so the brand was born, built on the three-legged stool of
service, trust and dependability.
Fast-forward to 2015. Nearly every imaginable cuisine in
the world has now been branded in the foodservice industry.
So, it’s reasonable to predict that the most successful foodservice brands of 2020 will be characterized not only by what they
sell, but also by how they serve.
The equity of a successful foodservice brand in the next
five years and beyond will be as much about investing in the
team members who literally embody the brand as its signage,
logos, architecture or menus. As author Patrick Lencioni says,
“These are the people who either deliver on the brand or don’t,
so customers judge the brand based on the experiences with
those employees.”Given the perceived uniformity of foodservice chains today by the dining public, it’s the human face
of your team members and how they treat your guests that
matters most. Like a strong brand, hospitality and service is
built on trust and it starts by extending it to your team.“If we
want to exceed the trust of our customers, then we first have
to build trust with our people,”said Starbucks CEO Howard
Schultz in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek interview.“Brand has
to start with the culture and naturally extend to our customers.”
Culture first, then trust. Trust second, then service, then brand.
Now back to the question: If service is our invisible
product, can it be branded along with the products we sell? The
short answer is no. Even though we use the word service to
delineate specific segments of our industry, like QSR and FSR,
the reality is that we associate foodservice brands more with
the food they offer than by the service they give.
There are brands that have earned a reputation for service,
like Disney, Chick-fil-A and Ritz-Carlton, but you’d be hardpressed to call what they do for their guests “branded service,”
because it cannot be uniformly applied and distributed. And
while both Disney and the Ritz-Carlton stage mobile service
institutes where you can send your teams to purportedly learn
the “secret”for a fee, the truth is that service can’t be taught to
the wrong people, nor can it be executed by companies who
are hobbled by habitual inconsistency in operations.
A brand for a company is like a
reputation for a person. You earn
a reputation by trying to do hard
things well.
– Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com
people takes customer-facing team members hardwired to
satisfy others. That can’t be taught, but it can be sourced and
sought in a thorough and regimented hiring and development
process.
Everyone agrees that service is a critical component of the
foodservice brand experience. And process streamlining over
the last 20 years has given the operator better service but worse
hospitality for the guest. That’s because foodservice brands
invested more in system standards, throughput and configuration than they did in hiring standards and training. As a result,
we have quicker, safer, better and less labor-intensive food. But
we also are saddled with increasingly disengaged servers and
habitually absent remarkable service.
It’s been said that a restaurant brand is not about feeling
full, it’s about feeling good. Since everything communicates,
the human face we put forward to define and deliver on
our brand promise may be the most overlooked part of your
strategy. Foodservice brands used to be nouns, but they need to
become verbs. That’s what consistently good service does for a
quality menu. Create a standardized and vigorous process for
hiring the right people and then religiously develop them daily.
It’s complicated, but a worthy goal.
Service is simple. Simple is hard. S
JIM SULLIVAN is a popular speaker at foodservice conferences
worldwide. His new book, Fundamentals, is available at Amazon.com
and in bookstores. You can get his apps, newsletters and all of his
training resources at sullivision.com.
19
Service and hospitality are words that are commonly used
interchangeably, when in fact they mean two different things.
Service fulfills a need and hospitality fulfills people. You can
get service from a vending machine or an ATM, but fulfilling
SCORE | 2015 Issue 1
THE
The Difference between Service and Hospitality