A few years ago, it wasn’t just the food that was making people sick at Chipotle. The restaurant chain’s workplace policies were also to blame, and therein lies an important customer experience lesson.
In the fall of 2015, Chipotle grappled with an E.Coli outbreak that sickened dozens of customers across multiple states. That would be a problem for any restaurant, but even more so for Chipotle given that fresh, locally-sourced ingredients were central to its “food with integrity” brand positioning.
Then, in December of that year, things got even worse when over 100 people got sick with the norovirus upon eating at one of the chain’s Boston area restaurants. Media attention led to increased scrutiny of other Chipotle food safety incidents, including a norovirus outbreak that affected over 200 customers and employees at a California store earlier in the year.
While health officials were unable to identify the specific source of the E.Coli outbreak, they acknowledged that the culprit was almost certainly within Chipotle’s food supply chain, since the incident affected multiple stores across the country. (In response, Chipotle said it was changing how it sourced and prepared its food ingredients.)
In contrast to the E.Coli outbreak, the two norovirus incidents were traced back to specific Chipotle employees working at the stores. These individuals, health officials discovered, were ill just prior to the outbreak, but came to work anyway. Why might they do that?
It turns out that hourly employees at Chipotle were not offered paid sick leave like their salaried counterparts. That created an incentive for sick hourly workers (who were already paid a meager wage) to drag themselves out of bed and into the store, where they could infect customers and colleagues.
(Interestingly, Chipotle seemed to be aware of the risk that their hourly worker benefit plan created, but perhaps didn’t address it quickly enough. In July 2015, the company announced its intention to offer paid sick leave to hourly employees. However, even in early 2016, their Careers website still showed that as a benefit reserved for salaried employees.)
The absence of paid sick leave – and the potential influence that has on employees (and, ultimately, customers) – is a great example of a “backstage” component to the customer experience.
In contrast to the “onstage” components of the customer experience (the live, digital and print touchpoints that customers can directly see, hear and feel), the backstage components are largely invisible. They involve behind-the-scenes infrastructure, workplace practices and cultural norms that help shape employee behaviors.
Despite employees’ best intentions, these backstage components can influence the staff’s actions in a way that adversely impacts the customer experience. Food service employees who choose to work while ill, because they don’t get paid sick leave, are just one example of this dynamic. There are many others:
- Call center representatives who rush customers off the phone, because their performance is measured largely by how many calls they answer each day.
- Employees who spurn teamwork, because their compensation is tied exclusively to their individual results, without regard to the broader performance of their unit.
- Sales staff who make awkward attempts to cross-sell customers, because they must follow a strict sales script that allows little room for judgement.
- Service staff who must repeatedly transfer callers to other areas, because their narrow job design doesn’t allow them to address common customer requests.
- Employees who are slow to transact business for customers, because of the archaic point-of-sale systems they must navigate.
These are just a few illustrations of how backstage workplace infrastructure – things like benefit offerings, measurement practices, reward programs, front-line systems, and job designs – can effectively undermine a company’s customer experience.
As Chipotle discovered, these backstage components, though largely hidden from customers’ view, can influence the quality of the customer experience just as materially as more visible onstage elements.
Making matters worse, these backstage components are generally outside of employees’ control. Chipotle’s restaurant workers couldn’t alter the sick leave policy. That’s the domain of company executives, who are ultimately responsible for designing all workplace policies and practices.
So, if you’re a business leader exploring ways to improve your company’s customer experience, remember this:
It’s quite possible those loyalty-sapping issues your customers see in front of the curtain can only truly be remedied by doing something different behind the curtain.
Jon Picoult is the founder of customer experience advisory firm Watermark Consulting. As a consultant and a speaker, he’s worked with the CEOs and executive teams of some of the world’s top brands. Follow Jon on Twitter @JonPicoult.