up, show them my phone, get a paper ticket, go queue up again, hand over my paper ticket, get it ripped in half and then (THEN) get allowed into the movie theatre. There has to be a better way.

Customers change their behaviour all the time. It’s our job in business to keep up with those changes, or be left behind. 

[amanita-jack]

Lore I hate you.

[zerosconsort]

Dear everybodyilovedies,

This fic was wonderful. It was lovely, and visual, and dynamic. It had deep friendships and snarking and anger and resigned partnerships and falling-in-love and denying yourself something you want because others have it so much worse. It had PLOT TWISTS and ANGST and LOVE and HOPE and it destroyed me and was all i could think about for a long while after reading it.

I love this fic. I'm going to read it over and over, picking out my favorite parts.

I just wanted to say thank you for posting it. And that i admire you as a writer.

Hearts and stars and admeration,

ZC