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At Zingerman's, we like recipes. Documenting and following recipes for the foods that we serve makes it more likely that the corned beef sandwich you have today will taste just as good as the one you have next week. That the chicken broth will have the right amount of salt. That the pecan raisin bread has the right amount of pecans and raisins.

But we don't just have recipes for the foods we prepare. We also have recipes for key processes and procedures for elements of the customer (or the employee) experience that we want to be consistent each time. Thanks to Ari's book Zingerman's Guide to Giving Great Service, our best-known business recipes include Zingerman's 3 Steps to Great Service and Zingerman's 5 Steps to Handling Customer Complaints, but we also have recipes for order accuracy, effective organizational change, and conflict resolution — just to name a few.

What is a Business Recipe?
Zingerman's 3 Steps to Great Service
1. Figure out what the customer wants.
2. Get it for them: accurately, politely, and enthusiastically.
3. Go the extra mile.

A successful business recipe is a process or procedure that you have thought through, broken down into simple-to-follow steps, documented, taught and practiced consistently — and that, when followed, guarantees (or at least greatly increases the likelihood of) a positive outcome.

Zingerman's 3 Steps to Great Service is simple enough that new staff can learn it on their first day. But its beauty as a recipe is that it is still exactly the right process for the most skilled service providers in our organization who exhibit tremendous creativity and finesse in performing each step — but who follow those same steps all the same.

Where do Business Recipes Come From?
Often, business recipes are developed because one person in an organization is consistently better at accomplishing a task than most other people and when that person's process for doing the task is analyzed, a recipe is born. Other times, a group gets together to compare best practices and document them as a recipe.

In most businesses, the recipes aren't documented from the beginning, but rather are developed over time. When Zingerman's Delicatessen opened in 1982, we weren't teaching a customer service class. Ari and Paul were just in there, waiting on customers, and modeling their vision of great service. About eight years later, however, with around 50 staff members, it became clear that we needed to do more formal training, if we wanted to maintain the level of service for which we had become known. In creating Zingerman's 3 Steps to Great Service, we searched for the common elements in the best customer service interactions and wrote them down. Then over the years, we've tweaked them a little as we found pieces that needed to be clarified.

Business recipes can also be imported from other businesses, although we have found that this is most effective, if the recipes are adapted to reflect the culture of the new organization, rather than just adopted "as is." For example, when we work with clients on developing a vision of great service for their organization, we offer Zingerman's 3 Steps to Great Service as a model but encourage them to create their own steps, using language consistent with their organization's look and feel.

Successful Model
Recently, I experienced the pleasure of working with the staff of Laurey's Catering in Asheville, N.C. Here's how they adapted Zingerman's customer service recipe to fit their business:

Laurey's 4 Steps to Customer Service
1. Welcome the customer and find out what he/she wants. Spend the necessary time with him/her.
2. Accurate orders delivered quickly and politely with genuine enthusiasm.
3. When you think you've done enough, do more.
4. Thank the customer.

This wording is a first draft and will no doubt be refined and polished as Laurey and her staff teach and live this service vision, but the language reflects the culture of their business and feels comfortable to them. Even though having these steps in writing is new, the culture of great service at Laurey's is not new and their recipe is simply documenting what they've been doing for a long time. But having the recipe written down will make it so much easier to pass on to new hires — and to measure whether or not individuals are following all of the steps.

Documenting Business Recipes for Your Business
It seems to me that we have two main motivations for documenting business recipes:
1. We're really good at something or have a special way of doing it, and we want to formalize that process.
2. We're not so good at a process or procedure that we know is essential to long-term success, so we want to find a better way to do it.

In either case, once we have defined the process, we need to teach it to others and the whole point of business recipes is to make teaching/learning easier.

If the idea of creating business recipes intrigues you, but you're not sure where to start, I'd spend some time thinking about what are the most important tasks that your staff needs to be able to do and what do you find yourself repeatedly telling them/teaching them again and again? Answering those questions will provide some insight into where to start and for many organizations, brings the idea of a recipe for delivering customer service to the fore. Feel free to use Zingerman's 3 Steps to Great Service as a launching point and adapt it as needed to fit your organization's service standards and culture. Let me know what you come up with and how it's working.

Maggie Bayless is the managing partner of ZingTrain, which is the consulting arm of Zingerman's, the specialty food retailer in Ann Arbor, Mich. If you have specific topics you would like to see addressed, please send your suggestions to Maggie at mbayless@zingermans.com.