“Pancakes on the rocks” is the restaurant focused on high-quality services delivery. The claim can be supported by the following facts: the process of customer servicing is built around the client’s satisfaction in details; this process is detailed and documented including the guidelines for every employee regarding how they should act in any situation that may occur; and there are no details that would be missed in the customer services policy. Thus, the process of customer servicing is focused on the customers according to the experience of profit model, such points as core service quality and customer service are on the high level that constitute 50% of the satisfaction drivers. In addition, “Pancakes on the rocks” has been established in 1975 and still operates on the market, and that means that the power of brand and pricing policy is strong and adequate. It means that the overall customer satisfaction is expected to be rather high. It should lead to the positive word of mouth recommendations and increased revenues.
Another supporting fact (previously mentioned) is the detailing of the process of providing high-quality service for employees. The document provides a step-by-step guide on how to greet, seat, serve, and cash out a customer. The policy is customer-oriented and provides no room for mistakes made due to lack of knowledge of what should be next. Personnel are able to provide excellent services in a timely fashion without unnecessary delays. It should be noted that such detailing of the policy is aimed to eliminate any possibility of dissatisfiers that could lead to the lack of satisfaction. In other words, a well-thought approach to the customer servicing mitigates the possible gaps in providing service. For example, any floor employee should provide arriving customers with greeting and a table if possible. It does not matter if this employee is busy or not at the moment – the time of standing in the foyer must be minimal.
The approach to the policy creation tends to minimize zone of indifference and make all possible steps moving a customer to the zone of affection. Such approach is aimed to develop high expectations for the future visits and keep customers assured in the next visits’ service quality. According to the SERVQUAL scale, such dimension of service quality as tangibles should be expected high at “Pancakes on the rocks” considering almost 40 years of providing services in the same setting. It means that all good findings regarding the interior, menu style, employees’ uniform, tables’ locations, etc. were implemented while all bad ideas were eliminated during the years of operation – decades of experience is an excellent advisor itself.
Reliability dimension is assured by the above-mentioned quality of the policy. All employees are aware of their responsibilities and have clear understanding of what should be done in any upcoming situation. Responsiveness dimension (how personnel should work) is among the strong sides of the policy – every controversial moment is supported by the explanatory term like “must,” “immediately,” and several others. Therefore, employees know what they should do and how prompt and helpful they must be to assure high quality of service (and their duties). Assurance dimension is another strong side of the restaurant’s policy for employees – it explains in details how employees should speak (the tone and words) and how to react to the customers’ behavior in order to keep the situation under control.
Empathy dimension is one of the most emphasized quality service dimensions in the policy of “Pancakes on the rocks”. It clearly states that employees must be smiling and communicating in the most appropriate tone with customers in order to assure simplicity of communication process. Finally, one of the strong sides of the “Pancakes on the rocks” policy for employees is the focus on teamwork and orientation on positive result. The process of fail points’ identification is one of the stages of work process but not some kind of a punishment for those who made mistakes. It is clearly stated in the policy: “Sometimes thing will not go according to plan and as a team member you will review the results and all modify the game plan to achieve better results.” Thus, continuous improvements of the services quality through the reviewing of the mistakes (using fail points’ identification plan) is one of the main goals of the “Pancakes on the rocks” team in order to assure customer satisfaction.
Complaint Process and Service Recovery
The policy of the restaurant regarding compliant process and service recovery is built on the principle of root cause analysis; it implements several effective recovery tactics to mitigate the negative consequences caused by customer dissatisfaction, and complaints. In other words, “Pancakes on the rocks” managers encourage employees to perceive customer complaints as the opportunity to improve customer service quality and gain customer loyalty: “Customer complaints may seem daunting, but in actual fact is an opportunity to fix a problem and improve overall operations. It is important that we perceive complaints as a method of improving what we do, and that we communicating this to our Customers.”
One of the major points of customer complaints’ management process is following the service recovery paradox as the guideline to gain customer loyalty. The policy states: “The Customer who has had a bad experience will tell 10 other people about it – the same Customer who has had a bad experience but is impressed by the way it is handled will also tell 10 people about it but the situation will be described in a positive way – correctly responding to a compliant can be a terrific P.R. exercise.” It is clear that policy cannot consider such factors influencing complaining behavior as the level of dissatisfaction, personal importance of the service, the cost of complaining, and the benefit to be gained from complaining in full.
However, employees have clear directions for EVERY case of complaint: 1. Sympathize – employees should be on the side of customers always; 2. Apologize – regardless of the situation and the cause of the problem, customer is always right so employees must apologize for the occurred inconvenience; and 3. Rectify – it is utterly important to assure the customer that someone more powerful (like Duty Manager, for example) will work on the solution of the occurred issues immediately. The directions are very specific and leave no room for the second thoughts for personnel in case of emergency. In other words, they always know what to do in case of complaint.
On the other hand, the policy does not provide any direction regarding service recovery. It clearly states what employees must do in case of complaint: “1. Lower your body to the table level to indicate sincere sympathy for the problem. Ask the Customer to provide as much information as possible so that the specific complaint can be identified; 2. Apologize whole heartedly – the Customer is never wrong; and 3. Tell the customer you will inform the Duty Manager, who will deal with it personally and you will be seen to be fixing the problem immediately.”
These steps are clear. However, the actual problem solving procedure (service recovery process) is not described anyhow. It means that the Duty Manager or Administrator have full responsibility for the service recovery and act according to the situation . It may be ineffective in case there are no free duty managers or administrators – a regular employee will not know how a situation can be resolved within company’s internal policy for such cases. Such state of things may cause certain tension for the employees and become a problem.
It can be an intentional step though, in order to gain stronger loyalty of customers. It is possible that such intentional gap in the policy is called to lower customers’ expectations and not solve some percent of the issues (at once) occurring during the day. Their solution can be related with certain time of expecting the Duty Manager to resolve the situation so that he or she could “save the day” and provide the solution. Thus, customers should know that “Pancakes on the rocks” management is responsible for the service quality but would not tolerate irrelevant claims. It is a wild guess but it is a rather possible managerial method of service recovery use. However, the policy is utterly customer-oriented in this matter, therefore, such cases of service recovery should be very rare. It is possible that such approach to service recovery allowed “Pancakes on the rocks” to stay on the market for so many decades until now.
A writer with the skills to provide the services of the best articles available Jeffrey Wynter was a student at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and Working as a freelancer cooperating with topdissertations reviews service.
