How does your business handle ‘off-menu’ requests?

To celebrate a Bank Holiday weekend in the UK, I took my son and ex-girlfriend on a trip down to Woburn Safari Park on Sunday, and on the way back we decided to eat at our nearest OK Diner.

It’s a pretty regular thing for my son and I. He’d quite happily live on hot dogs every day, I’m a fan of burgers (Particularly their bacon and guacamole burger), and he seems to have inherited my love of 50’s American style and music. Plus, the kids menu comes with crayons and pictures to colour in, which gives the two of us something to do!

 

But I left feeling a bit disappointed in myself. You see, as part of the kids meal, you get the choice of vanilla, strawberry or chocolate ice cream, but when my son first got offered a choice of flavours, he picked mint.

And until now, the waiting staff have happily accommodated him, which has made it feel a bit more special. This time though, the waitress enforced the menu options, so he settled on chocolate instead.

Part of me says that’s fine – it’s a clear menu option after all. But part of me wondered why I just accepted it – I could have either asked for a favour or even offered a pound or two to see if they’d have upgraded the ice cream. It’s not the English way to go ‘off-menu’, but it would have kept the special feeling that I and my four-year-old had after getting a ‘special’ ice cream.

I’m sure we’ll be eating there again soon – great milkshakes and burgers are a necessity in life – but it started me wondering whether my son will now automatically go for a menu choice or stick to his guns next time, and how all sorts of businesses react to special requests.

 

How does your business handle ‘off-menu’ requests?

Every business involves a lot of consideration for what can be offered, what is profitable enough, and how that can be presented in the marketplace. Often it’s more about ruling out possibilities to maintain some focus and direction, and to be able to market a clear message.

But in every case there will always be customers who want to tweak what you do. Maybe they want a different colour or size, or maybe they want an additional service bundled into your offering. And as time goes by, clients may have a wider range of needs that they’d like to come from one provider, or that they hadn’t considered previously.

Image by Dean on Flickr (CC License)

So how do you deal with them?

I don’t believe any business can try and please all the people, all the time. Some requests are going to be completely uneconomical to fulfill.

But I think you have a couple of choices.

• Where it incurs little or no downside, accommodate the request. An off-menu scoop of ice cream might eat very slightly into the profit margin on a particular meal, but the cost would be marginal, particularly compared to the lifetime value of 2-3 people regularly buying full meals.
• Where it incurs a prohibitive downside, explain the reasons for denying the request, and if possible recommend alternative solutions. That may mean exposing some of the challenges you face as a business, and even suggesting someone goes to a competitor company, but in the long run you’ll find that good, honest reasons and recommendations would gain you more than just saying no.

There are several companies who have achieved oft-quoted success with that customer service approach, such as Zappos, who train their reps to recommend competitor websites if they don’t have what a customer wants. And 10 years after founding in 1999, it was acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion. CEO Tony Hsieh published a book about company culture and process called ‘Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose‘.

And there are plenty of restaurants and bars around the world which have off-menu choices known to a select few (until they become widely-shared on the internet).

Even McDonalds and other fast food outlets have ‘off-menu’ choices, although I can’t vouch for them being available in the UK. Or edible.

But the key isn’t having special items, or allowing special requests. The key is empowering the people who run your business at every level to be able to handle those decisions effectively.

• Empower every person in your business to be able to handle any off-menu request. Your customers benefit from being special. Your employees and colleagues benefit from being trusted to make those decisions. And your business benefits massively in the age of digital recommendations and the amplified word-of-mouth.

Global culture is changing dramatically, and everyone is becoming more accustomed to being able to customise any purchase to be exactly what they desire. If you’re not looking at ways to incorporate that customer need into your business, you risk losing them to someone which will.