Customer Service Processes: Lowering the Hurdles

The goal of customer service processes is to enhance, not unreasonably burden, the delivery of exceptional customer service.

Last week, I shared Lee Cockerell’s “locked wine cabinet” story. You’ll recall that when Lee began managing a Marriott property in Springfield, a couple visited the restaurant to celebrate their anniversary. The couple ordered a bottle of wine and a lobster dinner. As Lee tells the story, “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.”

As we discovered last week, the wine arrived late because of a “process” — as opposed to a “people” — issue. The restaurant’s process required a server receiving a wine order to enter the transaction in the point-of-sale system, print the receipt, and locate the shift manager to unlock the wine cabinet and retrieve the bottle of wine. Notably, the shift manager was the only employee who possessed the key to the locked wine cabinet. That evening, the server couldn’t find the shift manager, who was working elsewhere on the property.

After learning about the restaurant’s wine-ordering process during a pre-shift meeting the next afternoon, Lee immediately modified the process. Before sharing Lee’s solution, let’s take a moment to briefly discuss the anatomy of typical customer service processes.

Most customer service processes attempt to “balance” customer service against competing interests. Common competing interests include protecting customer safety, complying with government regulations and industry standards, and minimizing employee theft.

The competing interest in the restaurant’s wine-ordering process was to prevent employee theft. Is preventing employee theft a legitimate competing interest? Absolutely. Businesses and organizations — including customer service powerhouses — possess the right to reduce the risk of internal theft. Accordingly, the restaurant was justified to include a “mechanism” deterring employee theft in its wine-ordering process.

But what happens when a “mechanism” — such as restricting access to a locked wine cabinet to a single restaurant employee — unreasonably burdens customer service? Is there a more narrowly tailored “mechanism” that could be used to reduce the risk of employee theft?

And that brings us to Lee’s solution. After learning about the restaurant’s wine-ordering process, Lee announced:

“From now on, when we open the restaurant each night, the manager will unlock the wine cabinet. When a guest orders a bottle of wine, the server will ring it up on the check, get the wine, and serve it. At the end of the night the manager will balance the wine cabinet stock with the wine orders and relock the cabinet. Also, the manager will from time to time, at random, ask to see the servers’ open checks. Serving wine to a guest before ringing it up will be considered a serious matter, and there will be consequences” (Cockerell, Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney, p. 144).

Notice how Lee utilized a more narrowly tailored “mechanism” — specifically, having the shift manager conduct random audits of open checks — to reduce the risk of employee theft. Not surprisingly, after Lee modified the restaurant’s wine-ordering process, wine sales rose (customers tended to order two, not just one, bottles of wine); server tips increased; and customer complaints decreased.

If you haven’t done so already, please share the “locked wine cabinet” story with your team. Then, during your next employee or departmental retreat, consider focusing on these three tasks:

• First, ensure that each of your customer service processes is regularly reviewed; that is, be sure that your business or organization has a systematic and formal process to review its customer service processes.

• Second, when designing and reviewing customer service processes, tirelessly ask each other “What if?” — especially with respect to “mechanisms” used to balance competing interests, i.e., “What if the server can’t locate the shift manager?”

• Third, ensure that “mechanisms” used to balance competing interests in your customer service processes are narrowly tailored to protect competing interests without unreasonably burdening customer service.

As always, have a “customerific” week!

Mark