Some time ago, I spoke at the Inc. 500 Conference in Savannah. The biggest perk was to hear the other presenters, such as former President Clinton. The presentation that had the greatest lasting impact on Zingerman’s was by Scott Cook of Intuit. Intuit makes Quickbooks, Quicken, TurboTax and other accounting software. Cook talked about the […]
Children are an ever-more-important element of our work in the food world. At the Deli, kids of all ages come in at all times of the day with parents and grandparents. At the Bakehouse and Creamery, which are located in an industrial park, parents show up with kids after school or around scheduled classes in […]
There are two specific areas where the one-customer-at-a-time approach can make a significant impact on organizational success. At Zingerman’s, we focus on both of them because either has the potential to take a customer experience from poor to great by simple, though often not intuitive, action by an owner, manager or associate. Breaking the Rules […]
I grew up with pastrami on rye (for special occasions) from delis in New York City and South Florida. But, my memories of time at these establishments are less about the service and more about the food—mostly because of waitresses declaring sharing charges for split meals (I was 8 years old, how could I possibly […]
The article below was originally published in Lawn & Garden Retailer in 2017, as a collaboration between former ZingTrain Community Builder, Gauri Thergaonkar, and myself (Elnian Gilbert). I vividly remember sitting at a table in our lobby area, discussing all of the fine points of the 10-4 Rule – what would be the most useful to […]
Over the years that I’ve been a Trainer and Speaker with ZingTrain, sharing how Zingerman’s builds a culture of great service, I’m sure you can imagine how my awareness of the way that different companies deliver customer service has only increased. Of course, there’s a wide range out there – I personally try to patronize […]
You’ve probably spent some statistically significant portion of your life on the phone. You know how to pick up the phone, basic phone manners, and how to hang up. We’re all, most likely, perfectly capable of picking up a phone and talking into it… But we also need to learn to take the art of […]
This may seem too simple to even mention, but I’m going to say it anyway:
Back in 2007, when Zingerman’s wrote Zingerman’s 2020 Vision describing what the business would look like in the year 2020, we wrote that “we [Zingerman’s] have successfully quantified fun, measured fun, and improved our fun factor by at least 380% since 2007. We actively teach people how to have fun at work. We have games […]
We all know service is important—right? We’d be surprised if there were a company left in the US which hasn’t incorporated some version of “the customer is always right” into its employee handbook. Every politician and business leader can quote statistics about the pros and cons of the relentless move towards a “service economy.” And […]
What does a truly great customer experience look like? We spend a lot of time thinking about this at Zingerman’s. In fact, we actively measure the customer experience by way of the Zingerman’s Experience Indicator (ZXI), which is our adaptation of the more commonly known Net Promoter Score. As Ari explains in this article, “the […]
For those of us who sell specialty products, customer education has always been part of the selling process. Sometimes we’re offering products that most customers have never heard of. Other times we have items with familiar names but vastly superior ingredients or construction. Almost always the prices that we charge are higher than what is […]
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