One of my favorite sit-down restaurants (client of mine) serves amazing food, but during every visit I noticed there were multiple tables that were not bussed. Seeing piles of dirty dishes and leftover food was not an appetizing sight.

I started asking different team members about their top priorities at the restaurant. I was amazed to find that cleaning the table was not on anyone’s top three list of priorities. I then realized a universal truth: “when something is a low priority for everyone in the team, it does not get done.”

To have a clean restaurant, every time, we made it a top priority for one team member (let us call him Jim) to clean tables immediately after a guest left. At the end of the day, the manager sent an automated text message to Jim thanking him for creating a great experience for the exact number of guests served that day. The next day during a team huddle, the manager gave a shout-out to Jim, the superhero who will have yet another amazing day.

It worked. After that, every time I went back, every table was clean, every time.

This goes beyond restaurants and applies to any business. If you are in the service industry, it is important to determine whose job it is to greet every customer with a smile. For a car rental company, whose job is it to make sure every car is filled with gas before it goes out? For an airline, whose job is it to give every passenger hand sanitizer when they board?

In any business, every team member wants to feel pride and make a meaningful impact, but they need a clear path to achieve it. To solve for the biggest customer experience challenge for your business, consider asking the following questions:

1. Who feels 100% responsible for it?
   For every key task there has to be one person who is in-charge.
2. How are you going to connect it to the overall business success?
   Every task must be connected to the overall success criteria, in this case it is the number of guests having a perfect dining experience.
3. How can you celebrate success on an ongoing basis?
   Finally, there has to be ongoing acknowledgment and celebration to keep the solution top of mind. Celebration must include immediate reinforcement at the completion of a task, and also forward-thinking celebration to keep the issue top of mind on an ongoing basis.

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