March 01, 2005
Service Standards: Are they what your customer’s value?
I was at Smokey Bones the other day and was greeted at the bar by a friendly bartender and a flying drink napkin. I jumped to the right to avoid what was sure to be a nasty paper cut, gathered myself, and began a conversation with the bartender.
I told the bartender that I always hated it when the bartenders threw the drink napkins at me. (The trademark napkin toss seems to be, at best, a little too casual an introduction to a customer and, at worst, disrespectful.) This led to a conversation about the service standards at Smokey Bones and how staff are trained and measured.
Turns out that the bartender wasn’t being rude when he flipped the drink napkin in my general direction, he was just following orders. Smokey Bones employees are trained at the fine art of the drink napkin toss. (The proper technique resembles that used to toss a Frisbee.) Smokey Bones training also extends to the “take a load off” approach to taking orders at the tables. This approach requires wait staff to sit at the table with you and take the order. With a family of five, this can get a little too cozy!
Secret shoppers, I was told, give employees points based on their adherence to the service standards—and, yes, they get points for properly executing the drink napkin toss. Shift assignments depend on the number of points they get from secret shoppers based on their mastery of the service standards.
What is great about Smokey Bones is that they have well documented service standards, employees are trained on the standards, and employees are evaluated on those standards (drink napkin toss included). From a customer standpoint, this leads to a degree of predictability about the service experience. What may not be so great are the standards themselves. Does the drink napkin toss and take a load off ordering process add to the customer experience or are there other customers like me that would prefer to do without these parts of the experience?
The keys with service standards are to make sure they are valuable to your customers, consistent with your brand image, and consistently executed by your employees. Organizations should test their service standards, just as they test new product concepts, with their target customers before rolling them out. Organizations need to make sure that the service standard will evoke the desired response in their customers, i.e., get them to come back and refer others.
Will I go back to Smokey Bones? Sure, because the drink napkin toss is not as important as some of the other elements of the product/service experience. I’ll just be sure to keep my distance from the bar until the napkin has landed.
Posted by Greg Robinson at March 1, 2005 02:27 PM
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