How many times have you heard, “We’re not allowed to do that because we need to follow the process”? I had a great example this morning when catching the train out of Kings Cross, dropping into the Carluccio’s chain to pick up the Italian breakfast of a coffee and pastry. Carluccio’s, hidden on the top floor of the St Pancras building, meant I went out of my way to try something different.
The entire shop was quiet, though the main door was open so I walked in. As I entered, the waitress, obviously setting up for the day by putting pastries on the shelf turned to me and said, “We don’t open until 8”. I walked out, empty handed and Carluccio’s lost another customer for the day.
This, by itself, wasn’t so much of a problem, if it wasn’t so rampant all over the world. Just another example of using the “process” to justify not being to able to give the customer what they wanted. This would never have happened with my normal coffee shop, the Farm Collective.
Imagine if, this waitress, explaining how they don’t normally open until 8, but would go out of their way to give me a coffee or, at the least, sell me a pastry for breakfast. Imagine the story I’d be telling now.
How often do you see this in the organisations you work with?
Unfortunately, it is likely that the waitress has no incentive to make you happy.
She probably gets paid the same, no matter how many people she serves.
In Timothy Ferris’s “4 Hour Work Week”, he says that he gave instructions to his staff to make the customer happy, giving them authorisation to spend up to $200 without asking permission.
That’s the way it should be done 🙂
Had a similar experience recently. Was at a Café in Guelph, ON (Canada), called “With the Grain” with a front area for walk-in business with coffees and pastries, and a room with sit-down tables for breakfast. The tables were full, so while we waited, we tried to get a coffee. We told her “for here” because we were going to get a table when one freed up, and she basically discouraged us from ordering coffee before we went to the table as they had a policy to avoid confusing orders. It was a nice cafe, and we had a good brunch, but it started off badly.
But, yes, that sort of approach is a common problem.
@Andy – Incentives (or lack therefore) almost always have something to do with it. There is something about the tayloristic attitude that permeates everything these days.
Nice observation.
I never really get why there would need to be an incentive for waitress to make you happy though, why can’t she do it just because it’s better to make someone happy than not to do it?
I’m led to believe that it’s probably not down to the individual but more the culture of that organisation which led her to react/behave in the way she did and perhaps in another situation away from the cafe she might do something different.
Assuming that is true then why do so many organisations create a culture/system which is so based around the Taylor approach to the world!?
I don’t know. I probably didn’t get it, but here is another perspective to see it.
Maybe setting up everything has taken up all her attention and she really wanted to get the preparation before switching to the next one. Maybe, and just maybe, the POS system was not ready before 8. Maybe getting ready by not attending customers before 8 provides far greater value to customers coming after 8.
We, developers set boundaries and rules in Agile too. We only do agile practices. We don’t want too much overtime. We TDD, continuous integration. We demand iterative release and ‘force/encourage’ customers to take their responsibility to do planning with us.
Yes, we do see them as values. What if, even the waitress didn’t see it, but the open at 8 policy does have values.
Maybe, all it takes is the waitress to have patient and explain better.