Why Michel Roux Jr won’t help you improve your service

Michel Roux’s new TV series, Service, tells the story of his efforts to train eight young people to serve customers to the highest standard.  The first episode recounts their introduction to the basics, especially presentation and attitude.   While they are reasonably well turned out, attitude is an obstacle for many of them.  Naturally their first effort at service shows their inexperience and youth, as well as their struggles to work as a team at this early stage in their training.  This makes for entertaining reality TV.

Yet while the commentators will no doubt focus on the more shocking spectacles in the show – the young man who swears, the underconfident teens in tears, the desperate failures of their first service efforts – there is a related issue that is not front-of-show: the use of systems to deliver great service.

A system is a deliberately designed set of procedures or operations to produce a planned outcome.  There is no doubt that Roux knows all about systems – his maitre d’ says to the trainees at the end of the programme “I gave you my system, and you didn’t use it”.  Roux describes the performance of his waiting staff at la Gavroche as “like ballerinas” – in other words, working in a choreographed way, to a plan.  He also describes the outcomes – the service times and standards – but it would be intriguing to know what system he uses to achieve them.

Roux may never let us in on the real secret of his current system.  However, this is not necessarily an impediment to those who want to produce service like his, because each customer environment will need a specific system designed for their particular resources and their intended customer experience.  The ideal system will produce the standard of service intended – in terms of service times and accuracy – virtually every time.  Errors and failures against the standard should ideally be measured in terms of times per million interactions.  However, in the worst service environments it is unfortunately more meaningful to talk about errors for every dozen interactions.  A well designed system would change this.

If this ideal sounds unrealistic, consider the dabbawala, a food delivery service in India where around 5000 “dabbawalas” carry around 200,000 lunches per day from the homes where they are made to the correct recipients at their work places.  They have been found to make fewer than one mistake per six million deliveries.  Moreover this is done without the benefit of IT systems or complicated management structures.  Instead, the service relies on a very simple but effective system of codings and procedures to provide their service.  For more about this exemplary business, see http://www.mumbaidabbawala.org/index.html.

Of course, the specific procedures – how to load and unload trays in the 20 second window while a train stops at a station, for example – are not going to be relevant to most businesses.  What is very relevant is this – the dabbawallahs have discovered ways of working that allow them – within the considerable constraints of their environment – to deliver and collect lunch tiffins with the utmost accuracy and timeliness over an enormous geographical area at very low cost.

So how can you design a service process that delivers to such a high standard?  The design process itself is in fact a cycle of continual learning and improvement.  It works like this:

1. Decide on the standard you will aim to achieve – for the dabbawallahs, this is 100% accuracy of delivery during the lunch timeframe, but yours will depend on your customers’ expectations and desires
2. Map out your current process and measure the standard it delivers in practice
3. Experiment with changes to these procedures – one at a time – and repeatedly observe and measure to find those that bring you closer to your standard
4. Decide which new procedural steps you want to adopt permanently
5. Train everyone involved to the new procedures
6. Go back to step 2 and keep going through the cycle until you have achieved your standard consistently through the system you have designed.  At that point, consider whether you want a new standard.

Figure 1: The Process Improvement Cycle

This sounds simple – but it has very significant consequences for management.  What this approach requires is a change of managerial approach from the bureaucratic (making sure everyone follows procedures) to a more holistic, scientific style.  Management responsibility expands to include all those steps that lead up to the agreement of procedures, as well as ensuring they are then followed.

Will Michel Roux reveal to us how he developed his world class restaurant service to the standard he achieves today?  Of course not – it probably counts as a trade secret, and in any case the antics of the young people make for much more entertaining viewing.  But if he did, it would probably do more to change the levels of service that our businesses achieve than any number of prime time reality TV shows.