So, I was thinking about the Market Maven Starbucks blog last night as I reluctantly sat in Taco Bell with my children waiting for our order. The poor girl who was taking orders was by herself at the front counter and it was only her second day on the job. She had to keep leaving the register to go to the drive thru window (where apparently someone with only a few more days experience was working) to ask how to ring up items. A crowd was collecting in the lobby and it didn’t appear that anyone was working in the back. After almost 30 minutes, I went to the counter to inquire about how much more time it would be for our order. I took the opportunity to look in the kitchen area (from the counter) to see if anyone was working. The place was a complete disaster! Food was all over the floor and pots and pans were lying all over the counters. Someone came in from the back door who had been smoking and immediately went to the food prep area without washing her hands. So, after collecting a refund and promptly walking out the door with kids in tow, I was explaining to them why we didn’t stay.
I decided to call their “customer satisfaction” hotline that is listed on the top of the receipt, as I figured that no one at the store would even care to listen to my complaints. The satisfaction hotline was a series of automated questions on “from a scale of 1 to 7 with 1 being the worst and 7 being the best, please rate the following items”…then, at the end of the automated call, you could push 1 to leave a message to the employees of the store and 2 to leave a message for the manager. I pushed 2 and explained to a machine about why I was not happy with my experience and then pushed “#”. Then the automated message says “we’re sorry – you didn’t win our sweepstakes but try back the next time you visit Taco Bell”. I thought – what the HECK??? The next time I visit? Will they ever know that the reason they can’t retain employees is because they don’t properly train them and the reason the store’s sales are suffering is because quality isn’t being taught to any employees who are working there?
So I thought about the Starbucks blog and how some companies seem to “get it” and become very profitable and even charge more for their product because it has been proven that people will pay more for quality. And then there are the Taco Bell’s out there – that unfortunately don’t send the same message to their customers and given the opportunity, don’t even seem to listen or respect that their customers have an opinion....opinions that could maybe help them turn a struggling company into a more profitable one if their focus was turned to delivering quality (MSN reports that Taco Bell/KFC “YUM” stocks are at an all time low given reports of rodent infestations and E Coli outbreaks).
So the message seems to be the same no matter what line of business it’s applied to – and it’s loud and clear. It’s the companies that focus and invest in training their employees on quality and customer satisfaction that will survive the downturn in the economy right now. And the companies that get that message and apply it will come out of this slight recession bigger and stronger because of it. And who knows? Maybe they will attract some Taco Bell customers along the way!