At the end of the youth baseball season, my youngest son’s team—not the team that I coached—decided to have a get-together at a local pizza joint. It was super informal, with each family ordering at the counter and then finding a place to sit outside.
We were the first family to arrive and our order was simple: one large pepperoni pizza. It would take forty minutes.
If you’ve been out to eat with small children, you know it can be a race against time before their boredom and hunger combine to make your lives as parents completely miserable. Thankfully, we had other families to mingle with, which helped keep everyone occupied.
At about half an hour in, we noticed that everyone else in our party had seemingly received their order, whether it was whole pizzas or single slices. As parents and their kids turned their attention to eating, our kids started getting restless.
That’s when I decided to check on our order. I went to the front, got an employee’s attention, and they told me it would be “ten minutes” without confirming where our order was in the process. I was doubtful, but maybe they were so efficient that they just knew.
Another twenty minutes passed. By this point, most of the other families had finished their meals and my wife was fully occupied trying to keep the kids entertained. I walked up to the front counter again, explained how other families had already received their order, and asked what might be holding up our order. The stressed-out employee behind the counter responded:
“Pies take longer than slices.”
I bit my tongue. Despite the fact that it didn’t actually seem to be true, maybe if I had known that, we would have just ordered slices.
In front of the pizza ovens, you could see employees furiously assembling pizzas, taking pies out of the oven, and trying to make room for the little pieces of paper representing orders. There appeared to be little rhyme or reason to the priority of how orders were assembled.
Ten minutes later, as families were starting to leave, our order finally arrived. The kids were happy to finally be eating pizza, but I was stewing over a question:
How did everything go so wrong?
Your operations are showing
It’s easy to pick on retail. Employees work in systems with ever-changing variables and demanding customers. If the system gets overwhelmed, it can be hard to keep up. Quality suffers, customers demand answers, and that’s when you hear things like “pies take longer than slices.”
But it’s not unique to retail!
A support rep responds with “our engineers have a lot in their backlog right now” when a customer reaches out to ask why a bug wasn’t fixed last week as promised.
A customer success manager is five minutes late to a quarterly business review with a customer and begins with, “I’ve been in back to back calls all day.”
An email to a recently-laid-off account executive goes unanswered, leaving a prospect wondering if the company even cares to take their call.
In these scenarios, what’s really being communicated? The inner workings of an organization—the inefficiencies, the bottlenecks, the demands—are laid bare for the world to see. It's akin to watching a movie and suddenly the set walls collapse, revealing the crew, the lighting, and the camera equipment behind the scenes. These are not the parts you, as the audience, are supposed to see, yet they tell a completely different story.
Recovering
Reasonable people like to be treated reasonably.
How do you recover when the inefficiencies of your operations start to rub against what the customer needs?
Show empathy. When you’re stressed out and feeling the pressure of everything not working, showing empathy is the last thing you want to do. But it’s the exact thing you should do. Slow down and let the customer feel heard.
Communicate clearly. Reasonable people like to be treated reasonably. Maybe your engineers really do have a lot in their backlog. Can you communicate that in a way so it sounds reasonable? This may require some serious wordsmithing, but it goes a long way to building trust. Check out my post on Communication Forces Clarity for an in-depth look on this topic.
Fix it twice. In Joel Spolsky’s Seven steps to remarkable customer service, number one is “fix everything two ways.” Are emails falling through the cracks when sales reps go on vacation? Don’t just fix the immediate customer interactions. Figure out how to operationalize redundancy so you never have that problem again.
A company's operations are more than just the people and processes behind the scenes; they're a testament to its values, integrity, and commitment to its customers. As much as we'd like to paint a seamless picture for our customers, sometimes the cracks do show, revealing the intricacies and occasional chaos beneath. It's in these moments, when the backdrop fades and the operations take center stage, that the true character of a business is tested.
How a company responds, rectifies, and rebuilds in the wake of these revelations is what truly sets it apart. It's not just about patching up the immediate issues, but about introspecting and understanding the root causes, ensuring they're not just isolated incidents but opportunities for growth and improvement. In the end, customers may forget a delayed pizza or an unanswered email, but they'll always remember how they were made to feel. And helping them to feel valued, understood, and important, regardless of operational hiccups, is the key to forging lasting, meaningful relationships.