Imagine
walking into a five-star restaurant, being seated at a table with a
million-dollar view and your server approaches the table.
“Sir,
Madame,” she begins, “We have prepared your Chateau Briand medium rare and your
Chateau LaFitte ’76 is being brought up by the Sommelier. Will you be having an
appetizer afterwards?”
What?
The expected
order of operations is completely wrong here. You are supposed to order before
you eat, drinks and appetizers are first, etc. We have expectations about how
things should work in a restaurant, and successful restaurants are very good at
meeting our expectations. Great restaurants consistently exceed our
expectations, and are paid handsomely for providing that level of service.
Restaurants that don’t live up to customers’ expectations simply fail.
We’ve talked
in general about process, but now we’re going to talk about formal
process.
1.
Process that
is documented.
2.
Process that
uses specific transmittal vehicles to hand off information between parties.
3.
Process that
creates an audit trail.
4.
Process with
defined roles and responsibilities.
5.
Process with
pre-defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
If your organization is executing at a high
level, you just mentally “checked” every one of those statements. If your
organization is not operating at a high level, read on.
You have a unique organization with unique
marketing and selling to an audience with unique buying behaviors (personas).
If you are an enterprise-level organization, your customers are probably
identified by more than one type of buying persona. Let’s look at some ways you
can think of your process in terms of our five-star restaurant catering to your
target audience(s).
Where’s
the menu? In
virtually all restaurants, there is a method of transmitting the critical
information about what food is available to the customer. We call it a menu.
While there are many varieties of menu – cheap, laminated paper to a recitation
of the available items by the waiter – there is always a menu. As a customer,
you are not expected to guess at what the restaurant is serving. (Although I
admit to having favorite restaurants where I do not require a menu because I
have it memorized.) Is your demand center set up with a “menu” of services or
do you leave it up to your internal clients to decide what’s on the menu? Are
the menu items clearly defined, or is “campaign” open for interpretation?
How
would you like your steak?
Many five-star restaurants require the wait staff to memorize orders, but most
do not leave that to chance. Regardless of the method, every restaurant has a
methodology for receiving the customer’s choice of menu items in a reasonable
and expected time frame (SLA). Think about the importance of timing here. Time
is required to process the menu, make decisions and transmit all the details to
the waitress. Not too much time, but enough. And what happens to your order
next? Does the waitress go cook your order (meanwhile, ignoring her other
customers) or email it piece by piece to the kitchen? Or is there a systematic
method of transmitting universally understood terms, such as ribeye, medium-rare with a loaded baked
potato?
Order
14 up! Even the great wait staff that
can memorize a complex order for a table of eight still have to transmit the
order to the kitchen. Flawlessly. Every. Single. Time. Once the order is
transmitted to the kitchen, the chef must execute on that order. Flawlessly.
Every. Single. Time. Let’s say Bob ordered his $60 ribeye medium rare and it
gets to the table well done. Is Bob thrilled with the flawless execution? Maybe
it depends on how many cocktails Bob has consumed, but probably not. Now we see
the importance of an audit trail. Was Bob’s order transmitted to the kitchen
correctly? Was Bob’s order processed by the kitchen correctly? Or did the wait
staff accidently pick up Jane at table 16’s ribeye and deliver it to Bob? Audit
trails create accountability and accountability leads to flawless execution.
Six
Minutes per side. No matter
who failed to deliver Bob’s medium-rare ribeye, the wait staff is going to
suffer the consequences in terms of the tip amount. Every member of the chain
of events is expected to perform their function flawlessly. While the wait
staff clearly is not responsible for cooking the steak, they are responsible
for delivering a customer experience that lives up to a certain standard – in
our case a five-star standard. Without the entire team fulfilling their
responsibilities, the five-star experience simply doesn’t happen.
Your
order will be right out!
Back to the five-star experience, the timing for each phase of the meal is
critical to the execution. Not too short and not too long. You neither want to
wait an hour for your steak, nor do you want it to instantly appear before
you’ve enjoyed your appetizer and/or salad. Nor do you want the bussers to
begin gathering your dishware while you’ve still got the last bit on your fork.
Timing – known to us as an SLA – is a critical part of the experience. How does
the kitchen receive and process the orders so that an entire table’s order can
be served at the same time, even though the items ordered might take different
amounts of time to prepare? Perhaps the kitchen has an order of operations to
prepare each dish?
Like any
five-star restaurant, your process must be well established, documented, and be
equipped with the transmittal mechanisms necessary for each team member to
properly execute his or her job. Roles and responsibilities must be well
understood, and each team member must be accountable for performing his or her
role within an expected SLA. Without these five components, your five-star
demand center experience is not going to fare well on Yelp! And that leads to
Demand Gen FAIL number 4.
Notes:
Your Demand Center operations must contain all five components of a
formal process. Without all five, you will not be able to deliver flawless
execution every single time.
You cannot expect to execute flawlessly
without strict adherence to your detailed campaign execution plan. This bears
repeating from last week, and is critical. If you have a great process, but
don’t consistently adhere to the process, it’s worse than not having a process
at all.
In next
week’s edition, we will look at Demand
Generation FAIL number 5: This Building has Structural Issues! That’s not a
problem, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment