A couple of weeks ago I was riding my bike (with pedals) and decided to stop and grab lunch at a restaurant near the bike trail. It was an absolutely gorgeous day so I decided to sit at a table on the patio outside the restaurant.
After grabbing a seat a server came out and said, “When you sit outside sir you need to come in and let the hostess know you are here, I will be back to take your order.” That’s all she said.
Back in the day, we had several thousand customers we interacted with directly or indirectly on a daily basis at the pharmacy.
Our competitive advantage was the way we treated our customers. It is safe to say no one did it better than us. We attempted to create positive customer experiences during each and every customer touchpoint.
I can remember instituting a phone answering policy (primarily our first customer touchpoint) where we said, “HealthCare Pharmacy, you’re the reason we’re here, this is Jay, how may I help you?” The teammates thought it was a little corny in the beginning but it soon became one of our hallmarks.
I was so passionate about taking care of the customer, I spent half my time on the road going to the nursing homes we served in order to see how we were doing and how we could do better.
I also spent time with our teammates asking them for ideas on how we could enhance our customer experience.
Back to my restaurant experience.
Imagine if the restaurant owner had routine customer experience meetings with his or her staff and during these meetings the staff had to come up with ways to better serve the customer?
In this imaginary meeting one of the servers says, “We are seeing more and more bikers stopping for lunch, why don’t we put a sign close to the area where the bikers walk onto the patio to inform them they need to come inside and let the hostess know they are there? This will enable us to take care of them in a more efficient manner.”
One of the hostesses says, “I like that idea, but in addition, this whole ‘biker thing’ could grow into a really nice business for us so what if we also paid closer attention to the patio and welcomed and served the bikers as soon as possible?”
Then another server spoke up and said, “I like all of these ideas and the only thing that would make the biker experience even better is to immediately bring a cold glass of water to them.”
This is the way we used to talk among ourselves back in the day and is one of the reasons we never lost a customer because of poor customer service.
What are you doing in order to assure you are providing a wonderful customer experience to those you serve? If you don’t take care of your customer someone else will.
BTW…I’ve never gone back to that restaurant and have had several opportunities to do so.
Luke 6:31, “And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.”
Jay@EagleLaunch.com
