Next week, Boston Market Corp. will put the capstone on a month-long program to improve service by hosting a competition in Denver, Colo.
The Service Excellence Challenge games on Sept. 23 will see exemplary employees from the Golden, Colo-based fast-casual chain’s seven regions show off their learnings from the new “Guest Service Excellence” program, which was introduced early this year.
“We’re bringing in our seven best servers from across the country in each of the regions and they are coming into Denver,” said Tony Buford, Boston Market’s executive vice president of operations. “Coming out of that, we’re going to name the top brand ambassador for Boston Market.”
Boston Market completed the rollout of its extensive service initiative earlier this month, and the Challenge is a way of continuing that program, Buford said.
“It’s all about keeping up the excitement and energy in the brand and getting everybody to understand it’s not a program just for today but something that’s in our culture permanently,” Buford said.
Buford talked with Nation’s Restaurant News about the service initiative at the 460-unit restaurant chain:
What was the idea behind the service program?
As we continue to grow our business at Boston Market, we wanted to be sure the guest service remained consistent at every one of our restaurants. The Guest Service Excellence program was really designed to drive a culture in our company where every field employee produces excellent customer service every day and that they really understand the “why” behind the guest and what we are in business for.
What aspects of the program are ground-breaking for Boston Market?
We put together what we call our five pillars based on feedback we received from the Service Management Group over the past year. These were things that we felt could enhance Boston Market’s service and create consistency.
What are the five pillars?
They are kind of common sense, but they are ones that we wanted to go out and communicate with passion.
-Friendliness is the first pillar, and we really talked a lot about the friendliness piece with all of our employees and what we call the guest-service model. We use G-U-E-S-T as an acronym standing for “Greet, Undivided Attention, Eye Contact, Smile and Thank You.”
-The second pillar is the taste and temperature of food, because it’s important at Boston Market that we have great-quality food.
-No. 3 is the efficient speed of service, as Boston Market is a bit different platform than the traditional restaurant out there. It’s not being extremely fast but efficient so the guests understand the service flow.
-Another pillar was the emphasis on table touches. Once our guests order the food and sit down, we really try to elevate the service level by ensuring that every guest who sits in our lobby gets a table touch from one of the members of management or an employee to make sure the food is OK, clear the plates and take care of any extra need they might have.
-The last pillar is problem resolution: When the guest has an issue inside the restaurant for any reason – the food might not be at the right temperature they are expecting or whatever might happen – we empower the team, not just our managers, to take care of the guest should the issue arise.
On that last pillar, you use what you call the “BLAST method.” Could you explain what that stands for?
It’s really just Believing the guest, Listening, Apologizing, Solving [the problem] and Thanking the guest for bringing it to our attention.
Tracking progress
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How long have you worked on this guest-service initiative?
We’ve really spent the last four or five months now, talking about these five pillars with every member of management and every employee in our business.
When did you see the challenges?
It dated back to the last part of last year. We brought Service Management on to provide us with feedback about the guests in the restaurants and how we were ranking. We realized there was an opportunity to introduce some new things to our brand and to our employees. We put together a group of employees and managers, surveyed them about the SMG results and how we could take the program to the rest of the company. … We formulated the program in the first part of this year. We pilot-tested in a couple of markets, and then rolled out across the country. … It’s about a six-month process from start to finish.
You just finished the last markets in Kansas City and Boston. How do you motivate the team?
We have a couple of different ways we’ve incentivized folks with the Guest Service program. One is just a general contest across the markets to see who is growing the scores. We’ve also made it part of our bonus program as a permanent piece based on the overall satisfaction scores that the guest gives through SMG. We bonus the top 50 percent of the managers in the company who score the highest on overall satisfaction with the guests.
What have you been most pleased about with the program since the launch?
In the past six months, we’ve seen a six percent increase in our overall satisfaction scores as measured through Service Management Group. They study many chains out there, and they’ll tell you a five to six percent increase in any given year on overall satisfaction scores would be a great achievement. So the fact that the brand has seen that happen in a sixth-month span is something we’re are pretty proud of.
And what’s next?
We still have a lot of work to do. This business is finding a way to be better today than you were yesterday. While six percent is a great improvement for us, we’re looking for more for sure.
Now it’s solely about keeping this at top of mind. Any time you launch something like this in a company, you know there’s the initial push and excitement. It’s now about maintaining the energy. We can’t allow that to go backward.
Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected]
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