Top Stories » Expert Columns » Profiles & Trends

When I think about inspiring sales, the first thing that comes to mind is how to give great service to our customers. I equate sales with service and firmly believe that the better the service we provide to our customers, the stronger our sales results will be. One approach we use to continuously focus on improving the service we provide is to measure it. The more tools we can use to help measure our service, the better our service will be.

Spotlighting Your Goals
At Zingerman's, we have three bottom lines - great food, great service and great finance. We measure all three of these bottom lines in order to determine our levels of success. Because we've been measuring all three for many years, we have developed many different ways to measure our success. I fully believe that the more exposure and measurement you give to a goal, the more everyone will pay attention to what you are working to achieve, and the greater the success you will achieve in improving your results. Because of this, we measure service on a regular basis in several different ways. I'd like to share a few of our service measurements with you as ways we have worked to improve our service and positively impact our sales results.

Code Reds and Code Greens
These are forms that we have on hand for our staff to use when they overhear customer comments about our food and our service. When a customer mentions something they enjoyed - food they absolutely loved, a service experience that made their day, or how much they enjoyed the new pictures we hung up in our café - we ask our staff to write down what happened on the code green form so we can review the feedback.

If they overhear or are approached with negative comments or product requests for items we don't carry, we use the code reds to document these. Documenting allows us to react to problems quickly - using service concerns as a way to adjust our systems to make things more service-friendly or to revisit training and to role-play difficult customer interactions. We share these write-ups with our managers and our staff, allowing everyone the opportunity to learn what is making our customers' day, and what areas we can all work on to improve.

The 10-4 rule
We actively teach this rule to our staff, asking them to make eye contact and smile at guests when they are within 10 feet of them. We expect them to greet guests when they are within four feet of them. We ask our mystery shoppers (see below) if they were greeted when they entered our store, and if they felt welcomed and if the staff engaged them in conversation. We often find that if we hear feedback that our customers aren't finding what they want, or don't feel like they were genuinely welcomed or wanted in the store, we can focus on this rule with the staff to improve our results.

Service Star Awards and Extra Mile Files
A service star is someone who gives great service day in and day out, to internal or external customers, whether they are regulars or new; easy or difficult; or happy or upset.

An extra mile file is something that you see a coworker doing that is above and beyond what you'd normally expect in a service situation. One example of this happened in December. Paul is a supervisor in our catering sales department. We had set up a catered presentation for a client on the UM campus but the presenters were across town and the taxi service said they couldn't arrive until after their presentation was due to start. Paul heard about this from the server at the event, and offered to be their chauffeur. He jumped into a catering van, picked up the presenters and got them to the event on time to give their presentation, luggage and all. Not something you'd normally expect as a provided service from a caterer, but it's these types of extra mile service situations that will win a customer's lifelong commitment to your business.

We solicit nominations for both of these awards every month and publish the winners in our monthly employee newsletter. The Service Stars and the Extra Mile Files are nominated by coworkers, and a group of our managers and front line employees who participate in our service central committee determine the winners. The winners receive a cash prize and so do the nominators, and they are published in our monthly newsletter so everyone can hear about the great service experiences, learn from them, and gain inspiration on ways they can provide great service or go the extra mile.

Mystery Shopper Reports
There are many different companies that you can use to provide mystery shopping services, but we've chosen to self-manage this through our training and consulting business, ZingTrain. Because they are a Zingerman's business, but a separate entity, we are able to keep the shoppers' identities confidential and have a closer relationship with them to receive their feedback. All of our mystery shoppers are regular customers who have agreed to fill out a form that summarizes their experiences when they are shopping with us. In return, they receive gift cards they can use to purchase items from all of our businesses to fill their pantry, or take lunch to their offices. There are several ways we shop our business. We ask for feedback on phone orders, as well as in-store shopping. We have several standard questions that we ask monthly - What day and time did you call or come in to shop? Was your order accurate? How enthusiastic was the staff you interacted with? Were you offered samples? Was the 10/4 rule followed? Did the staff go the extra mile during your visit? Were you thanked for calling or for shopping? We change the questions and focus on specific areas of concern every three to six months; for example, we asked the catering phone-shoppers to call in during off-hours and leave a message, as we were receiving complaints about messages not being returned when they were left on voicemail.

The great thing about having our regular customers provide feedback is that they are already committed to our success, and they often have higher levels of expectation than someone who is shopping in our store for the first time. We then have the ability to gauge not only how we are doing on service, but how we are doing on keeping up with our customers' escalating expectations for our service.

There are lots of ways to measure service, and these are just a few examples we use. The important thing to remember is that anytime you measure and track results, you build information that you can refer back to for comparison, you open up your concerns and focus to a broader group of staff, and inevitably you will see improvement when more people are focused on tracking and measuring the results. Although we generally hear more about the bad service providers than the good ones, there are a lot of great service providers in the world. If you want to be considered one of the best in your industry, you can't ever take it for granted, or stop working on it. It's a constant focus for us, and we're always trying to find ways to improve our systems or training in order to make giving great service a hallmark of our operation. I don't think I'll ever be satisfied with our results, but we make it a point to celebrate and reward our coworkers when we see great service happening.

Grace Singleton is a Managing Partner at Zingerman's Delicatessen and Catering. Since joining Zingerman's as a Managing Partner in 2003, Grace oversees the accounting, merchandising, catering and retail departments of Zingerman's Delicatessen. Grace teaches a variety of internal Zingerman's staff classes, is a co-teacher of the ZingTrain's Bottom-Line Training Seminar, and is often invited to present to outside organizations on Zingerman's approach to business. She can be reached by e-mailing her at gsingleton@zingermans.com.