Walking the walk

An Irishman’s Diary on the gulf between management jargon and real life

In Starbucks cafes, apparently, staff have a daily ritual called the “Values Walk”. I think it’s an actual walk, around the floor, although I’m not entirely sure on this point because, according to a company checklist somebody tweeted me yesterday, it’s also described as a “tool”.

In any case, whether it’s a walk or a tool, or both, the aim is to “evaluate how your store looks and feels from the point of view of the customer”.

The checklist, or “Knowledge Check” as it’s headed, takes the form of a catechism, with questions and answers to remind staff of priorities. Here, for example, in an even more spectacular piece of management guff, is the inevitable bit about customer service vision:

“What is our Customer Service Vision, including the Pillars? Answer: We create inspired moments in each customer’s day. Anticipate, Connect, Personalise, and Own.”

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Those last four verbs, I’m guessing, are the “Pillars”, although I don’t know what they mean, or why a vision needs pillars. If you want a clear view of the customers, after all, surely you need to keep pillars to a minimum? They must be a nuisance during the Values Walk too.

Another item on the checklist reminds me of an occasion, some years ago, when I was waylaid in Bewley’s by a market researcher asking me to rate my customer experience on a five-point scale.

I took the task seriously, agonising over such issues as whether I was “highly satisfied” with my almond bun, or merely “satisfied”, because when you start thinking about such things, it brings up deeper questions about yourself – the extent to which you are too hard to please, for example – and indeed about philosophy in general.

Is being “highly satisfied” a sustainable situation, I wondered, or should a cafe not settle for keeping a customer merely “satisfied” – avoiding the destructive cycle of highs, followed inexorably by lows, that only adds to human suffering?

But now I see from the Starbucks checklist that the question is not even up for debate. The difference between a customer being “satisfied” and “highly satisfied”, the document claims, is a likely two-fold increase in return custom, and a three-fold increase in recommendations to others. So the surveyed customers tell them, anyway, although I would argue that if you’re the sort of person who claims to be “highly satisfied”, you’re going to exaggerate about everything else too.

On a completely different subject, meanwhile, I must admit I had never heard of the splendidly named American writer Raphael Aloysius Lafferty before this week. And I’m hearing about him now only because, had he not died earlier this century, he would have been 100 today.

His books had a devoted cult, I gather. But his relative obscurity may be explained by the fact that he wrote in a minority genre, and even within that had a sub-genre all his own. Or as one summary puts it, his books were science fiction, “at least nominally”.

Their quirky humour was in part borrowed from the Irish ancestry that explains two thirds of his name (the other bit, "Raphael", came from the saint on whose feast day he was expected, being retained even when he was born two weeks late). It was also influenced by the story-telling of Native Americans, in which he took a big interest. In fact one of his departures from science fiction was a novel called Okla Hannali, which told the tale of a Choctaw Indian before and after the infamous "Choctaw Trail of Tears". The latter was a series of enforced migrations, involving not just the Choctaws but several other tribes, in the early 1830s.

They had lost their homelands under the Indian Removal Act, which gave them a choice between assimilation in the expanding US, or relocation to reservations in “Indian Territory”, now Oklahoma.

Choosing, in the words of one of their leaders, to “suffer and be free” rather than live under laws they had no say in, they trekked hundreds of miles in terrible conditions throughout the winter of 1831. Many died along the way. But the survivors went on to achieve immortal fame in this country when, in 1847, they collected $170 dollars and sent it across the Atlantic for famine relief.

This astonishing gesture from people themselves impoverished is commemorated by a plaque in Dublin’s Mansion House. It has also led to the participation by some of their descendants in the smaller, now-annual trek between Louisburgh and Doolough in Co Mayo, which commemorates a Famine tragedy. And that, I suggest, is what you call a Values Walk.

@FrankmcnallyIT