Fine tuning the customer experience

There are two restaurants on the Plaza in Kansas City I like to visit — Kona Grill and McCormick & Schmicks. Kona serves sushi along with a nice, somewhat eclectic menu. McCormick's is primarily a seafood restaurant. Both are chains, although there are far more McCormick & Schmick's restaurants nationally than there are Kona Grill restaurants.

I first visited McCormick's in May of 2000. The restaurant had been open only a week or so. And while the staff was a little shaky, they more than made up for it with their efforts and sincerity. The hosts were inviting, the servers attentive and jovial, the manager friendly and welcoming — it was a great experience. Over the next several years I became a regular. Each time I visited I came to know the staff better — because they consistently made an effort to know me. Today I can walk in to McCormick's and they know my name. I even know their names. They've made the effort to hone their customer experience. They care enough about the total customer experience to do it right — at every level.

I first visited Kona in the summer of 2003. And while the restaurant was packed, the service was excellent and the food outstanding. So Kona soon became a regular restaurant for lunch and dinner, too.

But there was a difference — and it was more than the fact that McCormick's cooked all their seafood. After visiting Kona several times within a two month span, I noted none of the hostesses remembered me on subsequent visits. The servers did. The sushi chefs did. But not the hostesses. Ever.

So I started asking others who visited Kona if the hostesses remembered them. Julie, my wife, commented that they never remembered her. Other friends said the same.

The food is great. The service is prompt and friendly. But the hostesses don't seem to understand their role in the overall customer experience.

Let me take this a couple steps further. Two years ago, a colleague of mine and I were to meet our clients at Kona. When we arrived, we informed the hostesses of our names and our clients' names, anticipating they would seat our clients with us when they arrived. The time for the lunch appointment came and passed. We called our client's office, we walked to the front to see if they had arrived, we looked around the restaurant to see if they had been seated. Finally, after the second time of walking around the restaurant, we found them sitting in a booth in the rear of the restaurant. They had arrived a few minutes after us, gave the hostesses their names and our names, and were seated — but not with us.

Yes, we should have seen them on the first walk we took around the restaurant, but we didn't. But more importantly, the hostesses should have made the connection and brought them to us.

Today, it happened to Julie. She arrived at Kona and informed the hostess she was meeting a woman for lunch. The hostess said, "We have a woman here named Julie. Is that her?" Julie responded, "No. Her name is Diane." In hindsight, that was a clue.

As Julie was being seated, she briefly looked around the restaurant for Diane. At 12:15, she sent Diane an email wondering if she had the date wrong. She then walked around the restaurant to see if Diane was there. No, she wasn't.

At 12:20, Julie received a voice message from Diane. She had been at Kona waiting on Julie, but left at 12:10. They had missed one another. The "Julie" name at the hostess desk was for Julie — from Diane, who had arrived before Julie did. But the hostess blew it.

Two thoughts on this. One, how can the food and the service be so consistently good at a restaurant and the hostesses be so consistently poor? I continue to go to Kona because of the first two attributes, not the last.

Second, the only thing people want from the hostesses at Kona is for them to care. Care enough to know their name. Care enough to think it through. Care enough to get it right.

The Kona Grill brand experience is good. It's not great. And good is the enemy of great. Left unchecked, the chronic hostess issue at Kona will cause them to lose business. Or at the very least, not ever achieve the level they truly should.

It seems it could be fixed with a couple of small tweaks. If I were Kona, I'd start tweaking.