When we overdo service, why we overdo service

This morning my friends and I were at a buffet at the Marriot Courtyard on Satellite Road in Ahmedabad. It is a favorite haunt of second year IIM students. The variety was good, the ambience was good - we were surrounded by people having power breakfasts and yet there was a relative peace and quiet about the place - and the service was swift. Maybe a little too swift. 

The waiters were like people with an OCD for clearing plates from the table. Things got to a head when one waiter cleared a plate, another replaced it swiftly and one minute later, a third came to clear the new plate even though it hadn't been used yet.

The problem, as I see it, is that waiters have been told to clear plates that don't have food on them. That's their job description, that's probably what they get incentivized on and are given a hard time about not doing. Unfortunately, they have forgotten that their actual job description is to "Wait" on tables, which means carefully observing and responding to the needs of the customers they are waiting on. Waiting for them to finish their food and change their plates when they are done with one course of the meal. 

How did this happen?

Management in a bid to "cut costs" probably hires lesser waiters and standardizes the waiting process into robot like steps which the waiter is only expected - nay ordered - to follow mindlessly; you see a clean plate in front of the customer and you didn't put it there, you got to go and change it. And the waiter observes his colleague getting a hard time for not following this simple series of steps and for employing his better judgement.

While this may seem funny and can be passed off as a quirk in one restaurant in one place on one occasion - very often it's not. It's what the "standardized" management student has been taught, and it's what he/she goes on to dictate from his/her corporate ivory tower while on the ground the market reacts with distress. 

Students who have been taught that cutting costs and standardizing processes  results in better quality will use this hammer because its the simplest one to use. Little do they know that they are setting themselves up for years later, when they are in a much more senior position, for falling profits, for falling customer satisfaction levels - which they can blame on middle management inefficiencies (due to policies that they themselves instituted because that's what the industry was doing at the time) - and the need to pay external consultants millions to come in, eat at their restaurant, talk to the waiter and tell them that they need to change the waiters' rule-book.

While marketing teaches us to go above and beyond in delivering customer delight at each instance of brand communication, we must be wary that we extend ourselves in the right direction - and that direction is the one our customers want us to deliver on, and not always the one that's easiest to do. Maybe the waiter could have told us about the banana waffles and the kiwi juice earlier. But then, he wasn't told to do so. And that is the way the cookie crumbles.