Put a samurai attitude to your food delivery service at the last spot, the house door.
Samurai gives a hint to delivery
Wall Street Journal online edition of November 29, 2021 gave me a hint so that I would put a samurai lesson to the food delivery service’s most important moment, how to behave at the door.
I missed IHOP reading that the pancake company delivery outage in the evenings and in the weekend mornings due to a surge in diners coming to the restaurant.
Such a tasty pancakes should be irresistible enough not to come to eat at the restaurant.
Many restaurants followed suit, the article says.
It is no wonder that all the restaurants where diners began to rush into must put the priority to customers ordering food there.
Halting the delivery service is a doomed fate now that Covid-19 infection is declining.
The pitfall of food delivery service
However, there seems to be a pitfall where food deliverers might make light of.
That’s how to decline orders or how delivery staff behave in front of customers.
This is a story of a famous writer in Japan.
In his twitter account, he tweeted that he was not happy with the way a delivery staff was dressed.
many twitter users criticized him as arrogant and too bossy looking down on them saying “Why such a trifle matters”.
But there should be a rationale behind the writer’s honesty.
That is how he sees the way he was treated.
He felt he was treated badly having a delivery staff dressed in a rough way.
In a management perspective this is a matter of the value of experience which has been a focus in marketing for the last two decades.
The complaining writer should be satisfied by having a pleasant purchase experience which includes how a product or service is offered to him at the last spot, the door of his/her house.
A matter of customer experience
The WSJ article cited a case where customers felt uncomfortable with how delivery staff treated them at the last place.
That is the very place where clients should be treated right.
In other words, every good product/service is a failure without the last minute good treatment at the last spot.
This is also the place where brand is finally tested.
Brand is fragile open to any minor service mistake.
I wonder if how many brand-conscious restaurants are aware of this.
A Samurai view
From the standpoint of Bushi-do, the way of samurai, this is a matter of “Zanshin” which means on alert for every direction.
Zanshin literally means “a heart remains awake”.
In today’s Kendo, the Sword Way, every technique is not counted as ippon (win) without Zanshin.
Zanshin should be shown at the very moment when a final offence movement is done. Whenever a strike is done, the attacker should show that he/she should be on alert not losing any attention for any surprise attack from every direction.
I conclude that every good restaurant should see to it that they should use the right delivery company assuring them to hire delivery staff with Zanshin.
Ichiro Noro
Professor, Seiwa University, Japan
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