The Waiter, The Customers & The Management
Image courtesy The Mirror
I was traveling on business a couple of months ago and a colleague of mine, Curt Douma, of Douma Solutions (Do More With Douma!), decided to have dinner together at a local steak and chop house recommended by someone we both knew.
When we arrived, we were heartily welcomed, but the person seating us told us the executive chef had quit the day before and a new chef had just been hired that day. Why at all, would we as customers care to know that? It sort of raised our spidey senses.
Create Value for the Customer: Strike 1
Our server, a tall young man, just hired by the restaurant and new to waiting tables, was quite nervous and tried to compensate by being chatty. That is something I would expect from a corporate clone restaurant, not a property billed as a high-end steak and chop house. As a matter of fact, when he brought our bread, it was on a hardwood board, accompanied with a medallion of butter, an edge of which was sitting in a small bed of black lava salt. He then explained to us that he didn't know where the lava salt came from, but suggested it was produced by rubbing to lava rocks together. We thought he was joking, but he seemed serious. If he, in fact was joking dead pan, that was wholly inappropriate. If he was serious, that was another issue, albeit still inappropriate.
What I've seen in most nice restaurants, and even in corporate clone restaurants, a new server is not allowed to serve until they observe a practiced server for a week or two, after which roles switch, and the newbie actually waits tables while the experienced server observes and coaches. This poor young man was left to the wolves and his own devices, apparently with no training. I felt sorry for him.
Create Value for the Customer: Strike 2
Our server asked for our order after delivering the bread and we ordered a couple of salads to be followed by our selected entrées. We visited and discussed business and after a long wait, our entrées were served. We began eating and realized we had not yet received our salads. We let our hapless server know, to which he apologized, went to the kitchen and returned tout suite with our salads, freshly and hastily made.
To his credit, our server apologized profusely for the oversight and said he would comp the salads. We thanked him and he left us to finish our meal.
When we asked for the check, he brought it to us and apologized that his management was not willing to comp the salads, as he had been vetoed, but if we wanted, we could have complimentary deserts. Management was scraping for every dollar of revenue it could, unwilling to let any that had been committed to slip through its fingers.
We were surprised and appalled that management did not back the server's offer. You would have thought this a coaching opportunity for management to teach the server. Rather than give up a few bucks as the cost of learning / teaching, it was management's call to get the short-term revenue and embarrass the already struggling server.
Create Value for the Customer: Strike 3
We felt wholly unsatisfied with our dinner. We felt wholly unsatisfied with the experience. And alas, we felt wholly embarrassed for the server, who despite his earnest and novice efforts, tried to do his best.
Create Value for the Customer: You’re Out!
I will be back in the area after the first of the year and I may stop in to see if anything has changed at that establishment. I'm actually curious to see if it closed or at the least, is under new management.
We can learn about organizational excellence by benchmarking. However, we can learn about organizational excellence by observing the experiences we have that are less than stellar and reflecting whether we might be creating similar less than stellar experiences in our own organizations. No matter what, there is always something we can learn.
I very much appreciate you and the time you have taken to read this article. You can find more articles like this from me at https://www.legup.solutions/blog.
If you have thoughts on this or other topics regarding yours or your organization’s journey of excellence, feel free to continue the conversation on my Secret Sauce slack feed.
Originally published at https://www.legup.solutions on 16 DEC 2024.