Continuous Improvement

 Anne is the team leader of twenty people in the hospitality industry. Her team is a veritable mix of age, demographic and experience and therefore there is no ‘one-size’ fits all when it comes to goal setting amongst her team. A focus item for Anne and her team is to keep improving the customer experience and therefore Anne is looking to set goals that align with this improvement for each of her team members.

Tony is a middle-aged accounts manager and Carrie is a part-time waitress who is also a university student. Both Tony and Carrie are members of Anne’s team aiming to create improvement in customer experience.

Through collaboration, Tony and Anne agree that an appropriate goal for Tony to strive for would be to improve the language that he uses in his email responses to customers querying their accounts. Using a similar process Carrie and Anne agree that she will aim to improve her memory for regular customers to learn their names and standard orders.

Anne also has another 18 team members that have similar goals that they are focussing on to improve customer satisfaction across the board. deBa is incredibly useful for Anne to record each person’s goals and then to also reference them quickly when needed. During a lunchtime seating, Anne was observing her waitstaff and noticed that Carrie was on shift. After a couple of taps on the deBa app, she is reminded that Carrie is looking to improve her ability to recall regular customers names. Anne sees that Carrie is trying hard and remembers a few regulars’ names and then struggles with a few others. After the lunch rush is over, Anne asks Carrie an open-ended question about how her efforts are going with learning customers names. The question results in a valuable two-way conversation where Anne provides Carrie with some of her tips on how she remembers people’s names whilst also providing Carrie encouragement on her improvement journey.

Within a few seconds, Anne records the conversation in deBa and a valuable moment in the evolution towards a continuous improvement workplace is achieved.