3 Lessons a Restauranteur Taught Me About Client Service

I once attended a rather uncomfortable meeting with a very large, significant client along with my team responsible for managing the relationship. Without getting into the details, we sat through an intense three hours of reviews and some rather direct and raw feedback from the client on how completely mishandled they perceived our relationship had been. They were threatening to terminate the relationship, which would likely have cost half of the members on my team their jobs.

It was painful.

That evening, I took the team to a de-brief dinner at one of my favorite restaurants in the city (a city notorious for intense restaurant competitiveness) where our client was located. I had met the proprietor (I'll call him Giulio) many years before when working for another company and had fallen in love with the timeless charm and amazing consistency of his customer experience year after year.

True to form, the evening was perfect from beginning to end. The service was attentive but not overbearing. The quality of the meal was exceptional. I had indicated in making the reservation that we needed a largish, round table to hold six and that we preferred a corner where we could talk as I needed to be somewhat frank with members of the team without publicly embarrassing them. Thus, the ambience and the table were perfect.

After a couple of hours and more than a couple of bottles of wine, we had finished a completely frank dissection of every mistake our firm had made over the prior three years in the relationship as well as the failings of everyone at the table – including mine.

We’d just finished coming up with an action plan to save the account when the proprietor dropped by the table. He has a passion for winding down evenings with a table of patrons where he joins, and (of course), orders more wine and after dinner drinks while discussing any topic that comes up.

For no particular reason, an idea struck me. During college, I supported myself as a lead waiter (a “captain”) in a high-end restaurant with a demanding clientele and an unforgiving owner. I learned more about client service during three years in that environment than many folks learn in their entire careers in high tech. Why not have my friend the restaurant owner share with my team his secrets of a successful restaurant, secrets which I thought might mirror my own experience?

He happily obliged – in truth, he loves hearing his own voice!

For the next 90 minutes, my friend held the table like an actor delivering an amazing soliloquy, sharing stories of his grandmother in Italy and his father’s import business and his own mistakes creating and serving incredibly authentic Italian cuisine in the heart of one of the world’s most demanding “foodie” cities. 

We were all taking mental notes, and he didn’t disappoint. Some of these principles I already used every day, others I’d forgotten. After that dinner, I’ve tried incorporating them many times since in my interactions with team members and clients. 

Here, boiled down for easy LinkedIn consumption, are the essential lessons he shared: 3 Lessons in Client Service the Restaurant Industry Can Teach the Tech Industry.

1.    The Customer Experience is Everything.

“So many people in your corporate world focus on MBA-sounding words like EBIDTA and ROI and ROA,” my friend told us. “These are all important. But there is no ‘R’ or ‘E’ without a ‘C’ – the customer.” This is one of the most straightforward yet elusive descriptions I’ve ever heard about the importance of placing the customer front and center.

In 2010 Robert Crandall (former CEO of American Airlines and one of my favorite CEOs of all time) delivered a speech in Istanbul entitled “The Customer is the Focus of Everything.” I highly encourage anyone interested in understanding the trade-offs between cost efficiency and customer experience to read it – there’s an entire graduate course in these short comments. Find it here.

Crandall’s point (and my restaurant friend’s reminder) was that investment analysis, cost cutting, process improvement, policy enforcement, management oversight, rigorous financial discipline, and endless other practices taught in endless Business School classrooms are meaningless if at the end of those efforts there is not a customer willing to accept and pay for them.

As a restaurant captain, I went to the mat daily on behalf of my customer experiences. That was one reason why in my last year as a waiter I earned over $20,000 more than my first year’s salary of $33,000 in the corporate world – all of that voluntarily paid by patrons who came back time and time again asking for me and my team rather than others. And lest some argue that my team didn’t pay for themselves, our per-plate average (the standard measurement in the restaurant industry) was consistently 27% higher than the next highest team. My last year at the restaurant my team generated $320k in sales, or an average of $1,422 per night we worked.

We achieved this, very much like my friend’s restaurant staff, by constant, proactive, and anticipatory attentiveness to customer needs. We “touched” every table – even on nights when we had 20 or more tables at one time – at least once every 5 minutes in some way. We observed reactions to meal tastings and immediately approached the table if something seemed off. Water glasses were never more than ? full (there’s a psychological basis for that I’ll save for another time). Napkins were always refolded when a customer stepped to the restroom. We offered our names at the beginning of every introduction and assured the customers they could ask for anything during their meal. We interceded in the kitchen before a plate was served to ensure it was what the customer ordered, the way the customer order it.

In short, we were successful because we attempted to remove every possible barrier to an excellent customer experience within the financial framework within which we worked.

In Tech Industry terms, you have to learn to predict and anticipate where your customers will find fault with you and self-correct before they do. That means investing in the time to meet with and solicit feedback from your customers during the experience rather than after. It means listening to your customers rather than being defensive. It means making sure things are right rather than having to “make them right” after the fact.

Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, famously said “If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will.” He was right. This attention to customer satisfaction while the services are being delivered pays 10x the dividends of sending out a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the year and delivers the ROI, ROA, and EBIDTA any Board will appreciate.

2.    People Matter More than Process.

“Sure, we have systems in place. I can’t run (restaurant name) without them. But the processes are just there to make sure the real stars can shine – my people.” My friend has hired and maintained some of the best people in restaurant business. He knows the importance of putting the right people in the right places and grooming them.

“Unless I want to buy the food, prep the ingredients, greet and seat the customers, take the orders, cook the meals, run the dishes to the table, pour the wine, bus the tables, and clean up afterwards all by myself I need the right team.” My friend understands his business.

Someone else who understands the importance of people is Cliff Robinson, Senior VP of Operations for Chick-Fil-A and overseeing nearly 41,000 employees. I recently spoke with Cliff at a leadership dinner in Austin, Texas. He reminded me of a favorite mantra he often repeats: “Before asking HOW, you have to ask WHO.”

Hiring the right people – not just the right skillsets from a resume – is perhaps the single most important investment a company can make. And that means hiring at all levels – from receptionists to senior executives. Nothing impacts bottom line like the right people with the right attitudes in the right spots.

Training them is perhaps the second most important. And not just onboarding (or what passes for it at some companies). Rather, companies need to focus on constant, continual training to ensure associates learn increasingly complex skills like managing ambiguity, anticipating problems, addressing – and resolving – problems.

Many best practices can be used here, including standard HR-initiated training programs, team training, intergroup orientation, and self-paced courses. One of my favorites (and one of the most effective) is a mentorship program. Take your best, most effective leaders and pair them with young, newly-hired recruits or promising risers.

One note. There are skills that can’t be trained, and this is related to hiring the right people. You can’t train associates to have passion, to have initiative, to have integrity. In a the words of hairstyling corporation Drybar founder Michael Landau, “You can’t train someone to be human.”

3.    Execute With Relentless Consistency.

“I never start with cost,” my friend told us. “Instead, I look at outcomes. How much better will customers talk about us, or how many more times will they come back if we give the best, most consistent delivery every day?

This may seem very much like the first principle, but it’s different. In fact, execution is the internally-focused marriage of hiring the right people and ensuring they pay attention to customers. It’s the connecting tissue of every function in a company.

Many companies are so focused on driving returns for investors and stakeholders they can forget about the importance of consistency. Things like delivering the same service the same way every time. Things like setting expectations and delivering on them. Things like making sure associates understand the essence of the company’s mission and living it every day.

One of management’s most important jobs is to ensure the company’s products or services are consistent and predictable in delivering on the brand promise. McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc was famous for his focus on consistency, saying “Perfection is very difficult to achieve, and perfection was what I wanted in McDonald's. Everything else was secondary for me.”

McDonald’s mastered this in the world of fast food – a Quarter Pounder has the exact same consistency in Los Angeles as it does in London. In my own restaurant experience, a cup of coffee at 11:15 pm on a Saturday evening had to be as fresh and hot and delicious as a cup served on Tuesday at 6:30 pm.

Without consistent execution, a company can’t mitigate risk. Every day is unpredictable and thus the future becomes unchartable. Without a clear path to future results, customers lose confidence, investors lose interest, and capital dries up. The company dies.

Think about that the next time you ignore the way your receptionist passes a message along, or a delivery subject matter expert cuts corners, or a senior manager correctly predicts revenue flow.

Mistakes matter. Execution matters more. People matter even more. Consistency is the lifeblood of successful companies. Remember these principles when looking for how to bullet proof your organizations.

Oh – and the good news? We kept our client after that fateful meeting and the dinner after. The sad news? That restaurant closed last year after over 20 successful years in business. Thank you, Giulio, for the friendship and the inspiration.