Who Cares Wins

A few days ago I was eating my Sunday lunch in a local restaurant and had the misfortune to get a large piece of meat caught in my windpipe, and so I was unable to breathe. Only the timely and expert intervention of a nurse who happened to be in the same establishment and was able to perform the ‘Heimlich Manoeuvre’ saved me from a very painful and frightening experience that could well have led to my untimely demise

The phrase ‘choking to death’ was never more apt or heartfelt!

I tell you all this not to evoke your sympathy or support. The fault for trying to eat too much in a single mouthful lay entirely with me and I blame no-one else. Except……….

The law of unintended consequences 

This terrifying event occurred at the end of an hour long wait to be served a simple roast beef lunch. A straightforward meal that was a core part of the restaurant’s offering on that day and which was enjoyed by many other diners. The kitchen did not catch fire, my order was not unusual, and the restaurant was certainly busy but, then again, it is busy every Sunday with diners like me who are too idle or incapable of home cooking

During that hour of interminable waiting our order was taken (after 15 minutes), drinks served, and then we were ignored, and ignored, and ignored.......

Our waiter was required to walk past our foodless table approximately 30 times as he swept into and out of the kitchen with seemingly everybody’s meal expect mine. The restaurant manager looked on with an air of superiority and orderliness whilst an attempt to query progress after 45 minutes was met with an indifferent shrug and the response that the meal was ‘just being plated’. After further intervention the meal appeared 15 minutes later only for me to rather messily and inadvertently attempt suicide by eating too much in one go!

So this sorry story begs the question - where does the fault lie in this truly appalling but true tale of service indolence, indifference and ignorance? Who to blame, who to sue (only joking), and who to complain to?

Where does the fault really lie?

That our waiter failed to ‘own’ the problem is obvious and he must bear a part of the responsibility. I am quite sure that he did know about the problem but chose to ignore it - or maybe he just didn’t care. However, the question also arises as to who created the culture, system and management ethos that allowed this set of circumstances to arise and go unchecked?

That the waiters were busy was obvious – but maybe too busy as they rushed from table to table underpaid and overworked. Treated as mere ‘casual’ staff with no investment in the enterprise, the service, or the customers.

It could be that the ordering system was at fault and that losing an order was a regular occurrence. Maybe, instead, the kitchen staff and chefs did not have a failsafe system for capturing information from the front of house. Of course, we can always blame human error but to what extent was this error predictable and avoidable?

Perhaps the simple expedient of measuring the meal 'cycle time' for each arriving diner would have avoided excessive delays as a failure to deliver a meal would have been noted within the management system and flagged as an exception requiring attention

We can be pretty sure that the monthly review of the restaurant accounts (which was part of a larger chain) were peppered with talk of budgets, targets and forecasts but what of the focus on real time customer service? The senior management of this particular chain proudly proclaim their positions of wealth and glamour on the corporate website with, no surprise here, not a single mention of employees and only the standard photo shots of smiling and apparently happy customers. Is it not valid therefore to ask where the priorities of this restaurant chain truly lie?

We can be pretty sure that any talk of ‘customer focus’ would most surely have had as the real objective the opportunities to ‘upsell’, ‘cross sell’ and ‘maximise value’ – all very worthy marketing tactics but not especially my concern as I slowly choked to death on the back of (admittedly) my own fury at the treatment we had received. Indeed, one has to wonder at the negative effect on budgets and achieving targets had I actually died and which would have rendered such corporate conversations utterly meaningless 

Who cares wins

Of course, no-one set out to cause my early demise as this would clearly have been very bad for business. The same could also be said for the recent furore surrounding the failure of the Thomas Cook travel company to adequately inspect the heating arrangements in a villa that they rented out to unsuspecting holidaymakers, with the resulting tragedy that two young children died of carbon monoxide poisoning

Of course, Thomas Cook never intended for these circumstances to arise. They did indeed have some systems in place for inspection and approval of the premises although, sadly, these proved to be insufficient. Moreover, the hotel involved was ultimately held responsible with employees being dismissed and imprisoned and Thomas Cook receiving ￡3m in compensation for the incident

However, it was the subsequent treatment of the bereaved parents by the corporate machine that caused the greater part of the uproar. A refusal to apologise for the incident (no doubt dictated by company lawyers) and the pocketing of the compensation payable, led to demands for a boycott of the company and a substantial decline in the share price as investors deserted the stock. Eventually, Thomas Cook did recognise their failings and took corrective action but the damage to the brand and the revenues of the business were substantial and long lasting (I shall not be booking a holiday through them ever again)

In this instance the failure of the system was also entirely unintentional but the problem caused by this failure was massively exacerbated by the apparent inability of the company and the senior employees within that business to genuinely care about its customers.

Whether, as in my case, it be the relatively lowly waiter unwilling to care about system failures to deliver me a meal on time, or the huge corporate machines that too often dismiss customers as mere ‘target markets’ it is surely right to question the core culture of the businesses that create and foster such an environment

 What to do?

In other postings in this series I have spoken of the need for a new route to ethical business practices, especially in financial services. I have also despaired at the way in which large corporations seek to belittle and fool their customers. Within my own world of the insurance claims industry I have sought to look afresh at the way in which we handle claimant notifications and losses to achieve better outcomes for customers.

Maybe though the focus is much simpler than these managerial, marketing and structural suggestions. Perhaps we should abandon management theory and maybe, instead, we should just care about the human beings in both consumer and business markets that buy our goods and services, pay our wages and (in my case) have learned how to apply the Heimlich Manoeuvre without whom none of us would be in business or – dare I say it – have survived to tell the tale

As we rightly talk of customer focus and the overall customer experience we might do well to remember that customer care should be a core value of the business around which we build our structures, systems and people