Thinking about customer pain points

 

Staffing Projects and Offering Quality Service for customers

How much stress and strain does customer service place on customer relationship? I recently completed a global survey of over 2,000 customers (total of 5,000) via Chart’s Unreliability! The result showed that customers didn’t buy food if they received poor customer service. So how can we provide a quality experience to our customers?

We identified 2 key areas of pain points customers felt that we failed in. Food visibility (80%) and in-store staff (70%). As a team we opted to focus on these 2 main areas as we deemed this to be the areas that gave rise to customer discontent. In addition, as a result of the 2012 fallout, we chose to reduce hours, reshape our stores to look more like a restaurant and create more physical space so that they look less like retail shops. All of these changes have been difficult and have received underwhelming feedback from the team thus far, but we’re committed to learning and improving every day.

By prioritizing customer service and customer perception of quality service, we are increasingly able to better serve our customers through deeper engagement and more shared values. Our team members are no longer afraid to address customers’ concerns and instead are attempting to better serve the customer through expanded service delivery.

We brought our overall customer service up to a respectable level, however, we were challenged and questioned in regards to our in-store service and how we were serving our customers. Several different things we did not do well including that our merchandising team did not think about their capabilities before they sold product. We also needed to question ourselves how we were investing in employees. We clearly made some bad moves but instead of watching them continue, we decided to improve them by improving training sessions. As a result, we now have more service coaches working exclusively with customers, making sure that customers are taken through the entire flow of the service experience.

Some conversations on improving in-store service have taken hold, especially among the food team (which was stressed out by the events that happened this past spring. They ended up restructuring training to be more reflective of their current position and by improving service coaching sessions, we are hoping that our customers will respond positively to the improvements we are making to our in-store team.

These improvements are the biggest undertaking we’ve had so far and there were many differences between the opinions of the different teams that helped develop our approach. While we were very fortunate to build and execute large initiatives with a group of dedicated staff who didn’t have a failure mindset, we need to build out teams that can focus on customer service. They need to come up with ideas and identify new ways to serve their customers that can be utilized across many different restaurant brands. We also need to focus on what we can improve to differentiate us and provide a great experience.

Our restaurant team is struggling to drive repeat business, so we should reduce the number of times people are asked for check details by 20% across the board, focusing only on the orders which really need a store’s attention. This process can be carried out without significantly impacting the customer service team and we will ensure that this optimization is carried out only as a direct response to feedback from customers. Our business leadership team also needs to be better at creating a positive feedback loop with our team so that they can make more informed decisions to improve their performance. We do not have the best food department experienced people in our stores, which means we’re in need of employees that can add value and know how to enhance our food culture to serve our customers. We will continue to try out a few things at the store-level and then bring these ideas to the CEO, board, or lines VP for approval. We need to be more aggressive and innovate at the board and CEO level to get these types of improvements made quickly.

We believe that our data strongly supports our philosophy to be more committed to the customer experience and the customer experience should be our main focus. Perhaps this change will be too drastic for everyone, so we want to be fair with our customers in working together to learn and improve.