Living-Deliberately.com

Story One: a friend and I were having a lunch at the kind of place where you order at the counter, get a marker of some sort, and then it’s brought to your table. Drinks are self-serve after getting a cup from the cashier. When I ordered my standard “water with lemon” she said, “Oh, did you know we are out of ice?”

“Out of ice?”

“Yes, ” she said. “We ran out”.

a little bufuddled, I gave her a confused look and asked, “how do you run out of ice?”

“Oh, our machine broke and we’re trying to get someone in to fix it”.

Ah. So they didn’t “run out”….they have a broken machine. Now I’m thinking of all the times I’ve ordered a fast food milk shake and been told they “ran out” when in fact they just didn’t clean their machine the night before and now can’t use it.

Lunch chatter between my friend and I included lamentations of ailing customer service, and how many other ways that could have been addressed, rather than sending busy lunch customers to their tables with iceless cups.

Story Two: happened about a week later in a different state. A Chik-Fil-A, located between a hospital, a college, and a bustling shopping center is understandably full at lunch. When I pulled into the parking lot the first thing I noticed was the manager directing traffic into two lines: one for the drive thru and the other, to the parking spaces. As soon as I was calmly led to the drive thru line (for there seemed to be no air of hurried panic among the drivers in a crowded lot at a busy hour as I would have expected), a girl approached my window with a pad in hand. She cheerfully took my order and handed me the slip of paper.

Two car lengths up (still a good four from the speaker box), another girl with a cell phone in hand took my paper and gave the cashier inside my order, and me, my total. The line moved quickly; I paid with my debit card and got my food in the next moment.

The whole thing took less time than it ordinarily would have had their speaker been in working order.

I was stunned. Normally, when a fast food restaurant has a broken speaker, they tape up a scribbled sign and either take orders at the window (much further down the line, resulting in less time to assemble orders) or make customers scream over staticky sound. This manager clearly understood that he had more than a “task” to address and kept the “experience” at the forefront of his mind.

So here’s a shout out for a job well done to the East Chase Chik-Fil-A in Montgomery, an encouragement to do better to the Trio restuarant in Knoxville, and a thanks to Dennis Snow for articulating the difference between “task” oriented and “experience” oriented customer service.

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