Like many Americans living in Europe, I can find service here frustrating.  In the US, I could be so much more efficient in planning my daily activities: rarely did I need to think ahead if I needed some stamps, photo processing or dry cleaning.  You stop by, you drop it off and away you go.  In Europe, these tasks can be much more time consuming: retailers and public administrators alike operate at a lower level of efficiency.  And yet, I think that the US may be missing something of the service concepts of Europe.

Did you ever wonder why you have to systematically queue for a table when you go to a restaurant in the States?  Whether you are going to a diner or a more upscale restaurant there is no booking, and you will be shown the menu for drinks while you wait.  The goal is to optimise table utilisation: by ensuring a queue on the ‘inbound’ side, the tables can all be kept busy.  Running a restaurant to a high local standard is a matter of optimising throughput time.  You get your drinks and food served quickly, and your bill without needing to ask for it.  If that sounds like an exercise is queuing theory and linear optimisation, then you’ve got it.  (When can you start?).

I am one of those odd Americans who own a passport and I also happen to like taking my time occasionally, especially when I am eating.  I would judge a good restaurant by whether I liked my meal but also the experience that came with it: the atmosphere and a friendly, relaxed service.  This is possible in Europe and almost impossible to find in the US.

Retailing and restaurant chains that have perfected throughput optimisation can be formidably powerful business operations: they can afford to run on low margins by having large volumes and are driven to seek high market shares.  This has led to a uniformity of offerings in much of the US market: franchised restaurants from coast to coast and retailers organised into carbon copy ‘strips’ and malls.   Their efficiency has also been transplanted to overseas markets, or copied by admiring business managers around the world. 

Something troubles me about this.  Not only to be an American who likes to savour life at my own speed, but also the fact that the ‘service equals efficiency’ logic goes unchallenged.  If we are all supposed to think about service in the same way, then something must be wrong.  It can’t be that everybody wants to be served as quickly as possible.  Surely that could make such a model vulnerable, if another business came along that understood customers better, and was prepared to organise itself accordingly.

One of the reasons I love living in Europe is the choice that we have, about where we eat and how we shop.  Fast food chains do exist and they work very well.  Malls appear to be increasingly popular.  But at the same time, we have local stores that are focused on doing one thing very well: selling cheese or wine or lamp shades, and getting to know their customers’ needs very well.  There is nothing to say that the business model is wrong, just because you have to wait in the shop and talk to a few people.  I happen to like that.

If the goal of the business is to be as big as possible (to achieve market domination in a specific segment) then a consistent strategy is to optimise the organisation around throughput efficiency.  To achieve sustainable, higher margins a business probably has to know something about “slow service” concepts, capturing more of the customer’s attention for a long enough time.

I am not concerned with broad discussions on American versus European standards of service: my interest is to challenge where a particular focus – such as better service means processing the customer quicker – goes unchallenged.  Yes, it would be nice to have fewer queues in my local town hall.

We will be discussing the theme of Service Innovation over the next couple of months, as we prepare for the next Learning Edge in June.  We think there are many things that a business can do to increase its effectiveness, and service capability, without big investments or complex changes to the organisation.  And it may not always be driven by simple metrics from the stop watch to reducing the length of the queue.