De Broodzaak is a ‘service’ company that is located at several NS stations in the Netherlands. It offers different types of consumer goods, for instance, grinded coffee, artisan bread with different toppings, and freshly pressed juices and soups. These products are prepared on the spot so that customers will be able to enjoy an excellent ‘on the go’ breakfast or lunch during their journey.
We analyzed the internal and external competitors of De Broodzaak and we also identified the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats for De Broodzaak. The external competitors are all the competitors outside NS stations and the internal competitors are the ones that are located in the NS station halls. We conducted a survey at Rotterdam Centraal and Leiden Centraal to gather information from the customers of NS about De Broodzaak and its competitors.
The main problem according to customers is waiting times during rush hour. This is a big problem since De Broodzaak should quickly help its customers on their way. Customers that are delayed by 1 or 2 minutes could end up missing their train, which means another delay of sometimes up to 15 minutes. A second problem is product availability during rush hour, De Broodzaak often has a stock of a few of each of its sandwiches. Sometimes it happens that these few sandwiches are gone within a couple minutes. It also only takes De Broodzaak employees a couple minutes to restock these sandwiches, however seeing as customers have very small windows to buy their breakfast or lunch, this might mean they will not be able to get the sandwich they prefer. The mission of NS is to increase customer satisfaction by offering the customers the best service on their ‘door to door ‘journey. Both of the mentioned problems prevent De Broodzaak from offering the best service.
To solve this problem, we came up with the idea of creating an application where consumers can order their breakfast/lunch through an app beforehand, pay for it within the app, and pick their order up at a designated time. This cuts the main activity out of the ordering process that takes the most time in the shop, paying for your purchase. Disney did something similar with RFID wristbands and MyMagic+ and cut waiting times by 35%. Pre-ordering also makes it a lot easier for De Broodzaak to tailor to customer demand, which will help solve the product availability problem.
The app also comes with more benefits that helps different aspects of De Broodzaak’s services. It would allow De Broodzaak to gather more personalized customer data, which could be used for personalized promotions and deals, increasing customer retention. It could also be used for more advanced forecasting methods, which would further help with product availability. Besides that it could function as another channel for customer feedback, which could be helped to improve other parts of De Broodzaak’s services or products.
Our managerial recommendations for De Broodzaak (thus NS Retail), is to develop the above mentioned app.
References Video:
Alba, D. (2015). Starbucks’ Grande Plan: Selling Coffee via Apps. Retrieved from
https://www.wired.com/2015/11/no-one-…
De Leeuw, M. (2015). NS test nieuw concept Broodzaak op Utrecht CS. Retrieved October 8, 2016, from http://www.outofhome-shops.nl/nieuws/…
Formotus.com. (2016). Figuring the costs of mobile app development | Formotus. Retrieved October 8, 2016, from http://www.formotus.com/14018/blog-mo… development
NS (2015). NS Year Report 2015. Retrieved October 8, 2016, from http://www.nsjaarverslag.nl/FbContent…
Van Den Heuvel, J. P. et al (2012). Estimating Pedestrian flows at train stations using the Station Transfer Model. TU Delft Civil Engineering and Geosciences. Retrieved from http://repository.tudelft.nl/islandor…
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