Zingerman’s

A great case study about using context to help improve customer experience in an area of authentic business is the example of Zingerman’s, a famous deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In the summer of 2000, a newly engaged couple put in a large order with Zingerman’s, which is known for awesome customer experience. They get context, they understand what people want, they take feedback, they have training sessions. Zingerman’s had been a favorite spot for this couple. They wanted to have three hundred loaves of bread as a giveaway for their wedding—a thank-you gift that they wanted delivered.

This cargo was supposed to get to Zingerman’s on the morning of the wedding, but it never arrived. And this is the wedding day. The bride’s frantic, trying to figure out what happened. She calls the delivery company, which tells her, “Hey, we delivered them, they should be there.” But the loaves of bread still haven’t arrived two hours before the wedding’s about to start. The couple calls again. The wedding coordinator calls. Still no loaves.

It seems like these customers aren’t going to get these three hundred thank-you gifts. The guests are going to leave without any wedding favors. But on the other end of the phone during this process is a new hire named Jenna, who’s part of the Zingerman’s direct sales team. She’s been listening to everything: the bride’s upset, the wedding coordinator’s mad, and so on. And Jenna’s trying to figure out what’s going on. She doesn’t know where the driver is. And she doesn’t know where these wedding favors are.

It’s possible that none of this stuff will arrive. At the end of the day, she realizes that the big thing is, every order, every customer is important. The customer doesn’t care about the fact that there may be a good reason why the driver didn’t get there. The context of the situation here is that Zingerman’s has to keep its brand promise. It delivers for its customers. The company ultimately must do this.

And so Jenna reaches out to the wedding coordinator and says, “Look, give me your three hundred guest names and addresses. We’ll personally order a replacement loaf of bread for each guest and have them delivered to them at home.” She’s going to make sure that this happens. The bride’s still furious, but she does send the guest list to Jenna. And the Zingerman’s team decides, “Let’s prepare three hundred gift baskets, let’s do it up right, and deliver these replacement loaves. And let’s send an apology note for what happened.”

The interesting thing here is, Jenna knows that making this happen is part of the Zingerman’s brand. She knows that customers don’t care what department she’s in. And she makes this decision as a new hire. This is a decision that’s going to cost Zingerman’s, too: first, for the three hundred loaves that didn’t get delivered and then for another three hundred loaves that are now being mailed separately. This is a really expensive decision. This is a complete set of replacements, and they are being shipped all over the country.

And Jenna never checked with her manager. She never asked for permission. She knew that she had to do this. She never filed a purchase order. All she knows is, there’s a really upset customer on the other end, and she represents a brand. And that brand promise is that they deliver their product when they say they will, and they deliver on making sure the customer is happy. Jenna represents the entire organization. She just did it.

One of the founding principles of Zingerman’s when it was established by Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig in 1982 was that employees should go to any length to deliver the Zingerman’s experience—any length to keep the brand’s promise. This is the shopkeeper example. This meant Jenna or her teammates could do anything within reason to leave the customer happier for having done business with Zingerman’s. And the implication here is that in every interaction with the company, the company’s reputation is on the line. Every team member’s responsibility is to deliver on that brand promise. Even a very expensive decision made by a new hire is a small price to pay for that.

The urban legend of the missing loaves is that the van crashed and the driver died. But when we checked with Zingerman’s, it turned out that the van had mechanical trouble and the driver was unable to contact Zingerman’s headquarters. And the angry bride and groom story is now a cornerstone of ZingTrain, Zingerman’s management training program, which corporations, nonprofits, and institutions throughout the world come to Ann Arbor to attend. And thanks to Jenna, Zingerman’s not only re-earned the trust of the bride and groom but actually made three hundred new friends—three hundred new customers—by going to great lengths to keep that brand promise.

This is what happens in the analog world, where your customers don’t care what department you’re in. They just want you to anticipate and solve their problems, and because you know someone, you can get that job done. In the digital world, that is very hard to do. I don’t know who the other person is. I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t know how customers view the experience they’re having.

At the end of the day, every employee represents the organization, but how do you do make that count in a digital world? In an analog world, an angry bride and groom can call up your business, and you’ve got a way to keep them happy. In a world where everyone’s chatting and the network never turns off, that angry call turns into an angry tweet. And it’s not hard for that someone to destroy your brand representation. That’s why in digital business, you really have to rely on context to understand who that individual is so that you can serve her better and so that every interaction a company has with a customer is done in a way that’s authentic, that’s true to the brand.

The good news is, you can do just what Zingerman’s did: you—and every Fortune 500 company out there—can make that customer happy. The difference with a digital company is that it’s not just good training programs and good recruiting. And it’s not just good culture. We also need the ability to deliver on context. And this is where right-time relevancy plays a role. Customers operate in different channels. They don’t care how you’re getting your information. Context plays a role here. We’ve got to empower workers and employees so that information is being delivered at the right time.

More important, we’ve got to get better at response levels. And this is where context matters a lot. This is not just about real time. This is about right time. Customers may complain. They do complain. But hopefully, they also put some praise in there and reinforce the brand. So ultimately what we’re trying to do with context is deliver.

This is mass personalization at scale, because what we’re really delivering is right-time relevancy. Basically, we’ve made the shift from analog to transactional systems. This has led to a wave of automation-driven efficiencies in the past century.

Today we’re in a world of engagement systems. And those engagement systems are moving toward experiential systems that are delivering mass contextual relevancy at scale, creating role-tailored communication styles, delivering bionic user experiences, and ultimately moving to right time and scale. We’re shifting to mass personalization at scale, and those systems start with an outcomes-driven design point. We begin with the end goal in mind and work our way back. We’re solving delivery of mass individual scale or customer segments of one. We’re trying to craft personalized conversations. We’re interfacing with human application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable people-to-people networks. We’re talking about different technologies that can drive personal fulfillment.

Mass personalization at scale is here, and it’s driven by context. We’ve gone from sense and respond and engagement, to agility and flexibility in experiences, to being intention driven. The challenge we’re trying to solve in the engagement world is really about mass social scale. The challenge in experiential systems is contextual scale: trying to get to smaller and smaller segments of personalization. But ultimately, in mass personalization, we’re trying to get to mass individual scale, which sounds like an oxymoron.

There are shifts in communication styles along the way. We’ve gone from being conversational to being very role tailored to ultimately having very personalized conversations, where a computerlike system—reminiscent of the hologram of the doctor in Star Trek: The Next Generation—is really having that kind of conversation with you. That’s the early days of IBM Watson, when you think about where we are. And speed is a critical part of this. We’re talking about moving from real time to right time to anticipatory in a space-time continuum. We’re also talking about taking this context and going from corporate to personal networks, to segmented value chains in networks, and ultimately to people-to-people networks, which we’ll talk about later.

We are now in a world where we’ve gone from business rules to predictive analysis to pattern-based thinking. New probabilistic algorithms are what’s driving this, what’s allowing us to serve up context at scale. And that’s where mass personalization is heading. Let’s take an in-depth look at Marriott, and how it is doing this at scale.

Marriott: Mass Personalization at Scale

Marriott has 325,000 associates worldwide and is organized around managed and franchised hotels. They’re known as being one of the best companies to work for and are considered one of the world’s most ethical companies. It’s all part of the spirit to serve that came from J. W. Marriott Jr. and some other folks within the Marriott organization. The company has been focused on delivering that same level of experience to their Platinum Elite guests, those who spend something like seventy-five nights a year in a hotel. If you think about it, that’s pretty brutal. Platinum Elites are on the road an awful lot.

At one point in my life, I was a management consultant for Ernst & Young. As a consultant, you spend half your life or more on the road, and you basically choose hotels based on price and location and on other things like phone call privileges, room service, location of the client—and so on. For one project I worked on, I spent nearly three months in the Boston area. Along the way, I got to know this general manager named Bill Munch, who managed the Marriott Copley Place in Boston and also the Cambridge Marriott. Bill ran an awesome customer-centric operation, before that term was even fashionable. Everyone from the bellhop to the housekeeper greeted you with a warm and sincere smile, no matter what they were doing. The customer service was excellent and beyond what you would expect from a chain hotel.

Let’s be honest. Those hotels weren’t in the best shape. They weren’t super fashionable, like a W. These were just decent, business-class hotels.

Anyway, I’d stayed there for a long time, and that spring I really wanted to propose to my then-girlfriend and now-wife, Tina. So I pulled Bill aside one afternoon and told him, “Look, I’m going to be headed off to San Francisco in March. I want to propose to my girlfriend. Can you help me with an upgrade to an executive suite? Or just a larger room, something fun, kind of good for the weekend?”

So he got back to me and said, “Hey, don’t worry about anything, we’ll take care of you. We’ll make sure everything’s great.”

There are a lot of different factors here. I really wanted to impress my girlfriend. I didn’t want to give it away that I was going to propose. This was our first trip to San Francisco together, and she was excited. And like any other guy proposing to his girlfriend, I was nervous as hell.

When I got to the registration desk at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, the clerk looked up, as if he knew my name already. The guy’s like, “Oh we’ve been expecting you, Mr. Wang. We’ve taken care of the upgrade. Bill Munch has called over here, so don’t worry. We understand this is a special occasion, so just let us know whatever you need. We have your profile. You’ve got your extra sheets, you’ve got your extra pillows, and we’ve put you on a high floor as you requested in your profile. And by the way, we want to make sure that you come join us for dinner.”

That was awesome. We decided to head upstairs. We wanted to take a look at what the room was like. So we got to the 34th floor with our bags and walked into the room, and wow. It was amazing. We were looking at 2,800 square feet. There was a huge vase of flowers for us. We saw a living room with a wraparound couch, an entertainment system. We saw this whole wonderful, large area and a dining room. The bedrooms were double the size you’d find in a normal suite. The bathrooms were the size of bedrooms. There was a 180-degree balcony. We were speechless and giddy. Bill Munch had done us good. And later on that Saturday, I proposed, my girlfriend said yes—it was wonderful. We had an engagement party at the hotel for about a hundred folks.

Since then, I’ve been a loyal Marriott customer. Why? Because they delivered on my expectations, they understood context, and they have done it over and over again.

But it’s not just that one incident. It’s the fact that being a Platinum Elite guest actually means something. And that’s really why it’s important to try to understand what Marriott is doing. There’s something magical about the way that the Marriott system works. Whether it’s a franchise or a company-managed property, Marriott’s associates start with the company’s mission statement, and that mission statement is supported by context.

When I asked Rich Toohey, the head of Marriott Rewards, “What does that mission statement entail for Marriott?” he responded, “Attention to detail; openness to innovation; creatively serving guests; and pride in knowing that guests can count on the company’s unique blend of quality, consistency, personalized service, and recognition at any Marriott property anywhere in the world.” Sounds like every generic customer service mission, right?

But who works at Marriott is important. The hiring process is important. It’s trying to find the right people. It’s looking for exemplary service—that’s in the company’s DNA. It’s also helping to make sure that its associates actually have what they need to give customers their special hotel experience. For the top Marriott customers, Platinum Elite members, the service starts with this. But their experience involves more recognition in every service interaction. More benefits than other guests might receive. Ultimately, an elevated experience.

Marriott does this by using information and providing context, having a streamlined process, and of course, with training. At the information level, this is more than just customer preferences. It’s capturing the profile online, or in an interaction with the clerk, or on the phone with the call center. In fact, all of these are at work all the time as each customer prefers different channels. Platinum Elite members are, first of all, likely to complete a profile, which helps provide context. But that profile is also being developed with every check-in. With every request, that interaction is captured. And so that information is there before the customer even arrives at the hotel.

And Marriott plans that. The staff knows at the beginning of every day who the Platinum Elite guests will be. Some of them even recognize those individuals and remember something about them and greet them by name when they come in. If you’ve stayed at the hotel before, they welcome you back.

At the process level, of course, Marriott is doing the right things. It has reports and procedures, and it can figure out room assignments and make sure people get the right room and the right benefits and the right welcome gifts when they walk in. And they can know that I’m allergic to feather pillows and prefer foam. That I want extra towels.

Part of how Marriott is able to provide this experience is through training. Staff members are trained to make sure that the Platinum Elite guests are given a unique kind of experience. So how does that work for the average Platinum Elite member? Well in fact, J.D. Power has given Marriott some really good rankings across the board—not just the flagship Marriott brand, but also a value brand like Springhill Suites. J.D. Power has listed them as number one for their upscale segment in 2012. Even the Marriott Ritz-Carlton brand has won top luxury category for the third or fourth year in a row. And one of the ways they do this is they actually create different types of experience, and that happens because of context.

The Marriott experience is really about empowering an entire organization. It’s basically trying to do Zingerman’s approach at scale. Imagine doing that even more at scale in a digital world. This would be beyond reservation teams. This is every single travel site that’s out there, plugging into the Marriott experience. Marriott is trying to carry their authentic brand to people who are not even customers.

To do that, housekeeping, reservation, food service—every department—has to deliver the same high level of customer experience. And they have to have a level of context to understand how to do this in the same way that Jenna, the Zingerman’s employee, was able to do.

Marriott’s Platinum Elite status is basically a marketing program that represents the business. It’s about Marriott’s “way,” their spirit to serve. And the entire organization knows that Platinum is the code for doing whatever it takes within a wide set of boundaries—taking that context and personalizing it. Because when a person decides to spend money with Marriott, every staff member, whoever they are—whatever the interaction or engagement—must be there to serve. They should be there to provide that personalized experience. And context is how they get there.

So where does that take us? We need to think about ways to engage with context. And this engagement map, this journey map in the digital world is actually what’s being successfully delivered in a digital world. This journey map is what helps a business be authentic. And what we want to do is engage with context for what is termed right-time relevancy.

There are nine things to get you there, what I call the “nine Cs.”

The first three Cs encompass what we call people-centric values. These are things like delivery and communication styles and right-time contextual drivers. These values involve trying to understand what our customers seek. We’re trying to understand the culture, the community, the credibility. We’re trying to listen in. This is the sense piece in sense and respond. The first three Cs of developing context with customers include:

• Culture. What are the norms? What are the communication preferences? What are the global outlooks? What preferences and styles does the customer bring at the moment of engagement? How can we best sense those kinds of cultural cues?
• Community. This is about segmenting customers based on internal and external points of view, right? External communities could be customers, partners, suppliers, or influencers. Internal communities could include employees, the board of directors, contract workers. But ultimately these are different groups of people. These could also be arranged by family. These could also be arranged by other segmentation models. And so community is really the segmentation model that’s here.
• Credibility. How do we represent trust? Where do influence and reputation and records and authority and appearance come into place? Because effective communications do require credibility, which we’ll talk about.

The second set of Cs is around delivery and communication styles. Here, what we’re trying to figure out is, What have we learned that determines how we will communicate? What channels do we go into? What content do we deliver? How often in terms of cadence do we get in? We know this based on our assessment of the people-centric values. This is the infrastructure that allows us to respond. The three communication styles are:

• Channel. What do we engage with? Today’s channels are anything from in-person interactions to kiosks to the web to social media to mobile phones. The question is, How do we map these channels to what customers expect? Ultimately, customers don’t care what channels you’re in. They only care about the channels they are in. This goes back to the analog example where customers didn’t care what department you were in. Basically, they’re engaging with you, and that’s all that matters.
• Content. So now that they’re in front of you, what are you delivering to help them to engage successfully? Content is the information, what we’re delivering. It could be internal, user generated, repurposed, or paid news analysis. Ultimately, we’re delivering content. So what are the results and byproducts of these interactions with customers? And how can they be used not just once, but repeatedly?
• Cadence. This describes when or how often you plan to engage. Cadence can be ad hoc. It can be scheduled or designed as part of an experience, or it can be continuous. For example, designed cadence occurs when you buy a new electronic or mobile device or product, and on day one, the provider sends you a new tip: “Come register with us.” On day two, the provider might say, “Hey, have you tried this feature yet?” On day three, the provider asks, “Do you want to share something that you know with a friend?” Cadence is the frequency and manner in which you engage.

So we’ve got the people-centric values—the culture, community, and credibility. And we have the delivery and communication styles, which are channel, content, and cadence. Now you have the tools to actually deliver what you’re going to do next. This is where the right-time contextual drivers—context, catalyst, and currency—come in. These are the elements that will set you up to create meaningful interactions, meaningful engagement. It’s where we get the call to action.

• Context. This is the relevancy. It’s where we’re drawing on the network through relationships and roles. It’s where we’re going back to time, location, and business process. But ultimately, context is built on the fact that we sense the people-centric values. We know what channels and context and cadence to deliver to. And so context is where we ask, What is the appropriate path?
• Catalyst. Here’s where we have the call to action. The catalyst is what inspires action and response. Catalysts egg you on to do something: whether to show up, whether to respond, whether to participate in a loyalty program, whether to look at an advertisement. But catalysts have to appeal to the customer’s self-interest, values, and styles. The basic question here is, How do we improve engagement with context? This is how we make things relevant. And so the catalyst is that offer that gets you to respond, hopefully in a positive way.
• Currency. Currency is the actual influence mechanism. How will we exchange value and influence behavior? Monetary incentives include cash, bonuses, rewards, and rebates. Nonmonetary currencies could be knowledge, virtual goods, recognition, access, or influence. Right? How do customers get rewarded for engagement? We did some studies with a client where we had fifty new banking associates that came in with salaries of $250,000. They were given the option to take a $50,000 bonus, spend a day with the CEO, have a mentor that they’d meet with once a month, work on a special project, or do a volunteer activity once a month that they could take the day off for. Ultimately, only two took the money. These other factors, in terms of access and influence, were much more important to the other forty-eight employees than just cash. So you can actually see where monetary and nonmonetary incentives play a role.

No matter how we get there and how we engage, ultimately, context plays a huge role in getting to right-time relevancy. The more we can rely on context, the more we can actually deliver on an authentic business.