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5 innovative brands share customer service secrets

"The answer is yes! Now, what is your question?"

October 26, 2016

By Micah Solomon, author and keynote speaker

When it comes to improving the customer experience, fast casual brands can learn a lot from leaders across the hospitality sector. Below are five secrets that successful execs have recently shared with me in, "The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets."

1.  Legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer: Customers crave recognition andacknowledgment .

Danny Meyer is the restaurateur and hospitality legend whose every move, including the worldwide expansion of Shake Shack and the elimination of tipping at his restaurants, makes news. And how does Meyer get customers to return time again to his restaurants? The keys, he says, are recognition and acknowledgment: giving customers a feeling that they're not anonymous. Making them feel appreciated when they arrive, paid attention to while they're at your establishment, missed when they're gone, and welcomed back the next time. It sounds simple, but it makes all the difference. 

2. Chili's: If they don't have a photo of it on their phone, the customer experience never happened.

Do your buns look good on Instagram? (Your hamburger buns, I should clarify.) Chili's is spending millions of dollars to make its food look more photogenic, more "shareable." For example, Chili's has started using an egg wash to give its hamburger buns a photogenic glaze that "glistens" (the descriptor comes from Wyman Roberts, CEO of Chili's parent company, Brinker International); it's trying out a new way of stacking ribs to make them look better in photos; and it's switching to sexy stainless steel baskets that will fetchingly hold its fries.

All this demonstrates a good understanding of the "if I don't have a photo of it on my phone, it never happened" aspect of the customer experience that so many of today's customers are looking for. It's important for them to experience the world visually and share it before, during, and after the purchasing decision. The customer experience needs to be designed for sharing.  

3.  Top Chef judge & Restaurateur Tom Colicchio: Great Customer service depends on trait-based hiring    

In a customer-focused field like the hospitality industry, it's essential to hire the right people: employees with the necessary traits–empathy, warmth, and conscientiousness, to name a few–that equip them to serve customers successfully, day in and day out.

Trait-based hiring means considering more than the technical skills and training that an applicant brings to the table. While technical skills can (almost) always be taught, personality traits are generally set in stone, and without these personality traits, hospitality becomes very difficult to provide.

Tom Colicchio, the celebrity restaurateur and Top Chef judge, thinks of this as a sort of dinner party divide: "We're looking to find people who naturally enjoy this work," he said. The best way I can describe the people we want is like this: There are some people who throw great dinner parties because they really want to take care of their guests, and there are other people who are lousy at it because everything is a chore—everything is a problem. We're looking for that natural host, the person who is always looking to make people happy and who doesn't find it to be a chore."

4. Richard Branson's Virgin Hotels: Scripted "Stepford Customer Service" is the ultimate turnoff for today's customers.

Today's customers, including the important millennial demographic, demand a customer service style that feels authentic and unscripted, what I call an "eye level" or "peer to peer" style of customer service. They're looking to be served by a fellow human being who speaks authentically rather than following a script.

Legendary businessman Richard Branson has built his new Virgin Hotels brand expressly on this principle, avoiding what he calls "Stepford customer service," the rigid, phony, scripted service style that today's guests find to be such a turnoff.  Because Sir Richard knows that if you treat customers robotically, they'll run, not walk, to somewhere that feels more "at home" to them.

5. Five-Star Chef & Restaurateur Patrick O'Connell (The Inn at Little Washington):  Build a culture of "yes." In a great hotel or restaurant, the entire organization strives to say "yes" to each guest, rather than figuring out ways to say "no," or "sorry, not my department," or "It doesn't work that way around here," or "Sadly, we cannot accommodate that request," or "If you call back in the morning, perhaps we'll be able to help you."  In other words, the essence of a customer-centered culture sounds more like this:

 "The answer is yes!Now ,what is your question?"  

Even though fast casual operators function in a significantly different sphere with different customer expectations, there's a lot to be learned from Patrick O'Connell's Inn at Little Washington. The double Five Star (per Forbes), double Five Diamond (per AAA) restaurant and inn has hosted presidents, kings, and queens. One scenario that Chef O'Connell uses in training his waitstaff is the story of the guest who asked "How big is the lobster?" and the server who answered, "How big would you like it to be?"

The line is partly a joke, but it also makes a serious point about the ideal hospitality ethos.  O'Connell wants every employee to be comfortable with using the customers' wishes, not the stated capabilities of the restaurant, as the default framework within which to operate.    

Micah Solomon is the author of The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets