The Greatest Customer Service Story Ever Told, Starring Morton’s Steakhouse
shankman.com
shankman.com
On the internet I sometimes get the impression that "everyone" has cute things like this happen to them. When you dig, it often turns out, like this, the person is big in PR or some related field.
It can get easy to forget that 99(.99?)% of the people regularly on the internet aren't getting free stuff, lighting up twitter, hitting the front page of reddit, etc.
From the article:
"I don’t think it’s about my follower numbers. I think it’s about Morton’s knowing I’m a good customer, who frequents their establishments regularly. "
I am 100% convinced this is not true. I'm sure if I (with 15 twitter followers) had posted something similar there would be no chance of something similar happening.
I was in London Heathrow when the plane crashed on the runway a few years ago - I was literally on the very next BA flight to I think the Czech Republic that was supposed to take off when we get notified that it's going to be a while, and then that things are canceled... nobody knew what was going until we heard the plane crashed, and then we wondering if it was terrorism, and the whole airport was really a mess.
I was really bummed out at that point. It's the middle of winter, and I really really wanted to get the fuck out of London. I can't say why exactly, but like, y'know when you're ready to leave a place and you get to the airport and it's like "ahh, I'm leaving"? Well, I had that feeling, then a fucking plane crashed.
After waiting in these gigantic lines for a really long time (everyone now trying to change tickets), I got to the ticket counter and the rep there was so, so cool. He said nothing could be done, and I could just head into the city.
And I said, "Man, I'm just overwhelmed with shitty foggy London weather. Can you put me on the next plane to anywhere that takes off, and route me somehow? I know this is a ridiculous request, I don't care about hotel or accommodation or plans or anything, can you just put me on the next plane heading eastwards?"
And - he did just that. It wasn't even on their same alliance, he went through some complicated procedure of actually selling my ticket to another airline. My memory is kind of failing me here but I think I wound up in Germany for the night, saw a cathedral in the morning, and then was routed on to Eastern Europe.
The guy went way above and beyond the call of duty in the middle of chaos just because I was obviously bummed out. In retrospect, it was probably even uncool of me to ask for with all of the chaos happening around, but I was just really fed up with London at that point and wanted to get out. And the guy treated me really really well, with no expectation of any favorable review online or anything like that.
So - ask for stuff if you want stuff, and yeah there's some decent people in the world that'll try to accommodate you. Also, when you get a ridiculous request, stop and consider if maybe you can do some variation of it because people remember that stuff forever.
And, perhaps most importantly, you treated him like a human being. People in various service positions are often treated like proxies; it's understandable, most people are busy, and they just want some item or information. But you leveled with him and talked to him like an actual person, and he responded in kind. That goes a long way.
I got a ticket to San Jose---from Portland. Because I was willing to change my airport and take some extra hassle myself, the agent was willing and able to help out. Ask for something nicely, be flexible on how it happens, and people can do good things for you. (Meanwhile, the lady who was screaming to get the exact flight she'd bought in the first place was turned down, because there wasn't a flight like the one she bought available and she wouldn't flex at all.)
I have too. I usually get treated well by the places I frequent, though I also make an effort to treat the people at those places well in return.
And it's not just fancy places, even the local Dominoes has been very kind to me. It's all about how you treat the people there.
So - ask for stuff if you want stuff
Literally decades ago I flew into Chicago with a connection to Oakland via Salt Lake City (actually wanting to get into SFO, but that was the cheapest connection) and it was miserably cold and snow stormed throughout the Midwest.
The plane was delayed for a couple hours and - of course - there went my connection.
Now you had some 150 or so angry passengers also having missed their connections yelling at the three ground staff, hurling abuse and insults and giving them a piece of their mind, just about as if the weather is their damn fault.
When it was my turn they informed me that there's no way I can connect to Salt Lake today and they'd put me up in a hotel in Chicago overnight. I informed her that my final destination is actually San Francisco and being nice, polite and understanding that the weather was really not her damn fault she completely went out of her way to rebook my ticket to a non alliance carrier that took me non-stop to SFO a couple hours later. Oh, and that at no additional cost to me.
Until today I'm convinced that just being nice after all those assholes hurling abuse at the poor employee did the trick.
He's also an author of a book on social media customer service. Perhaps the social media team at Mortons has a copy of his book and figured he would certainly be the kind of person who would share a story like this - whether it be as a tweet, blog post, or anecdote in a future book.
While I'm sure follower numbers have something to do with it, it's not necessarily everything.
Well is one of your followers Morton's? Do you eat there all the time?
Morten's invested in some 'free' PR here. Basically they know this guy is legit because he has a history with them, further they can estimate is future business 'stream' since they know how often he eats there. A simple affinity card where you get 'stars' for each visit and a free meal on your tenth or whatever, works exactly this way.
There are three HUGE things to learn from this story:
1) In order to know whose important you have to know who your customers are, it helps if you can tie a customer identity to a social network identity.
2) Keeping frequent customers happy brings in business because whenever they are in the conversation 'Where should we [consume/use/buy] [service/product]?' they recommend your product or service.
3) It might cost $100,000 for a 'small' advertising run or PR stunt, something like this probably costs less than $100. In terms of customer acquisition costs its hugely efficient relative to broader and necessicarily more dilute activities.
So I don't doubt for a minute that Mortens got their money's worth here. And I don't think it mattered at all that the guy has 100K followers. I think they looked at him as a great customer and this as a low cost opportunity for PR. They seized it, and hit one out of the park.
"A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about our plans to take our daughters -- particularly our nine-year-old Elizabeth -- to Harry Potter World at Universal Studios in Orlando. I worried, I suppose, that nothing surprising and magical would happen. Well, as it turned out, something surprising and magical did happen."
I don't have days like that, and neither should anyone else. With modern communication systems, flying in airplanes to lunch meetings and flying back that night is such an absurd waste of resources it qualifies as obscene. The fact that an expensive steakhouse decided to pull a cheap PR stunt by delivering a free steak to the airport to some well-known Big Shot is less obviously wasteful, but still a repellent manifestation of gratuitous luxury.
People within the cocoon of the upper percentiles of wealth often have a sense of how they are perceived by others, and usually take some care to disguise their self-satisfaction. It is always educational to get a glimpse into the mental world of extreme privilege.
Is it bad for the environment and a waste of time? Sure. But at the end of the day if flying out for a single meeting is going to be better for your business (or for your personal work if you freelance/etc), then you do it. I've flown from London to California before just for a meeting that will last a few hours - I didn't do it because I'm super rich, I did it because it was a good decision for the company I work for, and therefore they paid for it.
(Edit: I suppose a person who has the chance to travel around for free could be called "privileged", but I don't think that's what you meant by it.)
As to air travel, for me I consider it a privilege, I've loved being able to travel the world for free, and add on cheap holidays when I feel like it in whatever country I'm in. But then, I've never really minded sitting in a plane.
Sounds good, but doesn't always work in reality. (and I say this just coming back from a meeting with an architect who flew in for a day to check on a million dollar school renovation we're working on).
I've done meetings via teleconference, conference calls and face-to-face, and the face-to-face meetings have always been the most productive, especially when needing to review engineering documents. Things move faster because we're not all trying to talk over one another and we can observe body language to see who is paying attention or to confirm than someone understands what it being discussed.
Remote meetings have their place, but when the cost of a face-to-face day meeting can pale in comparison to screwing up a capital project, it's worth doing.
For example, I like to shake the hand of people I do business with.
Additionally, I think it's generally better to refrain from commenting on how people spend their time and money, because you certainly don't want them to reciprocate.
Further, what if those who pay for the lunch meetings feel that it was worth any price? How are you going to convince them they are wasting their money if a webcam chat wouldn't actually be a replacement in their eyes, and if they don't care about the dollar amount spent on lunch?
PS: Ever wonder why Berkshire Hathaway is not located in NY City even though it's managing so many subsidiaries? Could it be even with a crappy website they better understand how technology has changed the business landscape?
I can easily imagine the traditionalist "A Gentleman's Word is His Bond, Seal the Deal With a Handshake" sort of C-level executives. From a purely economic cost/benefit standpoint, if the 100k in opportunity cost/travel/etc is going to turn more than 100k in profit, it would make economic sense to do it. You could probably get some marketing mileage out of it as a nice symbolic gesture with some glossy photos in $finance_mag as well.
At the same time, you need some way of managing/restraining that sort of thing lest you end up with $200,000 "working lunches" which are nothing more than a brief holiday on the company dime.
I've no idea how Berkshire Hathaway operates. Certainly I can see the opportunities for tech to reduce the need for physical meetings in the general case, but this whole argument is about the special cases.
Having a fancy Cisco full-room telepresence/videoconference rates higher than a skype call with a webcam, which (imo) still rates higher than a regular conference call. For higher latency interactions, email (or enterprise groupware and whatnot) is the hands-down winner. Those things might be where the real work gets done (and "my people get together with your people and make it happen"), but they don't have the same symbolic significance.
(Edit: I forgot - he named it "The Indefensible".)
Our new world mentality where such cost is considered obscene just doesn't map to the genteel, where spending that much money in order to secure a handshake is a matter of showing appropriate respect.
I'm not saying such a culture is _right_, but I am saying it has its reasons for its wastefulness.
uh, no. there's no problem with the internet critiquing spending habits. certainly not because we should fear our own excesses coming up.
The same is true of face-to-face meetings. In addition, I suspect that Shankman wasn't just going for the meeting—he was going to communicate how important the meeting was. You don't just spend hours on a plane for something frivolous; he was sending a signal and reaping face-to-face rewards.
A brief story, although it's not on the same scale as Shankman's: I'm a grad student in English Lit at the University of Arizona, which means I teach freshman composition. Students e-mail me all the time. Constantly. Unless there's some compelling reason, I usually answer them in class, and, if what they want or need requires a longish explanation, I tell them to come to office hours (note that if they can't make office hours, I also do office hours by appointment).
This has a three-fold benefit: it cuts down on the amount of e-mail I receive over the course of the semester because students realize I won't answer frivolous e-mails twelve hours after they're sent. If I have follow-up questions, or the student does, those questions are easier to ask face-to-face. Misunderstandings caused by not not being face-to-face are evaded; it's hard to see context from e-mail. I think everyone has had misunderstandings caused by not having enough information. Finally, if they want me to read their papers or other work and show up to office hours, I know they really want me to read their work, and their desire to get feedback isn't just a passing fancy. The back-and-forth that can come from reading work and immediately responding to it can't be easily duplicated, especially among non-professionals, over e-mail or other asynchronous communications.
I meant to list three things, I really did. But the reasons kept popping into my head, and I think they're all valid.
Speak for yourself, I'm fine with it. Not only that, but I am tremendously wasteful and unnecessarily luxury-minded at times, so if this guy wants to critique my spending then it might be more likely to be the opening of a fruitful conversation.
"Sour grapes" implies winners and losers. Maybe you feel like running that race, but I don't want any part of it.
Did we read the same fable? Sour grapes is about something you don't have, which does not imply winners or losers.
From http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/31.html (and it's well into the public domain):
ONE hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. "Just the things to quench my thirst," quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: "I am sure they are sour." "IT IS EASY TO DESPISE WHAT YOU CANNOT GET."
Whether he is privileged or not the story was about the steakhouse and im sure many other businesses wouldn't do that regardless of who the customer was. I guess it shows, they know who their customers are, what their customers are saying, and improve on an already good service. I think lots to learn from that :) Excellant JOB by Mortons i say ....
You're assuming that because you don't have days where you've got to travel several hundred miles an then back that nobody else does...or should.
You're assuming that you know the context of the meeting in order to judge the trip as frivolous.
You're assuming that without the OP getting on the jet, it doesn't make the trip.
You're assuming that you know the decision stack that led to Morton's showing up with the steak.
The initial statement in the blog was that everyone has days like that.
You will want your attorney physically present, and never mind that they live in another city.
When your attorney lands at 9:30pm, you will want them to eat something better than Olive Garden. Good food relieves stresses and refreshes body and spirit. You will care a great deal more about the quantity of wine drunk than you will the money spent on it.
Now, imagine you are hiring for that attorney one month previous to this easily-imagined scenario. You are meeting with a candidate. You will care about their dedication, their thorough familiarity with your situation, their ability to confront make or break problems on short notice. Are you satisfied with a video-conference? Or do you maybe want them to fly down for lunch?
This is about your imagination. You can imagine "the upper percentile of wealth" is populated entirely by greedy, stupid people, paid only for structural position and spending only to indulge their ego and appetite. Note, this belief doesn't leave much scope for the reason and ability and pride of the people beneath them.
Or you can generate some curiosity about the world beyond _your_ cocoon.
What's not to like about being outside on a nice day with a cigar and alcoholic beverage while being able to call it business?
As many here have pointed out, this was a marketing/PR stunt, because they know exactly who Peter Shankman is and what he would do in response. It's a no brainer from Morton's perspective to give him a free steak in this case.
But is this a "social media success" story in customer service? No. They gave a famous person a freebie. For free positive PR.
If you follow Peter in the slightest way, you know he has this happen to him all the time.
Still, well played by Morton's and well-earned following I believe.
I'm sure Morton's has great customer service, but this is not an example of it.
Second, all that was required by Morton's to pull this off was the following:
* Someone following tweets looking for @mortons from people with > 10,000 followers.
* A chef in the kitchen ready to cook a steak.
* The manager of the restaurant (or even a waiter) with time to drive 30 minutes to the airport.
They had 3+ hours to pull this off. They could have done it in half that time.
I am NOT saying Morton's does not have great customer service. I also believe this kind of stunt indicates a propensity for great customer service. But does not guarantee it.
One of my own examples: I have Comcast cable for my Internet connection. A few weeks ago the connection started going up/down/up/down every few minutes. I tweeted
Comcast is like a yoyo this morning. Up-down-up-down-up-down. Mostly down though. /cc:@comcastcares
I have ~6500 followers. I do not believe I would have gotten this treatment if I had 20 followers.
For what it's worth, I plan on completely taking advantage of this phenomenon for my own benefit :-).
I'm a nobody on twitter (<30 followers) and I tweeted my cable company about their shitty phone customer service. I ended up emailing a nice woman who was powerless to do anything in the corporate hierarchy, but nevertheless _personally emailed me_ my cable bill for three months until the wheels of bureaucracy turned and fixed the problem.
Social Media people are paid to be cheerful and nice despite the fact that they have no bureaucratic power and no leverage with the technical people. Be nice to them but critical of the company (read: honest about your problems) and they will help you, because they feel the same way. Plus you skip the phone menus.
In fact I generally only keep a Twitter account around for calling out Charter when my cable internet isn't working, because I get a response in minutes from someone in my hometown rather than having to talk to a script-wielding service rep in a foreign country.
My only thought is that this type of response doesn't scale well at the top end. Monitoring (and responding) to a Twitter search for a term like Google or Netflix would take a ton of people.
Live demo:
http://expertlabs.aaas.org/thinkup01/index.php?u=whitehouse&...
"ThinkUp is a free, open source web application that captures your posts, tweets, replies, retweets, friends, followers and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
With ThinkUp, you can store your social activity in a database that you control, making it easy to search, sort, analyze, publish and display activity from your network. All you need is a web server that can run a PHP application"
"Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work and Why Your Company Needs Them "
We live in an age where everyone is a media creator. Instead of spending money on mass advertising campaigns (spray 'n pray) with little lasting value, this type of customer service is like launching smart bombs that target actual customers and the people around them. This story & pictures is now in the internet -- it will be around forever. Is that worth the drive from Hackensack? I bet it is.
I think the question we should be asking ourselves is how can we be this awesome for our customers every day?
I find it interesting how strong cynicism has crept into our social ideology. It's almost like a social darwinian requirement nowadays. You can't be happy about an interesting situation because it is, at some level, linked to some sort of marketing directed towards you. At least that's the perception, thanks to the Internet.
And thus, you are angry. Rawr. Upset that _you_ are the victim of some kind of marketing stunt. Travesty!
So an interesting and unique deed--whether the person was truly deserving because of some arbitrary, subjective parameters placed on the recipient--is thrown the curb because the cynical perception is since it's talked about, it's marketing, and therefore it needs to be discredited.
Bravo, HN community. Bravo! But I don't blame you. I just blame the social media tools on the Internet that half of us are building.
Peter Shankman might direct message you on Twitter (and not follow you so you can't direct message him back) and say he expects more from you.
Like he did to me an hour ago.
Peter Shankman: "would have expected more logic from you on your hackernews comment... Morton's can put a dollar amount on this, yes. It's business."
Peter Shankman: "Read the comments on their website. They do this all the time for non-famous people. As does KLM. And Virgin. It's good biz."
Peter Shankman: "An entrepreneur should know that. :)"
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Outrageous-Stunts-Work-Company-Needs/d...
Old lady doesn't place her regular order, driver takes the initiative to drive over and check on her. Sure enough, she's fallen and she can't get up: http://consumerist.com/2011/02/dominos-delivery-driver-saves...
Psycho ex threatens to stab customer with the door open as the driver arrives, he sneaks away and calls the cops: http://www.uhpinions.com/dominos-pizza/
Sounds like a best seller in the making to me, "Everything I learned about PR I learned from my mom."
That is the real lesson here - that it is OK to try to pull marketing stunts, especially if there is no real downside to your company in the case of failure.
The most likely explanation is that Morton's does what a lot of companies do: know exactly who their most important customers are. He just happens to be one of them.
As an aside, I find it funny how a guy that is too health conscious for fast food orders a 24oz steak. I love my steaks but that's a little much.
+1 for Morton's for sure, but -1 for the media expert not being able to realize when he's being manipulated.
1) Super Rich. (Not by a long shot.)
2) Horrible because I travel for a business lunch. Sorry, but in the real world, business is much more fruitful when done over a handshake, and not a pixelated image.
3) A celebrity. If that's the case, can you inform my cat? I just cleaned up his puke from my couch. Don't celebrities have "people" do to that?
4) This was a set-up. Really? I'd risk 15 years building a professional career for one stunt? Thanks for playing, but no.
Sad. I expected more out of y'all. But hey, it's just the Internet, right?
After all, according to people in Britain, the world is Flat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Shenton
I would have expected more out of Britain...
It would be disappointing if the real Shankman was so willing to paint the entire HN community with a ridiculously broad brush, when he's a professional and should know better.
Please post to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter if this is really you.
Hard to believe it's real.
"Even with items removed, the check totaled $159.05; otherwise, it would have been more than $200 for two cocktails and practically inedible food."
http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-09-09/entertainment/23994311...
He gets a steak. I get a retweet. Yeah, boy, Morton's treats all their customers the same.
Uh, think about that. Pick a different celebrity, like @neilhimself has 10 times the followers, and ask what would happen if he posted something like that. I will tell you: nothing. You know why? Because Morton's would have NO IDEA what he likes to order because he ISN'T a frequent customer. And do you really think they'd send a steak without anything to go with it?
That's why it's a customer service story.
Of course it makes no economic sense for Morton's to do this simply because he frequents Mortons establishments regularly.
The interesting part is that he believes that there are people who would believe this. But he's smart enough to think down to that level.
His parent's must not have been critical. People raised by critical parents (who call them on everything they say) wouldn't think anyone would believe this.
Being able to think like this is actually very helpful many times in coming up with schemes to make money.
You sign up for the service, associating your twitter account to a real live person, phone, address and payment details.
Later, you're hungry, so you tweet "@twitter2deliver carls jr. large #6, criss-cut fries, coke."
Or "@twitter2deliver Big Apple country fried steak, baked potato, green beans"
A little later, and a delivery guy knocks on your door, food in hand.
Technically twitter2deliver is a concierge service, so it can incorporate more than food delivery.
I have worked in situations in where management have tried to please customers by granting them their wish list. This has almost resulted in customer treating that particular favor as his born right.
You're right you can't do this for everyone, though, but giving customers "treats" now and again would seem to do wonders. I think the key is that it needs to be a surprise or it needs to be commensurate to what they spend for regular customers.
If it's commensurate to what they spend you need to budget and plan for it, and quite possibly should if you're aiming for a high end market, but it may be worthwhile to make some of the perks for regular customers "surprises" that makes it seem like you go above and beyond.
An up-market brand might have the margins to set aside say 10% for "stunts" that makes the customer fanatical about the brand. I don't know Morton's, but an upscale steak house can easily land you with bills in the $150-$200 range for a dinner - it doesn't take many dinners at that cost level before the customer has "paid" for a free steak and a 20 mile drive to an airport, and even if such a customer doesn't plaster it all over the internet, you can bet that if my favorite steak house had shown up at SFO with a steak on one the occasions I had to do regular business travel to California, everyone I met would hear about it for a long time. I'd repay a $200 cost or more with extra business for them in a few months at most, probably already on that trip just because it'd be an awesome story to have (as long as they keep their surprises fresh and not too frequent).
Peter Luger eats all other steakhouses for breakfast, and I say that as someone who drools uncontrollably when I think about going to either Mortons or Ruth's Chris.
I kept thinking "ME, ME, ME" as I read that.
That's literally 3 times heavier than a large steak in the UK.
More like "only in a steakhouse." We USAians have normal restaurants, too; in those, a steak is 6oz or 8oz. Sometimes 12oz, if they're trying to be ostentatious about their large portion sizes.
UK "steakhouses" make me grumpy.
My local pub is actually the only place I've found that does a tolerable steak. What I'd expect at a cheap roadside diner in the US. Certainly not a big treat, but at least edible. Everyone I know in London that's been there that haven't had steaks outside the UK have hailed it as having the best steaks they've ever had. To everyone else it's ok in a pinch but nothing more. To me that says it all.
Sorry - it's a sore subject, I absolutely love steaks.
Sorry for the outburst, but I'm going nuts in the land of British Beef. My last good steak was over a year ago, and I'm not going to make it back to the 'states until xmas.
Day One: Mama's Mexican Kitchen.
Day Two: Proper 16oz New York Steak from a proper butcherI actually have a friend who's a beef farmer over here, and we've talked about this at length. There's no UK equivalent of the USDA grades of meat, and thus no incentive to selectively breed cows for flavor and quality.
You can go to a specialty butcher over here and get the absolute best steak they have, and it still won't be as tasty as the one you'll find on sale at any grocery store in the US.
I actually thought all US beef was pumped full of growth hormones and other nasties? Your cows are about 50% bigger than ours :)