Since its return to Singapore in December 2017 after a brief hiatus, popular bubble tea chain Gong Cha has been doing things a little differently to give customers a better experience at its five stores.
Gong Cha has leveraged technology to up the quality of its drinks while providing more convenience in the order-taking and payment process.
Tapping the Inclusive Growth Programme (IGP) administered by NTUC’s e2i (Employment and Employability Institute), the company has put in place self-service kiosks at two of its outlets at National University of Singapore’s (NUS) U Town and Westgate. Through a simple-to-use touch-screen interface, customers are able to place their orders and make cashless payment directly via NETS, NETS FlashPay and EZ-Link cards.
Gong Cha has also made use of automated sugar dispensing and cup sealing machines to ensure accuracy in the preparation process. With a touch of a single button, staff are able to get the exact amount of sugar specified by customers and seal the mixed cups of bubble tea before they are served.
Creating Better Outcomes
Describing the benefits which the new systems has brought to Gong Cha’s operations, company CEO Kang Puay Seng said: “With the self-ordering system, it helps us improve our productivity by over 20 per cent. With the sugar dispenser and sealing machines, those give us additional manpower savings of 5 per cent.
We are quite happy with not just the efficiency of the operation, but the workflow is much easier for my employees so they can focus more on product quality and customer service.”
Elaborating on the 20 per cent savings in productivity, Mr Kang said that because the ordering system is linked to the company’s point-of-sales system, the transactions are automatically recorded without the need for a cashier. The process eliminates the need to manually manage the cashflow and generate sales reports at the end of each working day.
He also added that while the self-service kiosks are still part of a pilot, he hopes to be able to roll the system out to all Gong Cha outlets in Singapore in the future.
“We are glad to have been part of Gong Cha's journey back to Singapore. For a popular brand, having an outlet rely on the fully-automated ordering cashless kiosk system will mean job redesign and an increase in productivity for the workers at the cashier-less outlets. Our Inclusive Growth Programme is glad to support such initiatives that translate to more efficient service and customers can look forward to shorter waiting time for their orders,” said e2i CEO Gilbert Tan.
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