“Gong cha” is a Chinese term for the act of offering the best tea to the Emperor—representing teas and beverages of the highest and finest quality, fit for royalty. Today, the international beverage franchise is living up to its namesake by providing premium products to its customers around the globe. Gong cha has become one of the best-known providers of quality teas and has blossomed worldwide.
With over 2,000 locations across 23 countries, Gong cha specializes in freshly prepared premium tea, bubble tea, and coffee, and is known for its signature Milk Foam, which is hand-crafted for each customer.
Since expanding into the US in 2014, Gong cha has opened 165 locations statewide while establishing itself as a premier tea chain. At the center of ensuring the operational success of these locations is Rebecca Kahn, Franchise Business Leader for the US and Canada. With a well-established history of operations experience coming from her previous roles at both Burger King and Subway, Rebecca is able to provide Gong cha with a unique perspective on how to best ensure operational excellence.
Rebecca recently joined Crunchtime’s Ops Innovators webinar panel for Delivering Excellence at Scale Through Ops Execution. She shared insights on how her team operates at Gong Cha, emphasizing the importance of having the right people and, most importantly, the right technology in place to roll out new processes effectively.
When it comes to driving operational excellence, Rebecca asserted that while people drive operational excellence, consistency and standardization are key. She explained how it is important to place an emphasis on laying a strong foundation in operations. Gong cha is focused on standardization because of the complexity presented by its master franchise model. One of the biggest challenges Gong cha faces is rolling processes and initiatives effectively while communicating down to the store level.
Gong cha has been able to ensure smooth rollouts of new processes by utilizing technology such as Zenput, which supports efficiency and ease of use. Guest experience is important but team experience is also important. Employees need to feel comfortable with the platform in order to truly get the most out of it.
Rebecca remarked, “I knew Zenput was the right choice on some of the first initiatives we rolled out across the Americas because it is easy to use and makes complete sense. We are moving in a very tech-focused direction as an industry, and if we aren’t incorporating technology like Zenput to digitalize everything on paper, but also to get more creative on how we drive performance, then we are going to fall behind in our growth.”
When it came to implementing a new technology like Zenput, Gong cha knew they had to take a phased rollout approach. Having a master franchise model, they needed to anticipate how much they, as a smaller-sized department, would be able to support at once. They separated the market into phases, attempting to evenly disperse between the four waves they established, with a month break in between each. This was helpful for growing adoption as they were able to test some processes on the earlier waves, and then have the successful parts of those processes ready to go for the later phases. It proved to be a healthy, organic way to grow the adoption rate without putting additional stress on the field team and giving them the ability to support a market. This strategy mitigated the risk of rolling everybody out at once, which can be overwhelming and even lead to failure.
In her previous role at Burger King, Rebecca was always searching for an opportunity to get more creative on how a field team supports a franchisee. One solution was to use data from Zenput to target specific operators who were struggling. Specifically, validation and follow-up played a huge role in ensuring that specific operators in any given initiative were successful. Rebecca recalled an anecdote about attempting to assist a struggling franchisee:
The 90-day action plan that was instituted proved to be massively successful as the franchisee saw a complete transformation over that period. By the end of the 90-day plan, they had moved into the top three performing operators in that region. It was empowering to them and to the district managers to see this transformation happen, and this sparked many discussions on ways to implement Zenput more creatively.
When it came to implementing the lessons learned from Burger King at Gong cha, Rebecca knew to focus on using Zenput to create a combination of great guest experience and efficiency. One of the great things about Gong cha is the simplicity of the concept. 50% of Gong cha’s sales go through kiosks, which is almost unheard of. Having that high a percentage of transactions go through kiosks makes them much more efficient because team members are now able to focus on other responsibilities around the store.
With each location usually being run with only two employees or even one, the accompanying technology, like Zenput, needs to be efficient and effective. Efficiency drives sales because, with digital transactions, employees have more time to complete other important tasks. The end goal is always to increase sales, but efficiency is what gets you there, and Zenput enables that efficiency.
For more information about driving operational excellence and maximizing efficiency through the use of the correct technology, view the webinar in its entirety here.
