Employees know less than customers

Profit is a result of employee excellence.
Employee excellence needs leadership and entrepreneurial vision in order to grow.

To get to where we want to go as entrepreneurs, we need our employees to dive deeply into our business. That only happens with special employees unless we have a system to engrain corporate beliefs and history. In fact, we need a system to transfuse the corporate blood into every employee.

Customer service cannot start without product knowledge. It cannot exist unless our employees know everything about the company, its roots, its ownership and its beliefs.

Inspiration is the road to this destination. It's frustrating to see so many un-inspired people working in customer service roles.

I walked into a coffeeshop to hear a jingle from my childhood.

"Two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese, pickles onions on a sesame seed bun."

Two guys were freely singing the words to a McDonald's jingle from a  television promotion in the 1980s. It was weird but nostalgic at the same time. There was a time when McDonald's could do no wrong. Kids loved them. Parents loved them. The whole world was in love with the brand promise.

Then things changed. More importantly, customers changed.

Mickey D's tried to keep up with consumer demands with introduction of salads, coffee and a more mature environment. But they continue to piss off their fan base.

Customers know more about the product than the 16 year pimple faced kid serving the coffee.

I bet no one working at McDonald's today knows the jingle. It IS part of pop culture but McDonald's doesn't train their staff that way. Most of the staff were born after that song aired on the national airwaves.

That is what's wrong with customer service today. Customers know more about the brand and the products than the employees do. When this happens, disappointment is always the result.

It's not just a McDonald's problem. I ordered my favourite Blizzard at Dairy Queen. It was missing the best part of the dessert: walnuts.  Missing walnuts aren't a big deal. But they're supposed to be in the recipe. When the customer knows the recipe better than the employee, it's disappointing. In a world where staff are hard to find, motivate and retain, business owners forget the greatest disservice we can do to our customer is not training our staff.

I ordered a new pizza from a favourite pizza parlour. This chicken pesto pizza tested my taste buds just right. Not too much pesto is the key. I loved it so much, I went back a few days later to order it again. This time, the cook forgot to put pesto on the pizza. When I bit into the pie, I noticed the lack of zing right away. I went to the counter to inform an employee of my problem. The counter person didn't even know what pesto was and couldn't tell by looking at my half eaten pizza that it was missing.

A friend just bought a sushi restaurant. I asked her which sushi was her favourite. I was disappointed to learn that she doesn't eat fish.

Conversely, I was having a conversation with the barista at Starbucks about the sandwiches in the display case. The employee told me about how her employer had purchased La Boulange three years earlier. She knew where the products came from. She knew about the owner, the types of coffee, and the levels of caffeine in the coffee. I was having a real conversation about something I cared about: Starbucks. Employees are trained that way there. That's why Starbucks is not just another coffee house.

The difference between a remarkable company like Starbucks and the others is the way they inspire, inform and train their employees.

When customers know more about the products served than the employees, the company fails in their attempt at customer service.

Maybe that's why McDonald's is testing a self serve counter where customers order their own meals. It might be easier to let the informed customer order the food instead of the uninformed employee.