How Would You Modify this Customer Service Process?

When designing a customer service process, don’t forget to ask each other, “Yes, but what if…?”

During onsite customer service training workshops, I routinely share the “locked wine cabinet” story from Lee Cockerell’s book Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney. Lee was a former executive leader at Walt Disney World in Orlando; before that, he held a leadership position at the Marriott in Springfield.

Not only is the story true, but it also exemplifies the importance of repeatedly asking ourselves “Yes, but what if…?” when designing a customer service process.

Here’s what happened.

One evening, a couple decided to celebrate their anniversary at Lee’s Marriott restaurant. The couple ordered a bottle of wine to enjoy before their lobster dinner. As Lee writes in the book, “Soon the lobsters arrived, but still not the wine. By the time [the couple] could toast their marriage, all that remained on their plates were lobster shells.”

At this point in the story, let me pause to pose the following question to you: “What do you think happened?” If you think that the server obviously forgot about the couple’s wine order, your belief, although reasonable, would be wrong. Don’t feel bad, though: my workshop participants respond the same way!

Okay, back to the story.

The next morning, the couple appeared at the restaurant to complain in-person to Lee, who apologized and invited the couple to “reenact” their anniversary dinner at the restaurant for free.

Later that day, during a pre-shift meeting, Lee shared the couple’s story with his restaurant staff to determine what happened. The server who handled the couple’s order explained that he had entered the wine order into the point-of-sale system, printed the receipt, and attempted to locate the shift manager, who possessed the one and only key to the locked wine cabinet. Unfortunately, it took about 30 minutes before the server – or anyone else for that matter – was able to find the shift manager to unlock the wine cabinet. By that time, the couple had finished their lobster entrée.

The most illuminating aspect of this story is that the wine snafu arose out of a process issue rather than a people issue (i.e., the server forgetting about the couple’s wine order). See, in order to minimize the risk of employee theft, the restaurant’s process required the wine cabinet to remain locked. Moreover, the process restricted access to the locked wine cabinet to only one staff member: the shift manager.

But “what if” the shift manager was temporarily absent from the restaurant? The restaurant’s process governing wine orders neglected to encompass that potential scenario, and, as a result, the process itself created the customer service issue.

Consequently, Lee immediately modified the restaurant’s wine-ordering process to prevent a similar situation from occurring.

What did Lee do? Stay tuned: I’ll share that with you next week.

As always, have a “customerific” week!

Mark