58: The frontline is the bottom-line.

Big companies tend to have a desire for ‘command and control’. This is natural from a head office perspective: how can I control my offer if I do not set it up centrally?

The problem with this assumption is that it assumes that people in a central office know best.

In a service business, customer requirements can be different by the hour, or by the day of the week (a private motorist during the weekend might be a corporate customer during the week) and of course they are different based on who the customers are: a truck driver expects a good value coffee, a corporate driver in Germany won’t buy instant noodles for a snack on the way to work, but they might buy them on the way back home. I am generalising but you get the gist of it.

When the offer at one location is driven by a central office, in London or Beijing or Paris, rather than by the site manager who operates that specific location, with their specific customer base in mind, there is a risk to hit ‘average’ customers rather than real customers. And whilst a bad site manager will be worse than a central planogram, a good site manager will beat a central standard setting any day.

I am not advocating for a different offering at every corner because a standard offer across locations is a no brainer: customers like consistency. The art is to get this right allowing for some local adjustments for the location, language, customer profile of the location based on what the frontline hears from their real customers, allowing them to bring it to life in a way that connects with their customer.

When you can leverage a committed frontline that brings to life your offer in a meaningful way - you have ‘magic’.

Disney is a company that has been particularly successful in creating a ‘magic’ experience for their customers with the support and alliance of their frontline staff[1]. A brilliant example that you might have heard is the following.: a family approaches one of the service champions at a Disney park and asks ‘When does the park close?’ to receive as an answer: ‘The park is open until 8 pm’. I love it, do you?

If in doubt about who to listen to between someone who sees, and talks with, customers every day, and someone who sees spreadsheets every day, go for the former: the person on the frontline is often right, and the frontline is the bottom-line.

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[1] And I found out coincidentally that the phrase ‘the frontline is the bottom-line’ is often attributed to Dennis Snow, a Disney speaker and customer service expert.