At the 2001 annual Chick-fil-A Operators seminar, Truett stood in front of all nine hundred restaurant Operators along with their spouses and most of the home office staff and made a request that would transform Chick-fil-A.
He began by telling a story about a trip to a Ritz-Carlton Hotel. He told the audience that when he thanked someone for their assistance, the employee would smile and respond, “My pleasure.”
Truett liked the sound of that and the connection he felt with the person who helped him. He shared those two words and how the accompanying smile stayed in his thoughts for days. It was a nice way of telling someone that you were pleased to serve them.
Then he challenged Operators to respond with “my pleasure” instead of “you’re welcome” or “no problem” whenever a customer thanked them. Let people know we enjoyed serving them. He believed those two words, my pleasure, would remind us and our customers that we really did take pleasure in serving. “You can’t say ‘my pleasure’ without looking them in the eye,” he said, and eye contact leads to a personal connection.
I wish I could say we all immediately took up the call. A few Operators accepted Truett’s challenge, but most of them, as well as those of us in the home office, didn’t give it serious thought.
Operators work under enormous operational pressure, and I could feel their body language saying, Do you really want me to do these touchy-feely things, all these personal connection things? I’m trying to turn and burn, baby. I’m trying to get the orders accurate, bagged, and out the door, or get them through the drive-thru. You want me to do what? How is that going to drive my sales?
Truett reminded them, “People come to restaurants even when they’re not hungry. They just want the experience.”
A year later, at our 2002 Operator seminar, Truett renewed his request for “my pleasure,” and a few more Operators put it into practice. Finally, in 2003, Truett’s son Dan realized how serious Truett was, and he began to incorporate the phrase into his own vocabulary while encouraging others to do the same. “As I began to incorporate that phrase and that attitude into my vocabulary,” Dan said, “it dawned on me that this could be a service signature for us, almost like two pickles on a sandwich. If it could be that consistent across the chain, then it would make a tremendous impact on customers.”
In the Chick-fil-A annual message that year, Truett and Dan cowrote a leadership message titled, “My Pleasure”:
“My Pleasure” is more than just an operating standard and more than just a personal request. “My Pleasure” is an expression from the heart where team members, Operators, or staff members literally show that they want to go the extra mile—that they truly care about the other person. They have enough value in the other person to exceed expectations.
It was a transformative moment for Chick-fil-A that would strengthen our “Blue Ocean Strategy” space—that place where we were operating without competition or where competition was irrelevant. Truett (and Dan) Cathy, with the simple challenge to say “my pleasure,” was charting a course to a place where a warm greeting would infuse every Chick-fil-A restaurant and create a culture of genuine hospitality (more on this to come).
Another journey was about to begin.
Raving Fans Camping Out in Phoenix
Later in 2003, Dan experienced another personal-connection marketing event in Phoenix, Arizona, that would reveal to all of us the potential power of the Chick-fil-A brand to be really different.
We were opening our first freestanding restaurant in Phoenix after a few openings in California. As was our style, we were moving conservatively into new markets out West. Dan arrived on Wednesday morning for the Thursday morning opening. The prior week, one of our marketing associates, Tiffany Holland, who was already in Phoenix helping on preparations, had called Barry White in our department with an idea that might generate some publicity. Why not give away free Chick-fil-A for a year—fifty-two Be Our Guest cards for combo meals—to the first one hundred customers? Barry loved the idea, shared it with David Salyers, and when they brought it to me, I told them to go for it.
Tiffany was smart, aggressive, and good at buttoning down details. We were confident she could pull it off. So when Dan arrived the day before the grand opening, she told him about the idea. A little skeptical, Dan asked how it would work. He also wondered how people would know about the promotion. Tiffany explained that she had already gotten some good PR coverage through local radio, TV, and newspapers, including a local radio station partner. He liked that.
Tiffany walked away to take care of something, and about that time a man drove into the parking lot and asked Dan where the line started.
Dan said there wasn’t a line. The restaurant wasn’t open yet. He should come back on Thursday.
The man explained he had heard about the first one hundred customers promotion, and he didn’t want to miss it. He was going to stay all night.
Dan was giddy that a customer would be so determined and also concerned that the man would be sleeping in the parking lot alone all night. Moments later a woman arrived with a lawn chair, clearly intending to wait in what was now officially a line, and by nightfall a dozen more people arrived.
Nobody had taken this possibility into account. Dan found the store Operator and suggested he have somebody stay with the restaurant through the night so they could make sure everybody was safe and let the campers have access to the bathrooms.
At sunrise on Thursday morning, a news helicopter was circling overhead with the anchor reporting on live television, showing images of tents, lawn chairs, and more than a hundred customers waiting in line. Another local TV reporter arrived and interviewed some of the overnight campers for his morning news show. “Why would you stay out here all night long? How did you know about Chick-fil-A? It’s new to Phoenix.”
The answers were powerful, and the public relations impact exceeded anything we could have imagined. We counted up the coverage and realized we had received the equivalent of six figures’ worth of stories on TV, radio, and newspapers, not to mention social media from the campers themselves. Those campers suggested to us that the brand reached much deeper and wider into America than we knew, emotionally and personally.
Dan was meeting Chick-fil-A Raving Fans, and he believed they could play a crucial role in the future of the brand. He came back to the home office and described what he had seen, adding that the “First 100” must become a brand signature event at all Chick-fil-A grand openings. We certainly agreed with him.
This was a strategic store-opening shift in strategy that I strongly advocated. The history of Chick-fil-A had been to have “normal day” new-store openings (not too aggressive). The assumption was that the operational pressure of opening a new restaurant was difficult enough without generating large crowds. Another assumption was that sales would grow over time.
The data showed, however, that during the first three years, a new store’s strongest months would be the first three. More importantly, the data showed that the stronger the sales in the first three months, the healthier the sales long term. If we could maximize our grand opening traffic, the store could take advantage of all that activity, free publicity, and early customer trial to create momentum into the future.
The pushback: How do we prepare Operators and team members to serve two or three times the “normal day” customer traffic during their first ninety days in business?
Tiffany Holland’s initiative forced that conversation. We decided that we would continue with the First 100 promotion, opening new stores not just on the strength of the brand, but with rockets and flares declaring, “We are here! Not just in your city, but at this site!”
We sent operations and marketing teams to restaurants weeks in advance to help develop and orchestrate the grand opening plans. They helped select and train team members, gave away Chick-fil-A samples and Be Our Guest cards, and found other marketing opportunities. We sent media professionals to reach out to the community. And we sent in the Cows.
We now had to be ready for a big crowd the minute we opened the door, and that required a completely different level of staffing and training. There was no three-week ramp-up after a soft opening. From 6:00 a.m. on opening day, the whole thing was on steroids.
Raving Fan Strategy
The Phoenix experience with the first First 100 also stimulated our thinking about ways to identify and create more Raving Fans, a distinction that our friend Ken Blanchard embraced in his book Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service.
We began studying great contemporary brands and discovered common traits among their fans. If you build a great brand, three good outcomes occur:
• People will come more often.
• They’ll pay full price, because you’re delivering value beyond just the functional benefits.
• They’ll tell others about their experience with your brand.
By the way, they’ll not just tell others about how good their experience was; they’ll tell you if you’ve disappointed them, because they care that much.
Fred Reichheld, New York Times bestselling author and a business strategist with Bain & Company, helped guide us on that final descriptor of Raving Fans (telling others). Fred, who was named by the Economist “the high priest of loyalty,” based his book The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth on the fact that customer satisfaction can ultimately be measured by the question, “Would you recommend this business to a friend based on your experience today?” We surveyed customers and noted their answers on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a definite no and 10 being a definite yes. We categorized only those who gave us a 10 as Raving Fans—customers who most likely exhibited the three behaviors I mentioned above.
We knew Chick-fil-A had Raving Fans, because we had seen them. I had been calling them Brand Ambassadors. Could we develop a strategy that would create more Raving Fans? Every day, at every Chick-fil-A, not just at grand openings?
We reviewed our history and our current strengths and recognized three broad strategic categories of activities we had developed over the years that, all working together at a location, created Raving Fans:
• Executing Operational Excellence
• Delivering Second-Mile Service
• Activating Emotional Connections Marketing
Operational Excellence
Truett and Jimmy had insisted on operational excellence from the first day that the first Chick-fil-A restaurant opened. Then Truett had triggered our thinking toward Second-Mile Service with his request for “my pleasure.” And the Cows and personal engagement of our people and food had opened our eyes to the power of marketing that emotionally connected with our customers.
Building a comprehensive strategy around all three could amplify the power of each.
Operational excellence begins with the food. Truett opened his first Chick-fil-A restaurant in 1967 after other restaurants that had agreed to serve his new sandwich could not deliver the quality product he demanded. Fifty years after the first mall restaurant opened, Chick-fil-A still begins with fresh ingredients to serve crave-able food. The business has always been focused on fresh food and has consistently continued to improve on operational excellence. This was our first mile. It was the foundation the chain built its reputation on. You cannot deliver Second-Mile Service and have it be credible if there’s something wrong with the first mile: the food, the fundamental interaction with staff, the cleanliness, speed, or accuracy. It’s got to be right, or hospitality lacks credibility. This is the traditional focus of any restaurant, and Chick-fil-A strives to do it better than the others.
Second-Mile Service
As Truett and Dan wrote in their 2003 message to the Chick-fil-A family, “my pleasure” was an expression of the heart. That expression became the inspiration for Second-Mile Service throughout the Chick-fil-A chain.
Dan personally took the challenge to develop a model for hospitality by first helping define the opportunity. He looked into the origins of the phrase “go the second mile,” which appears in the Bible in Matthew 5:41. Jesus told His disciples, “If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles” (NIV). This was in the context of Jesus telling them to “love your enemies” and to “turn the other cheek.”
In those days of Roman occupation of Palestine, the law allowed a Roman soldier to compel a Jew to carry his pack for one mile, but no farther. Those forced into temporary servitude surely counted their steps and put down the pack as soon as they were legally allowed. Now this Jewish preacher was telling them to carry the soldier’s load a second mile as an act of kindness. The voluntary service could transform both the soldier and the servant by raising the obvious question—“Why would you do that?”—thus giving the follower of Christ an opportunity to share why he would see and serve the soldier as one of God’s creations. Why not treat all people who step into Chick-fil-A the same way, with honor, dignity, and respect? An unexpected second mile?
Dan then reached out to the Ritz-Carlton, which had been Truett’s inspiration. Aspiring brands learn from great brands, and in the hospitality industry there may not be a better brand than Ritz-Carlton. The Hôtel Ritz opened in Paris in 1898 and immediately earned a reputation for luxury, offering bathrooms en suite, telephones, and electricity in every room. Owner César Ritz was called “hotelier to kings and king of hoteliers” by Edward VII, who was a regular guest at Ritz’s Carlton Hotel in London. And when Irving Berlin wrote “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in 1929, he was simply putting into song the Ritz’s well-earned reputation for glamour.
Decades later, however, the Ritz brand had diminished worldwide. Atlantan William B. Johnson bought the brand for $75 million in 1983 and assembled a team of professionals led by Horst Schulze, previously general manager and vice president of Hyatt Hotels, to give it new life. Schulze became chief operating officer of the company, which built thirty hotels across the globe in ten years. He coined the phrase: “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” For its commitment to customer service, Ritz-Carlton twice won the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, presented by the United States Department of Commerce.
We pursued an opportunity to learn from the best. Ritz-Carlton was headquartered in Atlanta, making it convenient for Horst Schulze to meet with several of our staff and Operators. He was very familiar with Chick-fil-A, and he understood our category. Standing in front of us, he drew a box with three different levels of restaurant service inside. At the top he wrote the names of fine-dining restaurants like the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, Atlanta’s only five-star restaurant at the time. In the second tier he included full-service and family-style restaurants like Applebee’s and Longhorn Steakhouse. Below those, in the bottom section, were fast-food restaurants.
Horst wrote “Chick-fil-A” near the top of the fast-food section. “You’re the best of a bad lot,” he told us. “The best of the worst. If you’re going to have a vision of an exciting and uplifting organization, then over time you need to break out of that box—redefine who you want to be as a business and the kind of experience you want your guests to have.” But, how?
“Don’t look to be better than the other fast-food restaurants,” Horst told us. “Those limited expectations will just weigh you down. Instead, aspire to the next level of service—restaurants with price points that are at least double Chick-fil-A’s, and build a service model that resembles those.” There was a space in the marketplace, he explained, that was neither fast-food nor casual dining—a space that Chick-fil-A could own exclusively. He was describing our Blue Ocean Strategy before the book had been written.
In that moment, as we considered the possibilities, those of us in the room suddenly felt as if we had been released—set free to create an entirely new service model without the constraints of the fast-food tradition. Intrigued with this idea, we began to study Houston’s, Macaroni Grill, and other restaurants that were three times our price point, to see the service elements that made people feel good about spending fifteen or twenty dollars for a meal. Then we considered which of those elements we could incorporate into the Chick-fil-A dining experience.
Though the transformation would touch every corner of Chick-fil-A, from restaurants to the corporate staff, we led the initiative from the marketing department, assigning leadership to Mark Moraitakis. He became our director of hospitality and service design. His primary charter: How do we develop a consistent hospitality model, keeping the Chick-fil-A customer central during this service innovation journey?
Rather than decide what we liked, Mark and his team asked customers about their expectations for service at Chick-fil-A. He also tested ideas that Operators were already utilizing in their restaurants, such as fresh flowers on the tables, umbrellas at the door on rainy days, and a pepper grinder on the condiments table.
“Of all the ideas we’re piloting in stores,” we asked customers, “which made you feel most cared for? Which ones made you want to come back to Chick-fil-A?”
More than 90 percent of guests answered, “When someone smiles at me, looks me in the eye, and lets me know I’m being cared for and treated with excellence. That’s above and beyond what I expect at a fast-food restaurant.” Really!
Most of our Operators had been encouraging those behaviors for decades, but they were not 100 percent predictable. Whether they were getting lost among the list of other requests or team members simply forgot, a smile, a warm greeting, and eye contact were not happening every time, everywhere. (Remember Truett at that early store opening?)
If these were the desires of our guests, then we needed to package them in a way that made them easy for team members to remember and practice. So we created the Core 4:
• Create eye contact.
• Share a smile.
• Speak with an enthusiastic tone.
• Stay connected to make it personal.
These were the four behaviors we wanted team members to extend whenever they were engaging a guest in a restaurant. When we packaged the request that way, it was amazing to see how teachable it was. Team members got it. The requirements were not lost among the other requirements in the quality guide.
In addition to Horst, our hospitality team reached out to Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group owned such iconic white-tablecloth restaurants as Gramercy Tavern, renowned for a culture of “Enlightened Hospitality.” (Danny later opened Shake Shack in 2004.)
Danny helped us understand that service is the way you deliver the meal—the presentation, the consistency, the quality. Hospitality is how you add value after the meal has been delivered—the second mile. Hospitality goes beyond just successfully, accurately, personably delivering the meal and adds connection.
Hospitality adds unexpected surprises like refreshing a drink or giving a surprise dessert while guests are enjoying their meal. These steps might represent the expected level of service at an upscale restaurant. But at a fast-food restaurant, they become unexpected hospitality, letting guests know how much they are appreciated.
And unlike Ritz-Carlton, where the goal is elegance, Horst suggested visitors to Chick-fil-A should experience cheerfulness with every visit.
“Cheerfulness extended from warm hearts,” he said. “Don’t get too formal. Remember, you’re in the fast-food industry. You have to bring genuine cheerfulness and warm hearts into the service element. Otherwise, it’s only about the food, and you cannot thrive if the transaction is only about food.” He was helping us learn another way to become endearing, not just functionally sound.
We benchmarked other companies outside our industry that had high levels of operational consistency and great service reputations with customers—Disney, Apple, Harley-Davidson, Southwest Airlines, Zappos, and others. We visited several of those companies’ head quarters and sought to understand their philosophy about service—what kind of infrastructure did they create to replicate hospitality? (It seems counterintuitive to “institutionalize” hospitality, and yet people need the right tools for consistent expression.) Then we envisioned how we might train those standards in our environment.
We didn’t want to stop at “smiling and eye contact” and “my pleasure,” so we explored what we might add to take us into the second mile, and we selected three additional behaviors:
• Carry eat-in meals to the table.
• Check in with guests for any needs.
• Carry large orders, such as Chick-fil-A trays, to the car.
These simple, proactive behaviors became our “recipe for service.” As the name implies, this recipe consists of ingredients that are as critical as the ingredients in any of our menu items.
Training the entire chain on these new behaviors, we believed, would work best at regional off-site locations. Mark’s team, however, suggested that training might be more memorable and impactful in actual restaurants. We agreed and selected nine restaurants in our Atlantic region to pilot the training.
The team brought in professionals to serve as external consultants to the Operators of those nine restaurants: Peter Goode, an effective “edutrainer,” and Rod Stoner, retired thirty-year head of food services for the Greenbrier Resort. Rod and Peter coached the Operators and their teams to become Second-Mile Service experts—models for all the other restaurants in the region. They went to those nine restaurants twice a month, teaching and listening. We had never offered that level of intensity in training at Chick-fil-A.
After months of preparation, we trained our first regional group of team members in a restaurant. That morning a rainstorm hit, and the food truck was late with its delivery to one of the restaurants, diminishing the quality of that learning environment. “I had been in the restaurant the previous week,” Mark Moraitakis recalled, “and it was an unbelievably good experience. Everybody was living Second-Mile Service. The problems we saw the day of training weren’t a reflection of the Operator or the team. They were a reflection of the pace of our business. We learned that our restaurants are the ideal places to serve our guests, but they might not offer the ideal environment to teach specific new behaviors.”
Mark and the team walked out of the restaurant that day knowing that training would have to be focused and centralized, and they wondered how to create a controlled environment that could still reflect the realities of our business. We needed a “training camp.”
Coincidentally, back in Atlanta, our Chick-fil-A University was in the process of building a full-size replica of a restaurant in a warehouse near our corporate headquarters so they could train new Operators and create materials and product photography in a more controlled environment. We investigated the possibility of training all our Operators in that simulator, but the numbers didn’t work. We would need two simulators to train everyone in a timely fashion.
We built a second simulator, complete with a drive-thru window and electric golf carts for drive-thru “customers.” To make the experience as realistic as possible, we recruited customers to come into the simulators, role play, then offer their feedback. We trained more than two thousand leaders—an Operator and another leader from each restaurant—then sent them home to train their teams.
The hospitality team had started with my pleasure, two words Truett had shared with us seven years earlier—two words that would unleash the most powerful branding tool ever: the hearts of Chick-fil-A Operators and their team members.
Emotional Connections Marketing
And how about the third leg of the Raving Fan Strategy? Since 1946, Truett had created emotional connections by making friends with customers, giving away food, and extending his heart in countless other ways. Half a century later, the Chick-fil-A Cows were making a different kind of emotional connection, making people laugh. How could we expand and boost the process of making emotional connections? How could we equip Operators to prepare their team members to be proactive brand ambassadors—to come out from behind the counter and create new guest experiences in the restaurants and the community?
Relying on Operators to continue building the brand and sales, we focused on four marketing assets that they could leverage better than our competition—assets only available to Chick-fil-A Operators:
• Our food
• Our people
• The Cows
• Their influence in their communities
Our Food
We started with food, which we too often underestimated and underutilized. As I’ve said, since the earliest days of the original Dwarf House, Truett had been giving away food, especially during difficult times such as illness or death. That was Truett’s way of being a neighbor. Then when the first Chick-fil-A restaurant opened in 1967, Truett and his family stood at the lease line, where the restaurant opened into the mall, offering samples of Chick-fil-A on toothpicks. They were introducing a brand-new food product, and the response was instant.
Though we gave away literally millions of Be Our Guest cards (BOGs) over the years for free Chick-fil-A sandwiches, we believed those cards still lacked the power of real food. To confirm that belief, in conjunction with a grand opening, we blitzed a community with ten thousand BOGs. At the same time, we gave away ten thousand free sandwiches with an accompanying BOG. The redemption rate on the cards with accompanying sandwiches was two and a half times greater than the redemption rate of the cards alone.
Restaurants often give away samples of new products they’re introducing or to energize sales for an existing product. In Houston, for example, Operators throughout the market pooled their resources and for one day a week over a six-week period gave away eight hundred breakfast samples per restaurant. This wasn’t a buy-one-get-one kind of deal. The food was a flat-out gift. People love our food, and when we give it to them, they connect a pleasurable experience with someone at Chick-fil-A being generous. By the end of the event, Houston restaurants had doubled their breakfast sales.
We had three primary goals when we were sampling: introduce the product, remind people of Chick-fil-A, and reinforce a spirit of generosity. We wanted people to know that we cared enough about them to give them food with no strings attached. Nothing to redeem. Just free food. Almost everywhere else you look in the industry, if it’s “free,” it has a string attached. Truett had a complete, unabashed spirit of generosity. Why wouldn’t we want that to migrate and grow throughout the entire chain?
It’s not uncommon for Operators to give away as much as 1 percent of their sales in free food. They’re casting their bread on the water, and it always comes back. Or it’s like the principle of the harvest: you reap what you sow, and more than you sow. There’s an emotional payoff that comes with being generous with no strings attached.
And like Truett since 1946, Operators responded to difficult situations large and small with food, every day, all across the chain. Two high-profile Atlanta examples occurred during the time that I was writing this book: When a fire shut down a major interstate, Operators responded with free food for first responders. When the interstate was closed for months, the city asked commuters to help reduce traffic by carpooling. Operators encouraged and rewarded the effort by offering free breakfast entrees to carpoolers. Then on a Sunday in December 2017, when Hartsfield–Jackson International Airport was shut down for hours because of a power failure, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed called Dan Cathy at 10:00 p.m. and asked for help. Staff and team members who lived near the airport immediately mobilized and delivered more than five thousand free sandwiches and bottled water to stranded passengers.
These were examples that garnered nationwide attention. Most of the time, though, we share food person-to-person with a simple smile.
Our People
Leveraging our people was a matter of equipping them to do what they do best: interact with customers. Chick-fil-A Operators attracted a high caliber of team members who, because of their personalities, often had a natural hospitality or marketing bent. Putting them out in the dining room, the drive-thru, or engaging directly with folks in the community, transformed a transaction into a relationship.
Another high-profile example occurred in Houston in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. An elderly couple was trapped in their home by rising waters and called 911. When they couldn’t get a response, they called the next best thing: their favorite Chick-fil-A location.
“I ordered two grilled chicken burritos with extra egg and a boat,” J. C. Spencer told Good Morning America. “And can you believe that one of the managers of Chick-fil-A, she sent her husband to pick us up (in a boat), and we are so grateful.”8
Mr. and Mrs. Spencer were regular customers, and restaurant general manager Jeffrey Urban recognized the number when they called. He contacted a coworker, who called her husband, who took his boat to rescue the Spencers.
It’s more typical for a team member to help a customer with an umbrella in a rainstorm or a drink refresh, but we enjoy telling the stories of the heroic acts that build relationships as well.
The Cows
By many measures, the Chick-fil-A Cows make their own unique emotional connections. For example, the Cow calendar has historically been the number one selling calendar in the world, even outselling the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition! People hung calendars on the walls in millions of homes, offices, and school lockers, bringing the Chick-fil-A brand into their personal spaces. Every day of the year, they were inviting the Cows to give them a smile and remind them to “Eat Mor Chikin.”
The Cows moved from an advertising campaign to an unexpectedly fun connecting point for customers. They showed up at football games, small-town parades, and in the restaurants themselves, and they were absolute rock stars. They sometimes visited children’s hospitals with football players and other human celebrities, and the kids immediately lit up. The kids didn’t ignore the celebrities, but it was the Cows that they wanted a picture with. Operators sometimes have to remind themselves how special the Cows are. They can’t let the fact that the Cows are around so often blind them to their power. They help maintain the Cows’ celebrity status by keeping them in the limelight, on billboards, TV, radio, and local events. People love the Cows, and only Chick-fil-A has them, so we share them.
Community Influence
Influence lies at the heart of the Chick-fil-A corporate purpose: “to have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.”
Part of the beauty of the Operator concept is that the Operator typically stays at the same restaurant for many years—often for decades. So those Operators have a vested interest in the community because they live there. They’re raising their own families there. As a result, they grow attached to the people who live in their community. It’s a natural response. The store gives the Operator a platform to serve the community, starting with their team members.
Neighbors then become more endeared to the brand because of that relationship. That’s not why Truett did what he did, and it’s not why Operators do what they do, but it’s that cultural soil that they help create, work in, and live in. The business was designed to engage with people locally and to have an influence in the community.
Counting Raving Fans
We asked customers in every Chick-fil-A restaurant in the country if they would recommend Chick-fil-A to a friend based on their experience. As I mentioned earlier, the only answer that guaranteed the customer was categorized as a Chick-fil-A Raving Fan was 10. Not a 9, and certainly not an 8. People who answered 10 were the strongest marketing advocates of the business. Over time we learned how many Raving Fans each restaurant had. Not surprisingly, success and growth of individual restaurants corresponded closely with the number of Raving Fans. Then the collaborative culture of the chain encouraged the sharing of ideas among Operators on how to create more. Along the way, we learned and applied some key principles.
Four Habits That Fuel the Execution of the Raving Fans Strategy
Focus on Giving, not Getting
It’s not how much we give but how we give that’s important. When we give to friends and family, it looks like a wrapped box. But sometimes when we give through business, it looks like strings attached. This is not a gift. It’s a trade. If we expect something in return, it’s not a gift. This creates transactions. We’ll take all the transactions we can get, but when it comes to creating Raving Fans, it doesn’t start with thinking of transaction. It starts with interaction.
What we need to give is not a discount. Sometimes it’s not even free food. Rather, we give the gift of knowing a customer’s name and a smile—the gift of valuing the customer as a person.
Focus on Remarkable, not Ordinary
People don’t remark about the ordinary. Word-of-mouth advertising is the most powerful marketing anywhere. To earn it, we must be doing things worth talking about. We can’t just provide a product; we must provide an experience. What will they remember about the experience? What will they talk about? Are we creating and giving remarkable experiences? Chick-fil-A can be far more than a meal. It must be an experience.
Focus on the Emotional, not Just the Rational
Rational generates transactions. Emotional creates Raving Fans. A rational developer of toys for kids’ meals wonders what kind of gimmick will attract a child. At Chick-fil-A, we asked how we could use our Kid’s Meal to create an emotional connection between a parent and a child. How could we have positive influences on children?
Businesses focused on emotional connections use their platforms to make a meaningful impact on customers. Then those customers become more supportive of the business. They actually root for its success and feel obligated to do business there. Do things worth rooting for. Do things for customers that can’t be weighed or measured—that aren’t expected.
The destination with the customer is what’s important, not whether you can count and measure all the steps to get there. Raving Fans can be counted on to come in without a coupon or deal and pay full price, and they feel good about it. That makes a business more sustainable.
Focus on Active, not Passive
Great relationships require passion, and passion needs to be refilled. If you’ve ever seen a Chick-fil-A grand opening, you’ve seen passion. Passionate customers camping out all night waiting for the doors to open. Passionate Operators and team members connecting with those customers in the parking lot and excited to serve them on opening morning.
Operators and team members connect with passion when they move through the dining room alert to opportunities to serve. They greet customers, deliver orders to tables, refresh drinks, and clear tables. They take large orders to cars and offer an umbrella on rainy days. And they always respond with “my pleasure” when they are thanked, whether at the counter or in the drive-thru.