How Chick-fil-A Gets Their Young Workforce to Deliver a World-Class Customer Experience
Stop Blaming the Younger Workforce
The most common complaint I get from my audiences and consulting clients is about how bad the young labor force is and how this generation doesn’t want to work hard. I cannot disagree more. I also believe this is a crutch many leaders use to avoid building a better employee culture and a strong recruiting and onboarding experience.
Great CX Companies like The Ritz-Carlton and Chick-fil-A Hire from the Exact Same Labor Force
If the younger generation is so poor, then how do brands like The Ritz-Carlton, Chick-fil-A, Apple, Starbucks, Nordstrom, and John Robert’s Spa consistently produce a consistently excellent customer experience with the same generation?
“Our ladies & gentlemen come from the exact same labor force, background,
and quality of life as our competitor’s labor pool. We’re not paying a premium;
we pay the same as others in our industry. It’s really what we do when they join our family.
We create guidelines for how our people are to perform.”
– The Ritz-Carlton Hotels
Competency Can Be Taught; Character and Chemistry Cannot
Competency is a critical part of Chick-fil-A’s recipe, but it is not the first priority in their selection process. Most companies start with competency. However, competency can be taught, and in many customer-interacting positions, you can find hundreds of employees with similar skill sets. Chick-fil-A chooses to prioritize character and chemistry over competency, and it begins with a conversation.
During the interview process, Chick-fil-A likes to focus on asking questions such as “Why do you want to do this?” The what and the how are elementary, but the candidate’s “why” is where authenticity is revealed. After the initial interview, Chick-fil-A takes the strategy even deeper, testing whether this person wants to do this job and whether existing employees want the potential candidate to be their colleague. They use experiential interviews toward the end to put them in a restaurant and observe them, as well as giving them time to shadow existing employees, so the candidate can really see what this job is like and, even more importantly, get a feel for if it is truly right for them. And vice versa.
*Related – Interviewing for Customer Experience Rockstars
How Chick-fil-A Gets Their Young Workforce to Deliver a World-Class Experience
Chick-fil-A says its service is so consistent because it invests more than other companies in training its employees and helping them advance their careers—regardless of whether those careers are in fast food. The company genuinely cares about creating emotional bonds with its employees.
Leaders are encouraged to ask their new hires about their career goals and try to help them achieve them. “Do you know the dreams of your team?” leaders are constantly asked. For Kevin Moss, a Chick-fil-A manager of over 20 years, supporting his team has meant funding an employee’s marketing degree and paying another worker to take photography classes. Moss says he also tries to support his employees in times of need. For example, if an employee’s family member is in the hospital, he will send food to the family and hospital staff. “I’ve found people are more motivated and respond better when you care about them,” Moss told Business Insider. Another strong example of the phrase “being human is good business.”
Better Training
This best-in-class customer experience–leading company also offers leadership positions in all its restaurants, with higher pay and greater responsibilities. Crew members can work toward “director” positions in marketing, cleanliness, kitchen operations, and drive-thru operations. “The better we train, the longer people stay with us,” Moss says. It is a smart strategy focused on bringing out the best in people so that the best can then be offered.
How are certain businesses able to scale and still maintain business excellence for their customers and their employees? One of our favorite leaders we have worked with is Ryan Magnon, senior principal operations lead at Chick-fil-A corporate. Ryan has an amazing hospitality pedigree, having worked with two of the biggest hospitality legends: Horst Schulze, cofounder of The Ritz-Carlton, and Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A. Ryan shares some valuable insights into the amazing cultures he has worked in.
Quality Attracts Quality
“It’s not just about going out and finding great team members. It’s starting with a nucleus of quality leaders. When leaders identify with the company values, they are more likely to create an environment for their team members and attract team members that also value that,” says Magnon.
Once You Become a Leader, You Lose the Right to Make Excuses
This is one of my favorite quotes we learned from Ryan: “Horst Schulze told me, ‘Once you become a leader, all responsibility for results is yours, regardless of the reason for those results.’” Magnon’s spin on that is “When you transition from being a team member to being a leader, you go from being cared for to being the one who cares for within an organization. You are now responsible for other people and for making sure things are done the right way. Responsibility doesn’t fall to the team member—it rises to the leader. Who selected them, oriented them, trained them, or determines the best role they should be in? The leader.”
Chick-fil-A Is America’s Favorite Restaurant . . . Again
When CEOs find out that we have consulted with Chick-fil-A, the first question they always ask is, “How do they get 19-year-old kids to be so amazing at customer service?”
Chick-fil-A has been ranked America’s number one favorite restaurant 10 years in a row by consumers, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Even though customers said they prefer full-service restaurants over fast food, that didn’t stop customer service leader Chick-fil-A from receiving the highest overall score in the ACSI restaurant survey (which included full-service and fast food).
The Customer Experience Is Powered by the Employee Experience
Among national chains, we can look to Chick-fil-A’s business model to see why it’s an industry leader in the restaurant business, year after year. It goes beyond basics such as food quality, restaurant cleanliness, and speed of service. It’s about far more than chicken sandwiches. Chick-fil-A knows there is a direct correlation between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction.
Training employees to deliver superior customer service begins with higher standards in employee selection. This means choosing people with high character and those who exhibit chemistry with existing employees, investing in their training, offering leadership positions, and even supporting their goals outside their Chick-fil-A roles. This approach attracts and retains great talent, leads to frictionless customer experience, inspires customer loyalty, and keeps the company in the top spot as a leader in customer satisfaction.
Why Chick-fil-A Is One of the Most Loved Brands
You know you have a good business problem when, due to the huge demand for your services, the cities in which you operate are trying to declare a public nuisance because of traffic backups due to the expectations of a stellar customer service experience! Such is the case for multiple cities in which Chick-fil-A operates.
After all these years, Chick-fil-A restaurants are getting better, and Chick-fil-A is becoming a brand more and more customers truly can’t live without, one for which many a new guest becomes a customer for life.
Emotional Connections
How does the company create these consumer perceptions and emotional connections? Why does such a high percentage of consumers not only choose but love this brand? Over the past two decades, it has had its share of obstacles—from explosive growth, which is usually a customer experience killer, to the Great Recession, the pandemic, and the founders’ controversial opinion on same-sex marriages. Regardless of all of this, the one thing that can’t be ignored is the incredible success and positive sentiment the brand continues to enjoy and what other organizations can learn from it.
The average Chick-fil-A freestanding restaurant (non-mall unit) generates more than $8 million in sales annually, a 54 percent growth over the past five years. With only 2,700 locations, Chick-fil-A generates more total sales than any chain outside of McDonald’s and Starbucks. However, Chick-fil-A makes more per restaurant than McDonald’s, Subway, and Starbucks combined, even while being closed on Sunday. With such amazing statistics generated by its loyal customers, merely calling it a successful brand would be a huge understatement.
The image above shows the correlation between Chick-fil-A’s best-in-class net promoter score and the overall sales growth of the best-in-class same-store.
Keys to Success
Even as the demand for Chick-fil-A is at an all-time high, this private restaurant will only grow at a pace that ensures it won’t jeopardize the brand experience. This is one of the keys to its success and distinct brand personality. It could grow ten times faster. However, Chick-fil-A’s rigorous selection process for its owner/operators and obsession with its operational excellence, customer experience, and employee culture will not allow it to compromise any of those factors for more units and higher sales.
Chick-fil-A is meticulous about whom they select to run their restaurants (operators and team leaders) and work in their restaurants (team members). Chick-fil-A’s selection process for its operators (aka franchisees) is among the most impressive in any comparison. The company receives about 20,000 applications annually for franchises and only awards about a hundred new stores annually. How many institutions do you know have a 0.5 percent acceptance rate? Harvard University’s acceptance rate hovers around 5 percent—about ten times higher than Chick-fil-A’s. Even Bain & Company’s acceptance rate for 60,000 or so recent college grads who applied for a job last year ran just under 2 percent, reinforcing just how picky Chick-fil-A is in selecting its store operators.
Do Not Go Out Looking for Great Talent; Become a Great Talent Magnet
One of Chick-fil-A’s keys to building a world-class brand is that they don’t go out and find great talent; great talent finds them. Quality attracts quality, and quality has a community impact. Chick-fil-A’s widespread reputation for offering a world-class customer experience ensures that potential candidates who are only looking for paychecks, those who neither want to be held to a higher standard nor are concerned about making a positive impact, are filtered out.
Amazing Leaders
Chick-fil-A places tremendous importance on selecting amazing leaders. One of their primary decision filters for making informed decisions when selecting the best leaders is asking: “Is this someone who cares about others and will pour genuine love and care into their team? And is this someone I would want my child to work for?” Also, is it apparent that these values are part of this potential employee’s lifestyle outside the workplace?
When the core team of leaders (operators and their top directors) consists of these kinds of people, great talent gets interested. So many companies view recruiting and talent as if it’s “throw out the line and drag in the fish”; however, better yet, what if that fish wants to jump into the boat? Magnets attract, and when you start with a quality core of leaders, quality is reeled in.
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