How to best manage your time with Hawkr?

Tick tock goes the clock and time seems to be moving way too fast for your liking huh. Not only do you have to set time to cook and create your products, but you also have to handle, marketing, answering customer inquiries, shopping for ingredients, handling deliveries, and the list goes on. It’s no wonder that so many people feel stressed and overwhelmed when they do these all by themselves with little to no manpower.

Effective time management is starting to sound like a nice dream, doesn’t it? Well, look no further! I’m here to give you some tips and reassurance on what you can do to manage your time here at Hawkr and what we can do to help you achieve, robotic voice impression “Optimal Efficiency” in your business.

1. Customer service or concierge service?

When starting on your journey, talking to your customers was necessary as you needed to gain their trust, and respect, make a sale, and build a reputation to eventually build a group of loyal customers. As your business grows, you may not have the time to cater to every single DM.

You soon realize, instead of talking to 4 customers a week, you suddenly find yourself speaking to 8 new customers! Not only that, but you also have to cater to your existing 10 regular customers who want to get their orders in for the week. Soon after, another 5 more potential customers come pouring in, asking the exact same questions that you’ve been answering for the past few hours. You just realized you have been speaking to customers for the past 2 hours, all by yourself trying to piece together who ordered what, and you haven’t even started cooking today’s meals!

Being a human answering machine in the long run, is just not worth it. You waste so much time when you could have been doing other things that needed more of your attention. Also, people tend to ask the exact same questions if you don’t even state all your policies upfront. This is only going to get worse if you ever scale your business further down the road. How would you be able to grow your business and cater to new customers if you try to answer everybody’s demands?

(If you like to know more about growing business and reducing your cost (scalability) in your business, you can read more about it here)

So how do we go about this issue better? Glad you asked, here’s the answer:

Automate your customer service inquiries with technology

What does it mean exactly? Simple. Use the tools of technology to assist you in answering and replying to your customers without having to single-handedly speak to every single one of them that comes knocking on your doorstep. Here’s a list of things you can do to automate your customer service inquiries:

Set up a simple template in which customers can read and follow the proper steps to make their orders for you easier
Have a prewritten policy about your business in which customers can learn what you offer and how you do deliveries, take feedback, or do special requests
Use existing tools like Facebook and WhatsApp that can help streamline your customer service whenever someone comes to direct message you

“Well, that’s great! I have been doing this the whole time. How does this help me? I’m still handling direct inquiries to my customers!” you might say. Here’s where we come in.

As a marketplace, Hawkr can provide customer service support as well as a digital store for you to house all your products (it’s not a giant warehouse in real-life ok?) and your business information with no cost whatsoever.

In simpler terms: we can support you and your business by providing all the above solutions with our customer service and our app to automate all of your business processes. You no longer need to message every single customer. Let us talk care of that part for you and provide any additional information about your business on your behalf. Let us be your tech support!

2. Handling transactions

Apart from constant direct messaging to your customers, handling any purchases made by your customer is of utmost importance. It’s what keeps your business going and flowing. Your lifeline. But it can be a hassle if every time you have to personally see to it that the customer banks in the right amount into the right account and need to show proof that it has been made, all in your private line of communication on social media apps like WhatsApp.

Not only is it time-consuming but you also have a giant list of people you need to constantly keep track of and catalog. Who bought from you, who wanted to cancel their order, and who wanted a refund. Let’s not forget, that you might have to properly file each transaction down by the week and month to make sure everything is recorded for tax purposes. Why go through all that manual work just to see if the customer paid for their meals? What if……..you get the wrong details down?

Well look no further, when you are with us, all your orders will be automated as everything will be on the app. When your customer orders from your merchant page, it will handle all their transactions in one go and you will be able to see:

The menu items that they have ordered
The time they make the purchase and when they would like it to be delivered
Special requests if any
And the most important part is: how much they have paid (including delivery cost)
2nd most important part is: to Confirm, Cancel, or Refund with one click

This is all done, automated, and listed out clearly for you to see and handle all your orders with no manual edits whatsoever. It’s all listed digitally in black and white. You can easily track all your sales and what’s been paid for.

3. Prepare your meals on time, not too early

As you know preparing meals and getting them delivered on time is key to customer satisfaction right? Well, most merchants may run into a problem where they think that preparing their meals early and having them sent out to customers would be a good thing. In certain conditions like if your product is not a fresh hot meal, then the timing wouldn’t be too much of an issue. In most cases, however, is not a good thing to be too efficient.

Here’s a list of why is a bad habit to do:

Customers may have a strict time frame on when they would like their food to be delivered at the time they have already set (such as diet concerns, tight work schedules, social events, commitments, etc)
Can’t guarantee any riders or drivers be able to accept your delivery job at all. (A very common and most frequent issue, if you are using 3rd party courier services to do your deliveries for you)
Food might accidentally get cold if it’s a hot meal or loses its freshness once the customer receives it
The quality of your food might drop as well especially if you rush to have it delivered

While you may have good intentions to try to cater to your customers as quickly as possible and free up your time to do other things, this is not the best way to reduce your time or manage it. It is always better to at least make sure you fulfill the customer’s expectations based on what both parties have agreed upon. If you keep delivering to the customer too early from their agreed-upon delivery timing, you will start setting up an expectation that you are catering to them and setting yourself up for failure if you slipped up one day.

Not only that, to highlight point number 2, riders and drivers are highly unpredictable these days as everyone is not of the same standard as you want them to be. Some will be reliable, others will not follow through with your orders, and so on. So what is the solution to this issue? Prepare your orders with your customers at least 1 hour in advance and make sure is ready to be delivered within 30 minutes to the customer. Of course, this depends on the products that you sell, if you do bakeries it doesn’t necessarily follow this rule but is best to standardize your time and stick to it.

4. Delivery will be late? Time to get a food warmer.

Just imagine, you prepared meals for 5 customers on time but you notice your rider who accepted the job is 20 minutes late. You called him and asked for his whereabouts, and he responds with “I’m on the way no worries.” then hangs up on you. In the next 2 minutes, he suddenly cancels the job and the delivery system goes back to “searching for riders” mode but is going to take a while, as today is a rainy day. What do you do?

Another common issue that many merchants face and don’t seem to have a proper way of dealing with it is what happens when deliveries are going to be late? When such a situation arises, most merchants normally inform their customers about the lateness, and depending on how late they would receive their meals, the customers would always get their cold meal and a partial or full refund.

While is difficult to eliminate delayed orders to the customer due to outside factors that you can’t control when using 3rd party courier services, what you can mitigate is the cooling process of your cooked meals to your customers.

I present to you a way to maintain your food from getting cold, the one and only Food Warmer!

Why is having a food warmer so important? Well let's list the benefits shall we:

Provides a well-insulated space to keep your meals warm for hours
Is easy to clean and maintain
Protects from airborne germs and other pests such as ants, cockroaches, flies, and rats.

With a food warmer, you no longer have to worry too much about your customers getting their meals late nor do you have to cook again and use more of your resources, time, and money.

I hear you say: “You think so easy meh!? Do you know how expensive it is? I’m just a small business, not a restaurant!”

That’s exactly why you should invest in a food warmer! Indeed you are not a restaurant but you are making food for your customers, shouldn’t you want to make it easier to maintain your quality of food without having to waste more resources to do so? Having this simple technology can help save so much time and expectations as you are able to control this particular problem with little hassle. Plus you don’t have to spend a lot of money just to get a food warmer. Just search up on any online marketplace like Shopee and Lazada or go to your local shopping center to look for a simple home-used warmer. Really is not as difficult as you want to make it out to be.

There you have it, these are my top 4 tips on how to manage your time as a merchant here at Hawkr. If you plan on growing your business to accommodate more customers or simply have a better work-life balance, you need to start thinking about automating some of your processes like the ones that I have highlighted. If you don’t start using technology to assist you, you will only make things worse and tiring for you in the long run, and eventually, your business will start to suffer. So take my advice and invest in a little help like us, it will go a long way!

Thanks for taking the time to read this article, if you have any questions or concerns on how to get started with automating your business processes, don’t hesitate to reach out to me or any of the Hawkr team! We would be more than happy to help.

Now if you would excuse me, I’ve got to take care of my cat. He has not been himself lately since he lost his ability to walk. Looks like I’m gonna heed my own advice and use TECHNOLOGY to fix him!

Isn’t he gorgeous?! He may never walk again but he will fly high in the sky! Deutsche Ingenieurskunst ist die best! (Translation: German engineering is the best!)