Chick Fil A's Customer Experience Maximizes Marketing And Advertising

LOOMIS Agency President Mike Sullivan explains how marketing based on genuine social interactions maximizes Chick-fil-A's advertising

Marketers have long espoused the “Four P’s” – product, price, place, and promotion – as the tenets of effective planning.  But, results from some of the most successful brands suggest those who stand behind a brand and represent it to customers are central to successful marketing efforts.  Until the front-line staff has its act together, the impact of advertising cannot be maximized.

Why Marketing and Human Resources Should Share an Office

The most important marketing weapon for consumer-facing brands is something most companies assign exclusively to human resources. It’s people. The customer experience is a social one driven by emotion. Whether it’s a restaurant, a shoe store, or an airline, the way customers feel about their interactions with the people serving them is the heart of the brand experience. Each exchange either strengthens or weakens the customer’s bond with the brand. After all, a brand represents what people think it’s like to do business with a company. And what customers think about a company and the way it treats them has the power to make or break it. Great products and smart advertising are potent marketing weapons, but the customer experience trumps all.

The Friendly Folks at Chick-fil-A

Chick-fil-A knows how to deliver a strong customer experience as well as any company. In study after study, Chick-fil-A stands alone as the leader for delivering quality customer service with a gaping chasm separating them from second best. In a recent study fielded by Coca-Cola, Chick-fil-A’s score for friendliness was nearly twice that of the second-friendliest fast food chain, and more than double the category average. According to the Coke study, friendliness, which is a critical performance indicator in the restaurant category, includes simple pleasantries like saying “please” and “thank you,” smiling, and making eye contact. Being polite sounds simple enough, but based on the comparably poor scores for the balance of the fast food chains in the study, it’s exceedingly difficult to get front-line employees to extend themselves.

This is unfortunate for most companies, because it couldn’t be more important. As social beings, we’re constantly evaluating our daily experiences based on social interaction and feedback. An evaluative loop whirls away in our minds behind the scenes giving us constant information about our sense of belonging, status, self-respect, and so forth. This process is so fundamental to our human experience, we tend to forget about it. And, too often, as marketers, we do forget about it, or at the very least we overlook it. But, the leadership team at Chick-fil-A always remembers that delivering quality social experiences is core to its success. And that begs the question: In a society where the prevailing consensus is that basic civility and good manners are on the decline, how does a company train people to be well-mannered and friendly? How do we teach employees to show up socially in a manner that invites people to connect with our brand?

How Do We Train People Skills?

The short answer is, we don’t. Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy addressed this very question directly in a 2005 interview. He acknowledged the tremendous energy the company puts into training and retaining employees, but he said the key is to begin the process by selecting the right people in the first place. The company is extraordinarily selective when hiring. Instead of trying to train people to say “please” and “thank you,” Chick-fil-A hires people who already say “please” and “thank you.” Cathy summed it up in the interview saying, “We give them good training, but I expect them to bring their personalities with them.”

It’s tempting to dismiss the company’s commitment to careful hiring as the byproduct of some unseen advantage. But Chick-fil-A enjoys no such thing. The company slugs it out in the wildly competitive fast food restaurant segment against industry titans with huge marketing war chests like McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and hordes of others. To make matters even more challenging, capacity in the fast food segment has been outstripping population growth for at least a decade. And the front-line jobs at these restaurants aren’t high paying or particularly fun, compounding the recruiting challenge. Anybody who’s worked in a restaurant environment can attest to the long hours, fast pace, and just plain hard work. Chick-fil-A’s commitment to finding people who work hard with smiles on their faces boils down to just that: commitment. Chick-fil-A leadership believe in the difference people make, and they focus on recruitment and retention through practices that consistently deliver the best front-line employees in the industry. The company’s enviable financials underscore the efficacy of the approach.

Link to Financial Performance

“Anybody who doesn’t understand that companies are in business to make a profit isn’t plugged in right.”

That colorful sentiment was issued by a colleague to drive home the point that delivering great customer service isn’t an end unto itself. In far-reaching research for his book, “Firms of Endearment,” Dr. Raj Sisodia discovered that companies holding excellent customer service as one of their core tenants returned an average of 1,111 percent over a 10-year period as compared with 122 percent for the S&P 500 over the same period.

“What’s most significant about this is that we didn’t set out to find companies that outperform the stock market,” Sisodia said in a 2009 presentation. Sisodia was looking for examples of companies driven by passion and purpose when he found the corresponding impressive financial performance that also ties back to a relentless focus on the customer experience. The list of companies he identified as standouts includes brands such as Amazon, BMW, CarMax, Commerce Bank, Container Store, Costco, eBay, Harley-Davidson, Honda, IKEA, JetBlue, LL Bean, Patagonia, REI, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. Among the practices Sisodia says these companies employ to ensure great customer experiences are the following:

- Hiring people with a passion for their work, resulting in better employee retention
- Paying relatively modest executive salaries, but giving rank-and-file employees more in salaries and benefits than comparable companies
- Cultivating a culture of openness from the top down
- Devoting time to training and developing employees
- Empowering employees at all levels to make on-the-spot decisions to ensure customer satisfaction
- Creating close relationships with customers
- Viewing corporate culture as a great business asset

Source: “Firms of Endearment,” Sisodia, R., 2007

For information regarding advertising based on genuine mission and social interaction, see "LOOMIS’s Mike Sullivan On Integrating Customer Service And Advertising"