Yumpingo? Let me guess: A Japanese-bingo fusion pop-up?
No, but I can see why you'd say that. It’s London’s first “data driven menu development platform”. It lets restaurants gather and analyse large amounts of live customer feedback, you just need to download the-
The app? Yeah, we already have more than enough apps and sites for customer feedback… Howya, Tripadvisor, Foursquare…
This one is a bit different to those, or at the least, it’s more detailed. It gathers the insights dish-by-dish, which is apparently a level of scrutiny not yet seen on other platforms.
Oh, that is a bit different. So how does it work?
Well, at first glance it’s pretty similar to other apps. Customers go to a restaurant, have a meal, and then complete a one-minute review at the end. All the restaurant has to do is provide the Yumpingo-enabled, restaurant branded tablet, which replaces the traditional paper bill. The tablet has individual “data points” to select within the review, with the option to leave a comment (too hot, too salty, a fly in the soup, etc). When the data is analysed, the restaurant should have a quantifiable overview of where they’re succeeding- and where they’re not.
Will people actually use it? I normally just pay the bill and leave, unless the meal was really bad…
Well, as Eater London reported, Yumpingo has just finished a pilot with three Jamie’s Italian restaurants. The trial delivered “over 40 times more feedback for each restaurant”, gaining about 3000 reviews per restaurant per month. Perhaps it’s because when some aspects of a meal are good and others are bad, customers find it easier to be noncommittal when the waiter asks “how was your meal?” Plus, as the tablet is given to you instead of the normal bill, it’s almost easier to just fire off a quick review at the same time as you tap in your PIN code.
I see. So it's supposed to give a more well-rounded view of how the restaurant is performing?
Exactly. If restaurants changed their service based on the feedback from sites like TripAdvisor, they would only be using evidence from, on the whole, the extreme customers (customers tend to only review when a restaurant is outstandingly good, or exceptionally bad). Yumpingo says it gives the ‘silent majority’ the chance to have their say.
What else could restaurants use it for, then?
Potentially, if a new restaurant was opening in an unfamiliar area, the team behind it could develop and de-risk its menu prior to opening, purely by using data accumulated from other restaurants close to the site. Similarly, when opening new locations, a brand could make sure to properly streamline their menus prior to opening, based on their best performing dishes at their other locations. Jason Ridout, chief operations officer of Jamie Oliver Restaurant group, says that as a result of using the system, “decisions that were previously made on instinct are now data-driven”.
What’s the catch?
As a restaurant, you are charged a monthly license fee for access to the platform, as well as a monthly rental fee for the Yumpingo hardware- but the data is all yours.