Blog Posts

Open Book Management was a brand-new concept to me just four months ago. I hopped on the ZingTrain in October 2018 as the next-generation ZingTrain Concierge, a position responsible for coordinating ZingTrain's public seminars and workshops here in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In addition to that, I report on, forecast and track ZingTrain’s public sales numbers at our weekly huddle. (What is a huddle?, you may ask. Learn all about huddles here!)

How do you welcome new hires into your organization? Do you hand them a uniform and point them in the general direction of the front counter? Do you have them attend several days of classroom training before they ever talk to a customer? Do they learn about your organization’s history and vision from someone in leadership? Or do they get their information from the disgruntled employees out on the back dock?

Back in 2007, when Zingerman’s wrote Zingerman’s 2020 Vision describing what the business would look like in the year 2020, we wrote that “we [Zingerman’s] have successfully quantified fun, measured fun, and improved our fun factor by at least 380% since 2007. We actively teach people how to have fun at work. We have games to increase the volume of fun we experience and reward ourselves with added fun.”  

We all know service is important—right?  We’d be surprised if there were a company left in the US which hasn’t incorporated some version of “the customer is always right” into its employee handbook.  Every politician and business leader can quote statistics about the pros and cons of the relentless move towards a “service economy.” And service is the topic most requested by clients who want ZingTrain to speak or work with their organization.  On the other hand, many people feel that the level of customer service that they receive as customers is lower than ever.

What does a truly great customer experience look like? We spend a lot of time thinking about this at Zingerman’s. In fact, we actively measure the customer experience  by way of the Zingerman’s Experience Indicator (ZXI), which is our adaptation of the more commonly known Net Promoter Score. As Ari explains in this article, “the ZXI has provided a measurement tool to help us track and stay more focused on how well we raise every customer’s experience to a level of greatness. Briefly, the measure tracks customer response to the one ultimate question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, (10 being high), would you recommend Zingerman’s to a friend?” Nines and 10's are considered promoters, 7's and 8's are neutrals, and anyone who scores 6 or below is deemed a detractor.”

When the holiday season rolls around, most of us have the 'Busy Dial' turned up to 10, or even 20 on some days.

For those of us who sell specialty products, customer education has always been part of the selling process.  Sometimes we’re offering products that most customers have never heard of. Other times we have items with familiar names but vastly superior ingredients or construction. Almost always the prices that we charge are higher than what is being charged somewhere else in our market for something that can SEEM to be the same thing. Our success depends upon customers understanding the differences between our products and the competition’s.

Do you like handling customer complaints? Why or why not?

We are big believers in visioning at Zingerman’s. We’ve seen firsthand how it can improve our organization and the personal lives of those who use the vision process.

When business owners run into challenges that they’re not sure how to address—or know they can’t resolve on their own—they often start looking outside their organizations for expertise and resources.  Two common places to look are consultants and trainers.