“Customer service has been a bottom line, a literally, overtly stated bottom line for us, for twenty-seven years. We said in the mid-’90s that we have three bottom lines. And one of the reasons that we did that was because we decided that for us customer service was an end in and of itself. It wasn’t just a tactical step.”
He took a sip of tea and continued.
“For us it’s a core piece of everything. And I think really that’s why we did it, but I think it extends to people’s lives everywhere because it’s a mindset around your existence in the world.”
Before we discuss exactly how Zingerman’s delivers on the promise of meeting and exceeding customers’ expectations, it’s essential to understand a bit more about the philosophy of the company and why it has garnered so much national attention.
To begin with, for Ari and everyone else at Zingerman’s, “Great Service” is not just one of three bottom lines: it’s also the second of eight guiding principles, all of which are spelled out on the company’s website and in its printed literature. Along with the company’s mission statement and bottom lines, its guiding principles seem to be engraved on Ari’s heart, holding him accountable not only to Zingerman’s customers but also to its employees, from the bus girl to the managing partners.
These guiding principles weave together a very particular culture. And, as you can see, they are as enthusiastic as the people who work there:
1. Great Food!
2. Great Service!
3. A Great Place to Shop and Eat!
4. Solid Profits!
5. A Great Place to Work!
6. Strong Relationships!
7. A Place to Learn!
8. An Active Part of Our Community!
Reading guiding principle number 2, “Great Service!,” it’s easy to be cynical. You’ve probably heard something like it before:
We go the x-tra mile, giving exceptional service to each guest. We are committed to giving great service—meeting the guests’ expectations and then exceeding them. Great service like this is at the core of the Zingerman’s Experience. Our guests always leave with a sense of wonderment at how we have gone out of our way to make their experience at Zingerman’s a rewarding one.
If you’ve just done a mental eye roll, I don’t blame you. Pretty much every business claims to “go the extra mile” and “care” about your experience, even cable companies and airlines. However, in talking with Ari it’s very clear that these are not just empty words. He emphatically believes that he and his team not only need to meet customers’ expectations, but continually exceed them before, during, and after the sale. They do this in myriad ways. One small example: training employees to look people in the eye or engage verbally, depending upon how far from the customer they’re standing.
“Our job is to increase expectations,” says Ari. “Don’t you have higher expectations of yourself than you used to? Everybody that’s growing is increasing their expectations. It’s a good problem.”
This belief is reflected in the description of Zingerman’s second guiding principle:
Customer satisfaction is the fuel that stokes the Zingerman’s fire. If our guests aren’t happy, we’re not happy. To this end, we consistently go the x-tra mile—literally and figuratively—for our guests. The customer is never an interruption in our day. We welcome feedback of all sorts. We constantly reevaluate our performance to better accommodate our customers. Our goal is to have our guests leave happy. Each of us takes full responsibility for making our guest’s experience an enjoyable one before, during, and after the sale.
You may be thinking, as I was, “Nice words. But how does that work in a concrete way?” Well, here’s how: Zingerman’s has an internal process to evaluate complaints and compliments using “Code Red” and “Code Green” forms. Employees write a Code Green when they receive a compliment or hear another employee receiving one. In contrast, employees write a Code Red when there is a complaint of any kind. If there’s a Code Red, the employee explains what the issue was and how it was resolved. And the issue is almost always resolved. If the line employee and managers can’t “make it right,” they’ll go up the chain until they find a managing partner.
Ari admits there have been a few people over the years who have taken advantage of Zingerman’s willingness to do just about anything to make a customer happy, but the vast majority don’t. Most people are just grateful that someone cared enough to listen to their complaint and apologize, before fixing the problem.
Ari smiled when I told him that I thought that the next part of guiding principle number 2, giving great service is an “honorable profession,” was unique.
“One of the biggest things that we do is to get the message across that service is honorable because if you’re taking flak from your friends and family, you can do it, but it’s very difficult to stay grounded and rooted. My mother, ten years after we were open, she was still asking me when I was going to go to law school.” He pauses and looks me straight in the eye. “I’m not exaggerating.”
This is a far cry from the stereotypical image of a service-oriented job. Consider, say, a call center, where customer service representatives are near the bottom of the hierarchy, or a fine restaurant where dishwashers, busboys, and waitstaff are treated as easily interchangeable, expendable assets. That’s why Ari says that this belief is hard for some people to grasp when he teaches customer service seminars through ZingTrain.
“People have the belief that service is a terrible thing to have to do. If you’re a doctor, and you worked your ass off for literally fifteen to twenty years to get to your job, and you’ve been taught that puts you at the top of the hierarchy, and now some adviser comes in and goes, ‘No, she’s a bus girl and you should be nice to her.’ That belief is not congruent in your mind.”
Everyone, he says, is influenced by the people around them. Therefore, if managers and other leaders only say the right things, sooner or later what they truly believe, that the people dealing with the customers aren’t as important as the managers, or that striving for good service is “a crock,” then these beliefs will permeate the organization no matter what the mission statement says. Another part of guiding principle number 2 reads:
We give great service to each other as well as to our guests. We provide the same level of service to our peers as we do our guests. We are polite, supportive, considerate, superb listeners, and always willing to go the x-tra mile for each other.
This guiding principle, that serving peers within an organization is as important as serving customers, flows out of “servant leadership” philosophy and practices. First outlined in an essay by Robert Greenleaf in 1970 and then expanded into the book Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness in 1977, the basic idea of “servant leadership” is that staff will give no better service to customers than managers give to staff and managers will give no better service to staff than owners give to managers.
In this way, it becomes incumbent on the leadership to give their employees and customers outstanding service. On a normal day at Zingerman’s, this might manifest itself by a manager asking the sandwich makers if they would like a cold drink, or for Ari to pour water for customers himself when the Roadhouse is packed.
This concept is taken very seriously throughout the organization. In a traditional company, the onus of customer service is on those at the lowest level of the hierarchy. Servant leadership turns that upside down, because the higher you rise in the hierarchy, the more customers you have and the greater your responsibility for giving outstanding customer service to everyone.
That’s not all. Although it’s not an official Zingerman’s guiding principle, the idea that everyone is an individual lies at the heart of Ari’s personal philosophy and Zingerman’s