For the management of business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations, the retail or service location is, of course, the ultimate proving ground. The experience for the consumer—good or bad, reflects the organization’s management systems from values, commitment to hiring, leadership development, and operations effectiveness.
While my career in technology was B2B, like you, I’m a consumer of products and services. I’m also a close observer of B2C interactions, striving to understand the management systems behind good and bad ones.
My Life as a Junior Anthropologist of Organizations and Operations
I love to compare an organization’s values with its execution. Does leadership lead or just pontificate? Is quality built into the system? Are front-line managers excited and motivated to bring their part of the services or offerings to life? Are the people working close to the customer engaged and excited to serve and help? Does the montage of activities add up to a great customer experience? Those and more questions fuel my junior anthropologist hobby. It makes my wife bananas.
I’m thrilled to find an organization that offers affirmative answers to the above questions. We all love a great customer experience, and I have a deep regard for the management system that helps deliver those experiences.
Some organizations deliver excellence consistently. Many have the occasional hiccup or are content with mediocrity. Some are just bumbling and fumbling through the motions. There’s no response for the bumbling and fumbling—that’s a failed or failing management system. For those organizations experiencing the occasional hiccups, those situations provide rich learning and improvement opportunities.
Here are a few examples from my travels.
The Mayo Clinic—Consistent Excellence Driven by Clear, Actionable Values
In my lifetime, I’ve been a surgery patient and a regular visitor as a client to the Mayo Clinic. I’m also a parent of a child who had a complicated surgery there. My experiences at Mayo are reflected in the modules I run in various management courses titled Management Lessons from the Mayo Clinic.
During each visit, I strive to study the execution of client/patient services and compare the performance to their core value of The Needs of the Patient Come First.
From long experience and repeated exposures, one might reasonably conclude Mayo has found some way to embed this value in the DNA of the healthcare providers, schedulers, support staff, and even the individuals assigned to help you find your next appointment in the sprawling megaplex that is Mayo in Rochester, MN.
There was the world-renowned gastroenterologist who stayed with us long after the clinic closed to answer the almost endless questions from concerned parents. He then personally walked us out and ensured someone was there to unlock the doors. Or the student nurse who, when I asked her what her plans were once she graduated, indicated they were to work at Mayo. When I asked her why, she turned to me and offered emphatically, “Because it is a privilege.” How many times have you heard that about your organization?
For something as complex as healthcare delivery, The Mayo Clinic exemplifies practices that combine to create quality experiences for people at their most vulnerable.
No Safari Attire and An Unexpected Positive Surprise in Retail at The Banana Republic
I am the world’s worst clothes shopper. I hate it. Yet sometimes it’s necessary. With a 45-year high-school reunion two weeks away, my standard WI lake home garb of grubby jeans and Green Bay Packers sweatshirts wouldn’t cut it. I grudgingly agreed to a shopping trip with my wife. The experience was frustration personified until we happened to walk past a Banana Republic store. I’ve never been in one, and if you had offered me $1,000,000, I could not have told you what type of merchandise they carried. Safari attire jumped to mind.
A helpful retail professional greeted us and asked about our needs. She patiently explored the inventory with us, offering suggestions and giving us (mostly me) advice I painfully needed on styles, colors, mixing and matching, etc. She then helped my wife, who loves shopping but is conservative and economical in her clothing purchases. We both left with a fantastic array of new clothes, and it was because of how we were treated and helped.
The experience reflected good local management, an effective management system, great hiring and training, and a commitment to the customer. Kudos to The Banana Republic in Appleton, WI. We’ll be back.
A Wisconsin Icon Hiccups
If you live in or travel through Wisconsin, chances are you’ve visited a Kwik Trip for gas, bananas (seriously), and road snacks. The locations are clean, the food products are freshly made and regularly rotated, and the staff is friendly and helpful. As you finish paying, you are always offered a smile from the clerk and a “See you next time.” All in all, a stop at a Kwik Trip is a net positive.
On a recent trip, our mid-point Kwik Trip stop was off exit 97 on WI 41 in Fond Du Lac. We stop there regularly, and it is one of the busiest retail/gasoline stops I’ve encountered. The parking lot is not for the faint of heart. Yet the experience is consistently excellent—until it wasn’t.
For this visit, the restrooms were dirty, the fresh food supply was almost non-existent, the lines at the register were long and slow-moving, and there were no squeegees by the gas pumps to wash bug-covered car windows. I chatted with the manager and gently shared my observations. She apologized and indicated they were short-staffed that day. I still received the “See you next time” statement, but the energy wasn’t there. I skipped buying bananas.
Staffing is a vexing dilemma for retail. It seems to have never recovered from the worst of the pandemic. For this location, this may have been a one-day breakdown. Yet, a staffing problem is inevitable. Where was the contingency plan? Why wasn’t the remaining team able to step up? Why wasn’t the manager scrubbing bathrooms and making sure squeegees were present?
I find that excellence and a great management system shine through when the chips are down and the you-know-what hits the fan. On this day, the system failed at this store.
Starbucks, Bumbling and Fumbling to Serve Coffee
If you follow the business news, you likely heard of the recent struggles at Starbucks and an unexpected CEO change. Things haven’t been going great for this chain. The menu is highly complicated, with an estimated 87,000+ possible drinks, most of which are of the more-sugar-than-coffee ilk. For every location I’ve visited recently, from Boston to Chicago, customer service seems to be a casualty of store operations. If you stop and study the workflow, it’s chaos meets coldness and a pump of incompetence.
My wife and I recently visited a location in Schaumburg, IL (off Meacham), on a Sunday morning. We needed coffee and a protein pack to fuel our drive back to the lake. The drive-thru was crowded, but the café was relatively empty—there were no lines.
We weren’t greeted—not a huge issue, but out of character. The greeting from the barista is usually a nice touch.
We stood and waited at the register to order as the drive-thru overwhelmed crew ran around in an unchoreographed and chaotic dance.
The barista worked frantically to keep up while food and drink orders from the drive-thru kept several others busy. Finally, someone approached us sans smile and took our orders: one black coffee (me) and one frou-frou drink (wife). In my experience, simple coffee orders are filled immediately. No such luck here. My need for caffeine would have to wait.
We moved toward the end of the counter where the pick-up and in-store drinks were placed, waited, and watched.
Two people collided near the drive-thru window. Colliding with hot drinks in hand is never great.
The barista continued to work like the proverbial one-armed wallpaper hanger. Kudos on the effort. Yet, it didn’t seem sustainable, which is a flaw in the system.
Other crew members scurried in all directions. There seemed to be a lot of footsteps and process steps involved in serving the drive-thru, particularly for food items.
Another Sidebar: several years ago, Starbucks embarked upon a lean exercise to eliminate wasted movement and optimize store configuration while not sacrificing customer contact. Where the heck did that go? They missed this store.
At the ten-minute mark, my wife’s drink was set down. They had not taken her name, so there was no easy way to identify it beyond the label indicating the type of drink. Whether it was hers or someone else’s, we’ll never know.
Still no black coffee for me.
After five more minutes (15-elapsed), I butted into the register line from the opposite side and indicated the missing drink. The individual denied missing it. We had ordered from him. It was never poured. He grudgingly poured a new one and, instead of apologizing, indicated someone must have taken it. It’s possible, but I never saw it.
Thoughts.
OK, first, a coffee order is trivial. It’s not the Mayo Clinic or a healthcare crisis. However, if you are the coffee purveyor trying to turn around your chain’s fortunes, satisfy customers, and reinforce loyalty, there are no trivial orders.
The store experience was a minor trainwreck. Customer service was abysmal, and there appeared to be systemic issues in operations and flow. The local manager’s failure to ensure a viable, customer-service-oriented, and quality-focused process is unforgivable. The discombobulated operations flow is likely reflective of a chain failure. A lean consultant would have a field day.
The Bottom Line for Now
In business-to-consumer environments, effectiveness is gauged where the product or service meets the customer, one encounter and transaction at a time. The attitudes and expertise of those in the stores and service areas are critical to creating a quality experience. Local leadership sets the tone for the crew and the commitment to quality. The operations system must be coherent.
The late great management thinker W. Edwards Deming said, “Management is responsible for creating the system” and “The most important numbers in business are unknown and unknowable.” For those organizations experiencing hiccups or bumbling and fumbling, it’s beyond time to fix your system. After all, what’s the cost of one disgruntled customer? It’s unknown and unknowable, and it should be the stuff of nightmares for management.
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