Consistency
Scenario:
Location: “Aberdeen Beach Boulevard”
Day 1: Café Beta (This was the second café I tried)
“-Can I have a warm cappuccino please?” I want it warm so I can drink it straight away, how many times have you bought a coffee to go and walked half an hour to cool it down? exactly what I thought so… so after I paid a premium, actually, more than a high street coffee shop, finally, I got what I asked for, a good, delicious, and warm cappuccino, couldn’t be happier.
Day 2: Same Café
“-Can I have a warm cappuccino please?” The person serving, looks to be the owner, a finely dressed mid-senior gentleman says yes with a smile and goes to make the coffee, I’m paying and thanking and leave with the coffee when I had a sip of the coffee I burned my lips, now, what goes to your brain when you burn your lips? yes… exactly that! So, I go back to the gentleman and said:
“I’m sorry I asked for a warm cappuccino and I just burned my lips”, the gentlemen said:
“- Maybe I can put some cold milk on top of it” and realizing he doesn’t know how to make a coffee I did say yes and left, the coffee was bad, and for a coffee lover and premium payer that leaves you quite disappointed.
Day 3: Same Café
“- Can I have a warm cappuccino please?” This time a lady in her 40’s, staff member, says:
“-Oh… X is not here!” X was the person who made the coffee on Day 1, which she knew how to make a proper coffee. She looked concerned because she didn’t know how to make the coffee either (but charge a premium she knew) however she said she will try, so I thought okay, let’s give it a try. She serves the same coffee as the gentleman on Day 2, not even close to a cappuccino but hot as lava too… when asked for a less hot coffee the answer was the same as the gentleman, to add some cold milk on top of it.
The above story is quite funny and bitter, although I wasn’t too happy paying for that coffee a few times, it triggered a light bulb in my head, something I wanted to write and share with you, “consistency”. Nobody is perfect and most probably we did it too sometimes unconsciously, but there is some important lesson here. Consistency is crucial if we want to build a clientele and take our business to the next level, let us take for example a restaurant or a hotel property, the reason they keep having returning guests is because of their quality of service and the same tasty meals perhaps the same recipe that no matter what it’s kept delivered in the same way, in ninety-nine percent of the businesses it applies the same rules.
Consistency is related to discipline and to be consistent we need to follow through no matter what if we set a deadline for writing a novel, college assignment, or a blog post it needs to be followed even if we meet obstacles and get uncomfortable. In the above scenario, it is clear the owner doesn’t want to invest in professional training for his/her employees and improve their products and services to get a higher ROI and to grow the business.
Based on my professional experiences and some of the people I’ve worked with there are a few ways to improve, while in most large organizations they have measures in places like KPI’s and Q&C’s which managers are using to assess the executives, smaller or medium organizations sometimes cannot afford these due to lack of time and budgeting but mostly budgeting, so I have come up with a few ways that can improve your products, service, and productivity:
- Planning is one of the most efficient ways of achieving consistency, set a time, and date to do the things you want to do.
- Follow through, this means following on your action plan no matter the variables like weather, mood, distractions, etc.
- Set a measurable way to calculate your input, for example, we answered fifty emails in two hours and the next day we did the same number in one hour, we need to know what we did better to answer the same number in less than the day before.
- Set up a regular meeting with the staff to learn how everyone is operating, be on the same page, can be daily or weekly (the often the better), enquire about everyone’s serving style, tips to improve, enquire your staff about the clients and the different behavior and attitudes met during service.
- Train the staff members on the latest service trends.
- One of the most powerful things is to ask for feedback from both the staff and customers and identify the areas that need improvement.
Communicate!
Let’s smash this, thank you for reading, sharing and subscribing, I hope there is something valuable to take from this read, like always would be great to hear your opinions or ideas regarding consistency or any relevant feedback to customer excellence and business environment content, please share and subscribe with your tribe.
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