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Treat Your CustomersThirty Lessons on Service and Sales That I Learned at My Family’s Dairy Queen Store By Bob Miglani Published by Hyperion, 2006 ISBN 1401301983 Introduction When Bob

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Treat Your Customers

Thirty Lessons on Service and Sales That I Learned

at My Family’s Dairy Queen Store

By Bob Miglani

Published by Hyperion, 2006

ISBN 1401301983

Introduction

When Bob Miglani was growing up, he spent every

summer working at his family’s Dairy Queen store

At the time, it was mostly just a fun summer job

Now, looking back, he realizes those summers

be-hind the Dairy Queen counter were laying a

founda-tion for his future in the corporate world

Mastering the techniques his family used to

serve and sell ice cream provided him with

indis-pensable knowledge on the value of exceptional

customer service And he picked up more than a

few techniques that served him well as an

execu-tive with a Fortune 500 company

Whether dealing with customers, suppliers,

employees, peers or his managers, something from

the DQ experience invariably came in handy And

he’s still growing, returning to the store many

weekends to dish out ice cream and keep learning

about customer service

Here are some lessons

1 They’re Not Just Customers –

They’re People

On a particularly hot summer day, one of the DQ

employees, Mike, was serving a man who looked

as if he was in his mid-30s The air conditioner

was on high, but with all the serving windows

open, the heat was seeping in A car alarm went

off in the parking lot and the noise continued for

about 10 minutes As Mike was putting some of the sundae cups into the customer’s bag, he mut-tered, “What’s up with that guy — doesn’t he know how to turn off his alarm?”

The customer gave him a dirty look “That’s my father and he’s having a little trouble with his car,”

he said Mike’s faced drained completely of colour

It was clear he felt terrible about making the com-ment It could have been anybody’s father out there trying to turn off the car alarm

Too often we forget that the people coming into our store or business are more than just consumers who drive our revenues They’re people with feel-ings, hopes and problems just like the rest of us

By labeling anyone who walks into our store simply

a client or a consumer, we’re masking reality

By removing some of the words we use like

“client” or “consumer” we remove the wall between

“them” and “us.” Without a wall to separate us, we’re more able to treat them like real people That results in their liking us even more, and hopefully becoming loyal customers

Treat them well It’s not only good manners, it’s good for business

2 Know Their Names and Their Favorite Flavors

In some industries, customers who frequent the business are known as “big fish,” heavy hitters” or

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“whales.” At Miglani’s Dairy Queen they’re simply

called “regulars.” Those regulars are important

be-cause their purchasing habits make up a large

percent-age of the business

Over the years, his mother has gotten to know

many of the regulars She knows their names, where

they work, the ages of their kids and their favorite

fla-vors of ice cream

“Karen likes to get three large lemon-lime Mr Misty

drinks, while Steve and his family prefer chocolate milk

shakes every Sunday,” she’ll tell staff

That attention to returning customers has a direct

effect on sales For example, a woman in her mid-60s

came into the store one day and ordered a small hot

fudge sundae with mint chocolate chip ice cream

Over the course of three to four months, she would

come in on Sunday afternoon every few weeks,

allow-ing Miglani’s mom to become familiar with what she

liked One day, his mother saw the woman get out of

her car and had the sundae ready for her before she

even had a chance to order After that, the lady began

coming in once a week

Over time, his mother not only got to know her

name, but those of her grandkids and their friends as

well The lady’s grandkids joined a soccer team that

liked to celebrate when they won a game Guess where

they came? That Dairy Queen

Customers become regulars partly because you

know their names and buying habits Sure, they might

be regulars because they like your product or your

convenient location, but by remembering their faces

and what they like, you get a little closer to them,

mak-ing them more comfortable with you and your

busi-ness By taking the time to get to know your

cus-tomers and treat them like human beings, you build a

bond That bond is rewarded with customer loyalty

and frequent purchases

3 Don’t Make Them Wait

Today’s business environment is fast-paced The

typi-cal customer is harried and expects goods and

servic-es to be provided quickly The first thing Miglani’s

fami-ly teaches each of their employees is that they should

be constantly aware of a new customer walking into

the store The second is that no customer should have

to wait to be served

Too often when you go into a coffee shop or a

clothing store in the mall, you see lots of people work-ing but only one or two people at the checkout counter waiting on a long line of customers The store’s man-agers are basically allowing customers who are ready

to give them money to wait in long lines That makes

no sense It’s annoying and frustrating, and most of the time it will leave the customer with a negative feeling towards the business

A favorite Friday-night ritual for Bob Miglani and his wife was going out for a pizza and ice cream Liv-ing in New York City, they had many restaurant

choic-es but preferred a small pizza place in lower Manhat-tan and an equally small ice cream shop near a university neighborhood The people working in the ice cream shop were in their early 20s and blended nicely with the local students

The ice cream was great but the servers talked among themselves while they were serving customers One night, as a young lady was scooping his ice cream, she was in the middle of a conversation with her co-worker, who was doing nothing It took her longer to fill up the ice cream cup because she was fo-cused on the conversation instead of serving the cus-tomer After having a few more similar negative experi-ences, the Miglanis stopped going there Even though the ice cream was delicious, it wasn’t worth the time it took to get it

The primary job of a business is to sell something

to its customers Everything else — the cleaning, the organizing, the stocking, etc — is also important but not the real reason you open your business You open the door each day to serve the people who come into your store

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So do just that Every employee should be capable,

trained and ready to serve customers from the first day

on the job Sure, they’re training and need to be shown

how to do it right But don’t have five employees in the

store and only two of them serving customers with a

long line — have them all manning the cash registers to

get the customers on their way

4 Once in a While, Taste Your

Own Ice Cream

Before his family bought its own Dairy Queen, Miglani

spent a summer working at a neighboring outlet

Bar-bara, the tall blonde 50-year-old owner, was teaching

him how to make the strawberry topping one day

There really wasn’t much to it — you opened up the big

red container of pre-made strawberry topping and

added a touch of strawberry flavoring to give it a

sweeter taste and richer color When she asked him to

get a spoon so she could try it herself, he didn’t know

what to think

She said it needed more flavoring, so he added it

Seeing his puzzled expression, she explained that she

liked to taste everything she made in the store, and

sometimes even the things she didn’t make, like the

hard ice cream or the milk shake Her philosophy was

that if it wasn’t good enough for the owner, then it

was-n’t good enough for the customer

Once in a while, you’ve got to taste the ice cream

— whether you make it yourself or not Whether you

sell food, clothing, pots and pans, cars, toothbrushes

or services, you’ve got to sample your own products to

make sure they live up to the promise you’re making to

customers And this isn’t just about the products It’s

also about the outward appearance of your store and

the customer service provided by your staff

It’s good business practice to go on the front lines

occasionally It not only helps you get a flavor for the

business, but also gives employees a sense that

there’s someone in the corporate office who actually

cares Knowing the leadership of the company is in

touch with the realities of the business also builds

em-ployee confidence

5 If They Ask for a Medium Cone,

Give Them a Medium Cone

While training employees at the Dairy Queen, the

Miglani family has them weigh each cone for a short

time on a small scale rather than just measuring the serving size by the height of the ice cream A few weeks and a few hundred cones later, a server gets used to making a small, medium or large cone at the right weight without having to weigh it on the scale It’s not a perfect science but it’s as precise as they can get with that kind of product

Customers don’t know about business policies or procedures and don’t really care how things are done behind the scenes They just want the medium cone they ordered to look as close as possible to the one they got yesterday or the one the guy in front of them got That’s it Whether you’re operating a small busi-ness or a large one, you must satisfy customers in a consistent way on a daily basis

Business gurus preach about doing things

differ-ently all the time and it is good to do things differdiffer-ently.

But if you can’t deliver your product or service with the same consistency, what good is novelty? Don’t try

to do something extraordinary that you can’t deliver each and every time

6 Never Forget the Plain Old Vanilla

In the early 1990s, the Miglanis started getting a lot of competition from new ice cream retailers such as TCBY and Ben & Jerry’s Not only did those purveyors offer innovative flavors of ice cream, they also sold frozen yogurt, a new product that really took the market

by storm Flavors like chocolate chip cookie dough, fudge brownie and screwy strawberry were big hits

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Four out of 10 customers would ask for frozen yogurt

or one of those wild flavors

And while Dairy Queen restaurants were well

es-tablished and had been around for over 50 years,

they just hadn’t kept up with the market as well as

their smaller and much nimbler competition They

weren’t as inventive with their flavors as their rapidly

changing customer base wanted So they brought in

frozen yogurt and some new treats like the DQ

Bliz-zard, a blend of soft-serve ice cream and ingredients

like candies or cookies Although the Blizzard treat

was a hit, they still weren’t growing as fast as the

new guy on the block

Miglani’s youngest sister, being an impressionable

teenager at the time, would drive the rest of the family

crazy asking them to expand their variety of flavors to

reflect what she thought were the hot new trends They

ended up ordering many of the hot new flavors that

were popular with customers her age, and they sold

well for a few months, but not as well as hoped

In fact, one summer weekend they had so much

in-ventory of these new flavors that they simply forgot to

order a new supply of plain old vanilla And wouldn’t

you know it — vanilla was the most demanded flavor

that weekend But they were out of it!

No matter how “hot” a new flavor might be, most

people just want vanilla Nobody talks about those

crazy flavors anymore In fact, Dairy Queen has

discon-tinued frozen yogurt from most of its stores in the

Unit-ed States due to lack of consumer demand Yet over

the decades Miglani has been in the DQ business,

vanilla and chocolate have never been out of the top

five flavors served at Dairy Queens

You should never lose sight of the product or

serv-ice that’s at the heart of your business It’s what your

business is known for and what people associate with

your brand — and what brings in the most revenue

Sure, you’ve got to try new things based on trends and

customer needs, but don’t forget about your cash cow:

the plain old vanilla

Conclusion

Although you may not be serving ice cream cones, each day you have the same opportunity to benefit your business by following the lessons Bob Miglani learned at Dairy Queen e

A BOUT THE A UTHOR : Bob Miglani is senior director of public affairs for a Fortune 500 company.

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