PRST STD US POSTAGE PAID BOISE, ID PERMIT 411
600 Stewart Street #1300 Seattle, WA 98101 westcoastfranchiselaw.com (206) 724-0846
In This Issue 1
Unintended Consequences: How Government Rules Miss the Mark The Nostalgic Allure of the Happy Meal Steps Toward Building a Strong Business Credit Score Fast Food, Faster Future: The Innovation Race at the Drive-Thru Leading Restaurant Chains Strive for That Human Touch
2
3
4
Winning Chains Are Elevating the Customer Experience Serving More Than Food
reward customers if employees see them being kind to others. Cava CEO Brett Schulman says people today are yearning for human connection, but find it missing in many of their day-to-day encounters. At Cava, he told analysts recently, “We are focused on creating the authentic human connections consumers are hungry for.” At Chick-fil-A, managers believe an employee’s warm-hearted response to a customer can “come across like beautiful music,” Ryan Magnon, the company’s senior principal operations lead, said on a recent podcast. Whenever a customer at the popular chicken chain says “thank you,” servers are taught to answer, “My pleasure” — and to make clear that it comes from the heart! The simple phrase often lands with surprising warmth, Magnon says. “It is all about the intention on the part of that team member to deliver that great service.”
People will forget what you said and did, but they will never forget how you made them feel, as author Maya Angelou once said. That principle clearly has fans in the restaurant business. Several of the nation’s top-performing restaurant chains are working hard to elevate the brief, emotional experiences when a customer decides how they feel about eating there. Those flashpoints can be as fleeting as being ignored when you enter the store, encountering a rude order-taker, or nearly tipping your drink as you sit down at a wobbly table. At some successful chains, orders to fix those problems are coming straight from the top. Wobbly tables were a hot topic when Chili’s CEO Kevin Hochman met recently with managers at a Minnesota store to hear their complaints and suggestions.
Hochman has held 40 such store-level, in-person meetings to assess customers’ experience, as seen by managers at the grassroots. In those sessions, Hochman does whatever it takes to fix these small annoyances by delegating tasks or putting the responsibility squarely back on the manager, according to Restaurant Business. Fixing small annoyances like that on a chain-wide scale has led to broad improvements in Chili’s customer reviews. “Every time we invest (in customer service),” Hochman said, “good things happen.” Employees at Cava, a fast-growing Mediterranean-style chain, are trained to spread the love by using a “Love Button” on cash registers. The gadget enables employees to reduce customers’ bills if they notice they’re having a bad day, or
4
Published by Newsletter Pro • www.NewsletterPro.com
Made with FlippingBook Ebook Creator