Chick-Fil-A’s Soft-Customer Driven Standards
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Customer Service: Applied Introduction Chick-fil-A’s Soft-Customer Driven StandardsStudent NameStudent #University of Guelph Humber Amanpreet ChhinaMonday February 26th, 2018Customer Service: Applied Introduction Chick-fil-A’s Soft-Customer Driven StandardsThe article, “Chick-‐fil-‐A is beating every competitor by training workers to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ was published by Business Insider (Taylor, 2016). This article focuses on the American fast food chain and how their mission to go above and beyond in providing polite customer service, has allowed them to stand above their competitors. Chick-‐fil-‐A’s soft skill of consistently providing polite service has become a crucial interpersonal quality and people skill to the business. Business owners consider this skill a very important attribute and want all new employees to possess this skill. Chick-‐fil-‐A has translated customer expectations into polite respectful services and turned it into actions and behaviours that are definable, repeatable, and actionable.Chick-‐fil-‐A emphasizes the importance of always trying to provide a “second mile” (Taylor, 2016) service and has customer priorities focused on the continual improvement of workers interpersonal and communication skills. Their company core values are focused on providing a service that gives the upmost respect and amazing treatment to their customers. These service standards are not quantifiable in that they cannot be counted when measured, however they can be recorded in the feedback from customers, staff and others. Chick-‐fil-‐A’s mission illustrates their most important soft-‐customer service standard that is embedded throughout their business practices.
The Business Insider article notes that Chick-‐fil-‐A employees were statistically proven to be most likely to say “please” and thank you”, and to smile at drive-‐thru customers” (Taylor, 2016) when they were tested against 15 other chains. Out of the fifteen chains tested only one, PDQ, topped Chick-‐fil-‐A. The article also states that Chick-‐fil-‐A employees said “”thank you” 95.2% of drive-‐thru encounters” where as McDonald’s, placing in 14th place was rated at 78.4% (Taylor, 2016). Some actions that they practice in order to exercise their values are walking customers out to their car with an umbrella when it is raining, going out to cars withan iPad to take orders when the drive thru is busy and being closed on Sundays to ensure employees have time to rest and rejuvenate.Their success feeds off of feedback and opinions from not only customers but as well as their own staff and others. They aim to collect meaningful information and to not only meet customer standards but also exceed them. When ever the company makes new revelations on how to better provide service to their customers the company passes the information on to its employees effectively. They work hard towards making their drive-‐thru as customer-‐friendly as possible. The business really invests in properly training employees and making sure that they are up to date with any current information. In addition, the “chain has dedicated drive-‐thru teams, made up of compatible Chick-‐fil-‐A employees”(Taylor, 2016). Employees take a personality test and are teamed up with other workers that they would work best with.