If you occasionally ask the customer in-app "how was your service today?" with a simple thumbs up/down option, and you associate the order's rating with the barista behind the counter, you can get a good metric on their interaction with customers. You'd probably want to use the median and not the mean in order to remove any outliers.
One of my general problems with tipping is that I have to tip before someone makes the drink. Then end up with burned coffee I tipped for. This feels the same.
If the customer ordered via the POS, it will be shown on the next visit, if they sign in with their phone number (which is used to save your order history for easy reordering).
I had a shop too once (print, Germany, sold it after a few years) and know people owning restaurants. As far as I'm concerned, you are supposed to get your feedback from the "meta data" of your business, not involve the individual customers my making them work. Which is very unlikely to give you true and/or good data anyway. It's like asking people for what they want as "market research", which just shows a lack of understanding of how brains work and way too much believe in the rational mind theory.
You seem to have created the anti-human coffee shop.
You don't need my number to sell me coffee. Asking for it is an invasion of my privacy. If you insist on an awards program of some kind, it already exists in it's ultimate form, the stamp card.
Customers should not be tasked with evaluating employees. They have no expertise in the matter.
Employees should not have wages effectively stolen from them under the auspices that "good work is rewarded". You know how you reward good work? Raises, profit sharing, more responsibility, benefits programs, you know typical things employers do for employees in a worker centered environment.
All this also assumes anyone uses these systems as intended. I doubt customers will select ratings in any meaningful way and you will have no way to ground truth if they do or not. Nobody will ever care enough to sit through customer interviews to evaluate whether your one question survey is valid or not. Certainly not for a cup of coffee.
Instead of customers having the option to pay extra in the form of tips, you're charging more. By having a review/bonus system, you're still absolving yourself of the responsibility for fairly compensating your staff. You're shifting the burden of evaluating employee performance onto your customer. And you're incentivizing yourself to limit bonuses because that money goes into your pocket.
In the service industry, and especially amongst young people, it's common to pick up a job like this for a few months and make some money, then move on to something else. And that's okay, not everyone wants to make a career out of making coffee. It's still a good formative experience to have, while earning some money, and there's no reason why you shouldn't do it right and get rewarded for it.
But profit sharing won't work for someone that is around for a summer. For instance that person could benefit from any upswing caused by previous employees, but if they don't add a positive contribution to the customer experience themselves, they won't be around for the long-term impact. And if you don't give them an incentive at all for the first few months, then you're back to square one. Or even worse: they could negatively impact the profit sharing of employees that have been around for the long run.
Ultimately, money is a motivator and pretending like it's not does not make tipping go away. The problem with tipping as I see it, is that it masquerades the real cost of doing business.
By making that assertion you're absolving yourself of responsibility and shifting the retention issue entirely to the employee. You're completely dismissing the possibility that your retention issue is due to a customer culture you fostered or created, a poor work environment due to a manager or toxic employee, the demands of the job vs compensation, or any other factor.
> Ultimately, money is a motivator and pretending like it's not does not make tipping go away.
Money is a motivator but not necessarily for the right reasons and it has diminishing returns. Tipping culture has evolved from a mechanism for customers to thank staff into a means for staff to make up for insufficient wages. They're effectively panhandlers.
If an employee relies upon a tip to makeup for wages, they aren't paid enough and are being exploited and abused.
Today, not tipping is a punitive measure that allows customers to diminish an employee or staff's wage at the customer's discretion and without any insight or feedback provided to the employer. People feel compelled to tip because they thing employees aren't paid enough, not because service was above expectations.
