Drinking Your Own Kool-Aid

For far too long, suppliers of foodservice equipment have been handicapped by their own introspective cultures, looking continuously inward to reduce costs, tweak product features and assess engineering advances. As a result, most equipment manufacturers spend much more time studying their supply chains, labor costs and annual earnings than learning about what their customers think of their products. The upshot is a continuous loop of self-assessment that all but guarantees a continuation of the status quo.

As equipment suppliers see it, the risk of reaching out for feedback from the market is that they may receive disquieting news. Products don’t perform as advertised in sales brochures, automated controls and multiple functions are too difficult to master, cabinets are discouragingly difficult to keep sanitary, customer service is unhelpful, energy and/or water consumption is higher than projected, use-life is shorter. Who wants to hear news like that? The answer is, everyone who brings products and services to a marketplace.

In the real world of foodservice and restaurant operations, complaints and criticism are not only necessary, they’re valuable. How can any organization improve if it doesn’t find out from customers what it is doing wrong and where it needs to improve? Successful operators have come to understand that problems are opportunities, not headaches. No one wants to hear that he or she is doing a bad job, but never finding out about mistakes and short-falls only ensures that they’ll remain uncorrected. That’s why it behooves foodservice equipment manufacturers to cease judging their success by the achievement of internal benchmarks and begin to solicit input from end-users and specifiers to find out what they’re doing wrong.

Fortunately, there are more feedback-eliciting tools in today’s business environment than ever before. Social media sites, online surveys and Twitter campaigns can all supplement traditional focus groups, advisory councils and product education sessions. All it takes for foodservice equipment suppliers to learn what it takes to improve customer satisfaction with their products and services is a willingness to hear bad news. It’s amazing what improvements companies can attain when they stop telling themselves that they’re performing as well as they can.