Making It Cool To Care with Brian Klinger

Zack: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Give an Ovation, the Restaurant Guest Experience podcast, where I talk to industry experts to get their strategies and tactics you can use to create a five-star guest experience. This podcast is sponsored by Ovation, a two-question guest feedback platform that gives restaurants all the answers without annoying their guests. With all the questions. Learn more at ovationupcom. And today we have Brian Klinger with us, a senior strategic partnerships executive at Comcast, and I wanted to have Brian on because not only is he top voice for restaurants, he's a digital journey evangelist for restaurants. He's a motivational speaker and this guy just knows everyone and everyone likes him. He's not just oh, there we go, you're rocking the shades, looking good man For those of you who are listening, brian just put on a pair of sunglasses and looks really cool. So anyway, brian, welcome to the podcast. Man Zach, what?

Brian: 0:53

a pleasure. What a pleasure, Big fan. Love your podcast, love your company, love what you're doing in the industry, brother, so it's an honor to be here, my man.

Zack: 1:02

I'm excited to have you on, and my guests normally don't out-shirt me, but this day you have Brian. He is wearing a Dunkin' Donuts hoodie and he is looking good.

Brian: 1:14

Oh, oh, brother, it's the onesie head to toe. Oh, that's a onesie Onesie head to toe. If I could pan down you would see it. I mean, it is all down. The only thing it's missing are the booties on the feet. You know, like I have to wear a tennis shirt. Oh yeah, the next version 2.0 of the onesie needs to actually have the little footy in it. So you're covered head to toe.

Zack: 1:37

That is amazing. I love that. Did you see Ben Affleck?

Brian: 1:40

Well, brian, did you see what Matt Damon and Ben Affleck did? You see the Super Bowl commercial with the Dunkin's no, no, I missed it.

Brian: 1:46

Yeah, they're rocking like these big jumpsuits, like kind of throwback to the 80s. You know parachute pants and MC Hammerish almost just got a lot of play on it. So those things just went on sale yesterday at 12 o'clock. They sold out in about 10 minutes. But I was like you know what? This is my little homage to the Ben Affleck. You know Matt Damon, super Bowl. You know throw out. So here we are.

Zack: 2:06

There we go, like it, man. Well, brian, I'm excited to have you on. You know you work with so many different restaurants and you know so many different restaurants and different restaurant executives and what is, as you're looking at all these people that you talk to and they open up to you, what do you feel like is one of the things that people do consistently wrong, like what is a mistake, that you often see in the restaurant industry?

Brian: 2:33

Man. That is a fantastic question. I think what I find people are always striving for is how do we ring the register? How do we get the check size a little bigger? How do we solve for the labor challenge? We're all looking at the same common challenges in the industry, but at the end of the day and you can look at like let's just talk about Chick-fil-A for a second why do they do so? Well, and they would tell you not because they got the best chicken sandwich. There's a lot of great chicken sandwiches right they talk about.

Brian: 3:03

Their goal is to be the world's most caring company and I think the misstep that we can kind of it's like not seeing the forest for the trees is we think about technology, we think about digital, we think about personalization, but you've got to remember there's still human beings on the other side of that interaction and there's human beings working behind the counter. Even though we're all looking at kiosk now, we're looking at mobile and we're looking at automation, but there's still people at the end of the day. So I would say that we've all got to and I'm preaching to myself be really focused on. What does that mean to the human, to human element, the human interaction.

Brian: 3:42

And I'll give you another quick little story on Chick-fil-A. They've been a long time partner of ours is, and I've got stories on Duncan too. I mean they're all incredible in how they focus on care. But Truett, cathy, I don't know if you've heard the stories that, but when you go to Chick-fil-A and you say thank you to someone working in the drive through or behind the counter, what do they say back to you?

Zack: 4:01

My pleasure.

Brian: 4:02

My pleasure. Did you know that Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A? It took him seven years for the company to embrace that mindset of saying my pleasure and there's a lot of videos you can find if you search out on the internet for it where Truett's in these big auditoriums and there's a room full of Chick-fil-A employees and operators and he'll say what do we say when people say thank you, my pleasure, like he's training up an army. But it took seven years at.

Brian: 4:32

So to answer that question, it's Truett was radically focused on. At the end of the day, I want to show hospitality and I want to show care on a human relationship level, but he stuck to it, to his credit, and now you know what that brand stands for. It's my pleasure. So I think that it's just being intentional about care.

Zack: 4:51

Yeah, and I love that. Will Kedera I love his book on reasonable hospitality, and in there he talks about how they made it cool to care.

Brian: 4:58

Yeah, 100% yeah. It's their mantra and that's exactly who they are.

Zack: 5:03

And that's the magic, right Is? I think that your spot on, which is all of this stuff, boils down to one thing, which is the guest, and the guest needs to feel important. They need to feel heard, they need to feel loved. Right, and if you look at technology, OK, you could increase convenience, but you can't decrease care.

Zack: 5:25

Yeah exactly, and I remember one time I ordered from a kiosk and I got the locker and I got my chicken and I took a bite of it. It was raw. By raw I mean like completely raw in the middle and frozen. And if you want a bad experience, take a bite of a chicken nugget that's frozen on the inside and I just got a thumbs up, pop it up there, but that is definitely like a thumbs down.

Brian: 5:48

Yeah, exactly.

Zack: 5:49

The way that I look at it is you've got to care about the human, and it all starts with the heart and everything else follows. You can't throw guests experience at the very end of the line.

Brian: 6:00

That's it, and I'll tell you one of the things. Back to your question. Such a great question. Matter of fact, that's the first time anyone's ever asked me that. So kudos to you, because there's so many ways you could peel that apart.

Brian: 6:10

Think about the team member experience. If the team member is not poured into and invested in and cared for and reached in, winning hearts and minds. They talk about the red matter, the heart and the gray matter, winning those hearts and minds. There's a great book called Remarkable, david Salyers wrote. He's a former executive of Chick-fil-A marketing department. He talks about that.

Brian: 6:34

But if the employees and they'll tell you, apathy is a cancer that just kills your business, and if employees don't care, the guest is going to feel that. So you've got to make your employees feel cared for first and then they can show that care element back to those guests if you want to be consistent. And then how do you manage through that Reward when they do things right? We oftentimes just look at clipboards and KPIs and metrics and we just kind of have this level of expectation. We're real quick to come down when things don't go right and they're going wrong. But how do we celebrate when things do go well, how do we celebrate those employees that stand out and use them to be those models for others to follow? So, man, just a great questions, that good opener.

Zack: 7:18

Well, and I think that it's so. We're all in this swimming in the same pool, facing the same currents, and as we look, I remember one time I was in Hawaii surfing and I got caught in this rip current and I got pulled out far and I remember I asked this guy hey, how do I get back? He's like just keep paddling brah. And I'm like, ok, but thank you. But how do I get back? He's like, oh well, come over here cause and then paddle forward. If we can see and learn from each other, we can just all get to where we want to get too faster and at the end of the day, rising tides, man, that's what it's all about, right?

Brian: 7:57

And Zach. I've got a quick story on that. I mean going back to Truett Cathy, in one of the books I've read about Truett and how he managed people, there was an employee that worked at one of their first restaurants in a mall and the employee just would not have that warm smile, that warm look that make eye contact speak with enthusiasm. The person was just kind of, in our eyes would be viewed as checking a box, just kind of indifferent, you know oh, my pleasure.

Brian: 8:26

You know, just kind of yeah, just kind of like hey, here it is going through the motions right, and instead of Truett coming over and going now, I told you it needs to be my pleasure and do this, and that he simply walked over to the young lady and said I just love your smile, I just love the way you're interacting with the guest, I just love the warmth that you're showing to these people. It's so incredible, even though she wasn't doing it. And then he came back a few minutes later, you know, and checked on her. He goes, everything good. And then an hour later I just love the way you're interacting. And then light bulb went off and she's like I get it, I know what I'm supposed to be doing now. He had such a way of reaching people without beating them up or putting them down, and he showed that level of care first, and it's just a real opportunity for all of us to learn from that as we go about our day to day.

Zack: 9:14

You know, Amen and speaking of it, all of this, like we talked about, has boiled down to the guest experience, and so what do you think is the most important aspect of guest experience nowadays?

Brian: 9:25

Oh man, I can tell you from my own personal journey. You know I want personalization. I think everybody knows that right, there's a level of expectation.

Brian: 9:33

But I also want accuracy and you know when you think about the restaurants and I have a lot of grace and a lot of empathy for the restaurant operators. The original restaurant you can imagine it was a diner. You sat down. Someone came over, took your order, probably on a notepad, called it out to the back or stuck a ticket in the window. They fixed the order, shoved it out in front of you on a plate.

Brian: 9:51

Right Now there's orders coming in six ways from Sunday and you can just imagine the stressors that are being placed onto the staff and getting the accuracy right. And I know there's great technology now with machine vision and all the AI and all the IoT and how do we automate this stuff? But at the end of the day, you know where I want to go into a restaurant and you know who does it really well, Waffle House, waffle House. Well, could you all look at that Waffle House If you're a regular patron of a Waffle House, they really have a cultural mandate that they want their people behind the counter to know who Zach is and where do your kids go to school and you know where do you.

Brian: 10:29

Oh, how was Timmy's soccer game Sunday? And stuff like that right, and it's that kind of throwback mentality that Waffle House has kind of go in there some time and check them out. They're trying to stay true to that person-to-person personalization interaction, but doing it old school style. You know they've got mobile ordering and you can place it over your phone app and everything.

Zack: 10:51

Even during a tornado you can place those orders.

Brian: 10:54

And think about that. Right, they're a safe place to go during hurricanes and disasters and they've kind of showed that level of care in communities. But I just think that people for me, I want it to be accurate, I want it to be frictionless, I want the entire experience to be somewhere where I go and I think you know what they're not apathetic, they do care for me. But what a challenge that is in this climate.

Brian: 11:17

It seems like after the pandemic hit, nobody wants to go to work and the ones that do go to work, you know they're thinking, well, listen, for me, I'm going to leave tomorrow, kind of thing. So how do you retain and attract the right people and then train them up and give them opportunities to grow with the business or at least feel like they are a part of? You know some success story, right? So that gets back to leadership, it's back to motivation and celebrating those good things. But yeah, man, I want it to be right, I want it to be accurate, I want it to be frictionless and I want them to know me.

Zack: 11:48

I love that because the accuracy what we find is that accuracy is one of the angriest negative reviews that you're going to get is about accuracy it is. It is Because they feel like I paid for something and I didn't get it. You stole from me because you didn't give me what I bought right and there's a real like injustice there and so, yeah, accuracy is so important nowadays. And what are some tactics that you've seen to improve the guest experience?

Brian: 12:17

Yes, so think about this is just one of many I can share, but this is something near and dear to my heart, because Comcast is actually you know, we're one of the largest venture capital companies in the US. A lot of people don't know that, that we have a massive venture arm through our NBC Sports Tech program and also our Lyft Labs accelerator and our Ventures organization. So we're always looking around the corner at emerging technologies and we're vetting them, both for our own use, because, you know, we operate global theme parks and these global theme parks have restaurants. We operate in many arenas around the country. We own sports teams, professional teams, we have our movie studios and our film and media entities and all the IP and technology companies that come underneath the umbrella of Comcast, nbc Universal.

Brian: 13:00

But when you look at the restaurant industry specifically and this is not, you know, specific to the US this is a global challenge.

Brian: 13:06

A lot of the people that work in behind the counter, in the back of the kitchen, and especially it's talk to US about 40% of the kitchen staff don't speak English.

Brian: 13:16

So when you think about order accuracy, if the kitchen display system is reading out the order in English and the person that's actually preparing the order speaks Portuguese. That could be some challenging situations. So we actually invested in a company called let's Chat L-E-T-Z-C-H-A-T and let's Chat is a company that's been around about 10 years. They owned the patent on device language detection. So if your cell phone or a tablet or a computer is set to Spanish and you pull up a website or a mobile app, it will basically show that app instantly in your language that you prefer. That can integrate into the point of sale system, the kitchen display systems, into kiosks, into digital menu boards, and so they are helping to solve and they're actually integrating with a lot of the common partners you may see in the restaurant technology industry that are serving back of house or even guest experiences in the front of house by integrating that language technology solution to break down the language barrier.

Zack: 14:21

Yeah, I see Bojangles, mcdonald's and the FL.

Brian: 14:25

Yep, and so now you're able to increase the likelihood of accuracy. When I'm preparing the meal in my native language, I see it in my language, so somebody could be speaking into the menu board out front, and here's a really mind-blowing one's act. It also has the ability to detect the language. Ai voice ordering is a big thing. Right now, they can actually allow you to speak in Chinese Mandarin into the menu board and the person in the kitchen hears it in English or whatever preferred language they have. It does that type of communication as well. So we're using it not only to offer it to our partners in the industry and customers, but also for ourself across our global businesses. We just signed a large global MSA with those guys last year.

Brian: 15:10

So that's an example of how we can use technology that's patented. They own their own large language library. These are just phenomenal entrepreneurs and Comcast, being a big venture company, said you know what? We want to invest in this and also use it for ourself, and the end result will be that we're able to increase accuracy in that kitchen because the people that are fulfilling those orders that don't speak English as their native language whatever that language is they're able to solve for it and allow it to be personalized to raise that level of accuracy of older fulfillment, and that's been proven out in tests with other restaurants that have deployed it so far.

Zack: 15:46

That's super cool. I mean, that's a great idea, great company, let's chat. Just check out their website. That's super, super cool. So, brian, you know, like I said at the beginning, you know everyone. So who is someone in the restaurant industry that deserves an ovation, who is someone that we should be following?

Brian: 16:02

Ah, if you're not following Stuart Brown, you need to follow this guy. So Stuart Brown is the executive director of the Inspire Brands Foundation. So if you can think of Inspire Brands, that's Duncan, jimmy John, sonic Arby's, buffalo Wild Wings, baskin Robbins. They have a foundation led by Stuart Brown that literally impacts millions of children every year to provide food, to provide medical needs, to provide, you know, shelter and services. And they partner with a lot of the big nonprofits out there, like Boys and Girls Clubs and Feeding America and no Child Hungry. And then they've also got another arm of nonprofit group called the Duncan Joy Foundation and Duncan Joy is led by Amy Eldridge and they do a lot of great work with kids who are battling illness, kids that are battling hunger.

Brian: 16:52

And I love to support restaurant brands that have a cause, that are giving back to communities and serving communities and funneling their resources back to make a difference in people's lives. So Stuart Brown, just an amazing human being. Amy Eldridge, also equally amazing, and just check out a lot of the cool activations. You know South by Southwest is something that you know a lot of people go to. They're starting their own version of that in Atlanta that Inspire started last year and Comcast was a sponsor of it, and a lot of other big businesses in the area were as well. Ludacris, who was also featured in the Super Bowl this past.

Zack: 17:28

Sunday.

Brian: 17:28

He was on stage. He's a big champion for a lot of community impact causes and you know these guys are doing big time work in the community, so glad to be a corporate partner of theirs, both from a technology standpoint and also from a community impact nonprofit standpoint.

Zack: 17:44

Love that Again, it starts with leading from the heart. Man Right, you lead from the heart and it guides you to these things. You don't do them as just like a PR stunt, but you do them because you care, like you were talking about. That's it, brian. Where can people go to learn more about you and what you're up to?

Brian: 18:00

Man, just check me out on LinkedIn or you can also go to hashtag quick bike crew. I usually get on there. I do a lot of advocacy for the restaurant industry. You'll never hear me talk about Comcast when I'm out there sharing things with the quick bike crew, you know. But we're out there to advocate and celebrate and spotlight all the cool things that are going on in the restaurant and hospitality world, and so it's not about us, it's all about them and we want them to succeed in whatever we can do to spotlight them, champion them. Man, hit me up. You got an idea for a quick bike video. Want me to spotlight something cool and interesting? You know, hit me up. Either go through ZAC, come to me directly either way, and we'll shine a light on it.

Zack: 18:36

Awesome. Well, check out Brian Klinger on LinkedIn. His posts are awesome. He's a top voice. Like I said, got some great motivations there. So, Brian, for helping to stay connected both through Comcast and motivations, today's Ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Give an Ovation.

Brian: 18:50

Thank you so much, zach. You're awesome man. Appreciate your brother.

Zack: 18:53

Thanks for joining us today. If you liked this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We're all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by Ovation, a two-question, sms-based actionable guest feedback platform built for multi-unit restaurants. If you'd like to learn how we can help you measure and create a better guest experience, visit us at ovationupcom.