All Posts Tagged With: "customer service"
Really Fast Food
Pal's Sudden Service
Pal’s Sudden Service is one of my favorite Baldrige stories. The only restaurant to receive the Baldrige Award (2001), Pal’s is a small fast-food chain headquartered in Kingsport, Tennessee, that boasts world-class performance:
- Service speeds four times faster than its competitors
- Order accuracy at least ten times better than its closest competitor
- Employee turnover half the industry average
- Customers who come back 3-4 times per week compared to 3-4 times per month for its competitors
- Same store sales and market share that have grown for the past 24 years
A great article on SunHerald.com traces the evolution of Pal’s from a single store selling 12-cent mini-hamburgers to a beacon for best practices. The company formed Pal’s Business Excellence Institute (BEI) in 2000 to share its operational ideas with other organizations and a bunch have jumped at the chance, including hospitals, school systems, law firms, charities, churches, and more than 50 nonprofits and government agencies. Ken Schiller, head of a barbeque restaurant in Texas, brings his management staff to BEI every year. “Coming to Pal’s allowed us to know where the bar can be set,” he said. “It gave us a benchmark that we otherwise wouldn’t have even known was possible.”
In the article, David McClaskey, who founded BEI with Pal’s, describes one of the keys to Pal’s operational excellence. “Pal’s has a standard,” he said. “They’re going to train 100 percent of their people to do the job 100 percent right,…
18Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedInnovation in Customer Service
The first question in Category 3 of the Baldrige Criteria asks: How do you identify and innovate product/educational/healthcare service offerings to meet the requirements and exceed the expectations of your customer groups and market segments?
Best Buy recently introduced an innovative approach to customer service that has the potential to meet customer requirements and exceed expectations for quick and accurate answers to their product questions, troubleshooting problems, and service issues.
The new service is called Twelpforce: Customers use Twitter to raise their issues with Best Buy, which has a thousand employees across all operations available to resolve those issues.
In his blog, Barry Judge, Best Buy’s chief marketing officer, wrote, “Twelpforce has the potential to be a resource for our customers in helping them do the things they aspire to do with technology…Secondly, I think Twelpforce can be a catalyst to think very differently across our company about customer service. No longer do we need to passively wait in our channels for people to come to us…we can actively seek out the conversations that increasingly are happening outside our channels. I also think this initiative can change our definition of customer service. No longer is customer service a department but something that all of us can do.”
Judge admits that Twelpforce is a very public experiment that carries a certain amount of risk, but it seems to be a good fit for a tech-savvy, social-media-conscious customer base. Such innovation…
12Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
