Saladstop!: Service Environment and Design

In May 2019, the founder of SaladStop!, a Singapore-headquartered healthy salad chain with locations across Asia, was looking for innovative ways to improve the customer experience at SaladStop! stores worldwide. In six months, the founder was planning to renovate one of his branches in Singapore. This renovation would set a precedent for future outlets in terms of layout and design. The founder was aware of rising customer dissatisfaction caused by some service quality issues. As such, there was an urgent need to find a way to maintain customer interactions at SaladStop! while paying attention to customers’ expectations. Should SaladStop! embrace new technologies in the restaurant business, or should it continue to focus on offering a truly authentic customer experience by relying on traditional human touchpoints?

This case is recommended for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses covering topics in service design, service strategy and quality, service encounters, and related management issues. It explores a typical restaurant’s customers, service environment, and service quality problems and explores ways in which these service issues can be overcome without compromising the restaurant’s core values or the founder’s vision. It also invites students to understand the complex nature of service design, which must accommodate all forms of constraints while effectively reducing the possibility of service quality problems. By working through the case and assignment questions, students will have the opportunity to do the following:<ul><li>Identify the various customer personas that visit the restaurant.</li><li>Present the customer journey maps for these different personas.</li><li>Develop preliminary “how might we” questions.</li><li>Develop preliminary ideas on addressing pain points and reconfiguring the service delivery process.</li></ul>

• Design thinking, bottlenecks, environmen