Coffee shops and key factors to success?

Running coffee shops have never been easy. It isn’t made simple either. If you are planning or going to open a coffee shop, let’s take a look at these following essential factors. They may help you a good start to successful coffee shops during your life time career.

#1. Providing good quality coffee

Quality is always first. Excellent cups of coffee are definitely very important to coffee shops worldwide. This is the esssential feature to draw customer to your coffee shop. You have to serve best coffees with high quality and cleanliness. Remember to guarantee best quality to other kinds of drinks. If you cannot cover all excellent cups at the first time, you may need to focus one or two coffees as your specialties. For example, your coffee shop serve the best cappuccino in the neighborhood, customers will always remember your cappuccino; as a result, they will remember your coffee shop. Coffee shops also need excellent baristas with skillful hands and if possible a funny and joking guy. Beside beverages, you should consider to the foods and cakes served with coffee.

#2. Location

Location is also a key factor. A corner or a location with good view will be best matched for successful coffee shops. As you can see, many famous coffee shops have a very typical location. The place must be easy to find, easy to guide, and have some identical characters. An ideal place is at a small but main street where many people gathers and there is not much noise. It can be near business areas, schools or residential neighborhoods.

#3. Great atmosphere & impressive decoration

Many coffee shops surprise its customers at the first sign. Customers, especially the youth do care about the design and decoration of your coffee shop. People usually go to a coffee shop to have a leisure time or even do their job. They need a comfortable and friendly atmosphere with beautiful and stylish decoration to raise their creativity and work effectiveness. Therefore, you need to set your coffee shop a really nice design, good music and comfy seat.

#4. Customer services

One of most headached managerial tasks of running coffee shops is customer services. Let’s attach a special importance to the customer services by providing free wifi, indoor entertainment, comfortable lounges, serving a fast and great take-away coffee, etc. You can open some activities and games or just put variety of magazines and books at your coffee shop, so customers will not feel bored. Additional customer services should be considered as a serious matter. You should provide member card (the kind of discount card for loyal customers), hold interesting sale programs, etc.

The way you and your staffs serve customers is also very important. Never let your customer wait too long, always give them a smile and a fair care. Just remember three “F” – friendly, fast and fun. These three words are key guidelines for any barista and waiters, waitress.

#5. Media

Don’t think that your coffee shops are a small business and you don’t need promoting programs. The boom of social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) can play a critical role to make everyone know about your coffee shops. A positive comment or a nice photo of your shops posted by a customer can boost your coffee shop’s reputation a lot. Let’s open a facebook or twitter page for shops and update regularly to draw the customer’s attractions. Make it really interesting and cool.

#6. Truly understand what you are doing

This will help coffee shops go much further. You have to figure out the exact purposes of your coffee shop. You have to answer clearly questions such as which kinds of customers you target to? (to make the suitable design for the coffee shop), What the main menu? (Focusing on types of coffee, additional drinks, foods, etc.),… You really need to make a strategy and real plan of how to get the favors of customers and keep them return to your coffee shops. In short, don’t put too much pressure, just think put yourself as a customer and you will find out what you need to do.

To sum up, openning and running successful coffee shops have never been easy at all. The reason is a coffee shop is like a factory. You have to plan products, production, marketing, customer services, etc. There are many things which decide the success of a coffee shop. However, six main factors are (1) quality of coffee itself, (2) right location, (3) shop’s atmosphere, (4) customer’s service, (5) media or marketing and (6) long-term plans.