Michael Attias, a restaurant consultant, sent this story out. I think it teaches a good lesson about good service...
Tuesday morning I was in Las Vegas to lead a catering round table for Restaurant Hospitality's Concepts of Tomorrow show. Kevin Higar with Technomics was giving the breakfast keynote and shared a story about Texas Roadhouse with the audience.
Most restaurant hostesses rush to get you to a table. They're running the 100 meter dash waiting for you at your "table finish line". Texas Roadhouse hostesses walk next to you the entire trip to your table. The higher ups realized that this was one of the most important touch points in service. During the table walk, the hostess has an opportunity to find out whether it is your first visit.
If it is your first visit, the hostess notifies a manager and within a minute a manger is at your table. The manager is usually sporting a complimentary item like a cup of chili and welcomes you to the restaurant.
It is service like this that helps chains. Independent or chain, I can't tell you the last time a restaurant brought me a free sample and welcomed me as a new guest.
Kevin has visited Texas Roadhouse many times for his company and has tried to stump the hostess. He has stopped to tie his shoe and made the hostess wait on him while talking to friends at another table. Each time the hostess was patient and stood by him...at his pace...until they reached the table.
Now more than ever it is imperative you focus on the 101 little things to make you stand out. Most people suffer a life of quiet desperation with very little to discuss besides the headlines of the day or the weather. Bill Marvin, The Restaurant Doctor tells a story of a restaurant he owned in San Francisco. During long waits he would serve those awaiting a table a glass of wine. Word spread as we tend to share the out of the ordinary experiences in our life.
Here is a strong argument as to why the variable reinforcement works better than the constant reinforcement people get from traditional customer loyalty program. With variable reinforcement, the business decides when to send an offer and thus reward its customers on a variable schedule. With a traditional loyalty program the customer earns points and redeems them on a regular basis.
Schedules of Reinforcement
There is a popular misconception that if you start training a behavior by positive reinforcement, you will have to keep on using positive reinforcers for the rest of the subject’s natural life; if not, the behavior will disappear. This is untrue; constant reinforcement is needed just in the learning stages. You might praise a toddler repeatedly for using the toilet, but once the behavior has been learned, the matter takes care of itself. We give, or we should give, the beginner a lot of reinforcers - teaching a kid to ride a bicycle may involve a constant stream of “That’s right, steady now, you got it, good - However, you’d look pretty silly (and the child would think you were crazy) if you went on praising once the behavior had been acquired.
In order to maintain an already-learned behavior with some degree of reliability, it is not only not necessary to reinforce it every time; it is vital that you do not reinforce it on a regular basis but instead switch to using reinforcement only occasionally, and on a random or unpredictable basis.
This is what psychologists call a variable schedule of reinforcement. A variable schedule is far more effective in maintaining behavior than a constant, predictable schedule of reinforcement. One psychologist explained it to me this way: If you have a new car, one that has always started easily, and you get in one day and turn the key and it doesn’t start, you may try a few more times, but soon you are going to decide something is wrong and go call the garage. Your key-turning behavior, in the absence of the expected immediate reinforcement, quickly extinguishes, or dies out. If, on the other hand, you have an old clunker that almost never starts on the first try and often takes forever to get going, you may try and try to start it for half an hour; your key-turning behavior is on a long, variable schedule and is thereby strongly maintained.
If I were to give a dolphin a fish every time it jumped, very quickly the jump would become as minimal and perfunctory as the animal could get away with. If I then stopped giving fish, the dolphin would quickly stop jumping. However, once the animal had learned to jump for fish, if I were to reinforce now the first lump, then the third, and so on at random, the behavior would be much more strongly maintained; the unrewarded animal would actually jump more and more often, hoping to hit the lucky number, as it were, and the jumps might even increase in vigor. This in turn would allow me to selectively reinforce the more vigorous jumps, thus using my variable schedule to shape improved performance. But even some professional animal trainers fail to make good use of variable schedules of positive reinforcement; it seems to be a peculiarly difficult concept for many people to accept intellectually. We recognize that we don’t need to go on punishing misbehavior if the misbehavior stops, but we don’t see that its not necessary or even desirable to reward correct behavior continuously. We are less sure of ourselves when aiming for disciplined response through positive reinforcement.
The power of the variable schedule is at the root of all gambling. If every time you put a nickel into a slot machine a dime were to come out, you would soon lose interest. Yes, you would be making money but what a boring way to do it. People like to play slot machines precisely because there’s no predicting whether nothing will come out, or a little money, or a lot of money, or which time the reinforcer will come (it might be the very first time). Why some people get addicted to gambling and others can take it or leave it is another matter, but for those who do get hooked, it’s the variable schedule of reinforcement that does the hooking.
Here are parts of an article I just read that seems to bode well for small businesses:
The gap of confidence between small companies and big ones is growing. We used to rely on the security of big companies. That's why we worked for them. And hired them. And put our money in them.
But with the virtual collapse of AIG, Lehman, Citibank, GM, Chrysler, and many more — now even GE is in trouble — all that's changed. Now it's a risk to do business with the big ones.
We simply don't trust companies anymore. We trust people. And in big companies, it's hard to even find a person to trust as we scream "operator" into our telephones only to get transferred to another menu whose options have changed.
That gives small companies a huge advantage.
Small companies with low overhead, reliable owners, a small number of committed employees, personal client relationships, and sustainable business models that drive a reasonable profit are the great opportunity of our time.
Small is the new big. Sustainable is the new growth. Trust is the new competitive advantage.
Here are a few email marketing tips from TargetX's Recruitment Minute Newsletter...
Outsource your email broadcasting. "Using an Email Service Provider (ESP) is an inexpensive way to maintain deliverability, along with a number of other benefits."
Make HTML templates that are simple and unobtrusive. "The simpler, the better. The star of your email is the copy, and specifically the call to action."
Track results. But make sure you view them within the proper context -- and that means defining your goals for each message before it is sent.
For cost-effectiveness, it's still hard to beat email as a marketing tool, says Dartmouth's Karlyn Morissette. "Email marketing is not rocket science, but doing it successfully requires careful planning and an eye for detail she concluded. "By following these guiding principles, you will be able to build an email marketing program for your business that will generate results."
A well-respected advertising guru stated these two direct marketing truths:
1) "Direct marketing is the only medium that allows you to use hard numbers to plan, engineer, and measure programs" and
2) "Most people still don’t use the numbers to plan, engineer and measure programs."
Hopefully you understand Truth #1 and don’t practice Truth #2. For example, make sure you save the gift certificates your customers redeem and then calculate the response rate you’re getting. More importantly, always track how many sales and customers you make so you know the exact ROI you’re getting. Something that’s virtually impossible with any other form of marketing!
Why spend time, money and effort sending email marketing campaigns if you don’t know if you are making sales from them? You cannot improve your campaigns if you don’t measure the success of them. Watch this 2 minute video to learn how to make the most of you email marketing dollars:
We recently surveyed some of our clients - here's an interesting thing we found:
Many people admit they are not aggressive enough in collecting emails (either not asking directly or not attempting to collect much) Those that DO ask directly generally get a good response. Need help or ideas to collect emails? Just ask us - we know what works! Watch this 2 minute video to learn how to effectively build an email database:
The March issue of Restaurant Business has a great article about the power of giving your customers a free offer.
The word has such a strong connotation it leads people to gamble away their hard earned money under the believe they can beat house odds in Vegas, so why wouldn't it work to get customers through your door?
In his recent book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely puts it best, "Free gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offers as immensely more valuable then it really is" Ariely believes the power of free is related to our intrinsic fear of loss. With free, there is no fear of loss, as, well, it's free.
We believe the power of free products or services works on two levels. The first has to do with engendering a sense of surprise, delight and excitement. With all of the anxiety regarding the current economic climate, free products make the consumer feel good in a way that lower prices or sale prices cannot. Put another way, it's the shopper's job to hunt down the best prices, it's the retailer's job to surprise them and make them feel better.
The other reason free succeeds is related to universal cultural norms regarding reciprocity. As most of us realize, the unilateral giving of a gift compels one to return the favor, however small the gift may be. And because this is a cultural thing, it is a very powerful force. By now most of us have endured the uncomfortable experience of being surprised by a gift—say at a holiday party--when we have brought nothing to 'return the favor' Extrapolating this effect to the retail level (i.e., bestowing a surprise gift upon a shopper) may seem less consequential, but there is an effect there, however subtle.
Social media is a partner, not a threat, to email marketing because it provides new avenues for sharing and engaging customers and prospects.
"Even though people are spending more time using social media, they are not abandoning e-mail,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, "Maximizing the E-Mail/Social Media Connection." "The two channels can help each other, offering the opportunity for marketers to create deeper connections."
So far, the consensus of the value social media adds to e-mail marketing has been in the area of softer metrics. 81% of marketers surveyed by MarketingSherpa in summer 2009 said social media helped to expand the reach of their e-mail content, most likely because of sharing buttons incorporated into e-mail newsletters. A further 78% said social helped to increase brand awareness.
Bottom line? Social Media helps build your brand, email marketing get people thru your door.
