This week, I did some reading in a primer on the topic of nouvelle cuisine, the “modern style” of cooking – figuring that a chef attempting to please a diner likely has some parallels to a customer service professional attempting to please a prospect or customer. And, indeed, I found a number of tidbits worth bringing back to my own field:
Reject excessively elaborate preparation and presentation methods, and shun the use of rich and heavy sauces that overpower the taste of the main ingredient.
In terms of cuisine, the modern style focuses on choosing good ingredients and preparing them skillfully, not by doing things that are labor-intensive or unusual, but getting the basics right. A proper entree needs only a few basic seasonings and careful preparation – and when it hits the plate it should still look and taste like exactly what it is.
Relating this to customer experience: there are a lot of bizarre ideas that are tried in order to put a “fresh” spin on a product or a transaction, which are done simply because they are unusual and are expected to amaze and delight the customer. None of this buffoonery substitutes for getting the basics right, and an unobtrusive but competent service experience is always appreciated.
Reduce cooking time to serve food that is prepared on demand and served fresh.
In terms of cuisine, this principle focuses on the quality of the meal served to each individual diner, rather than the quantity of meals served to all diners. Cafeterias and similar venues practice “utility cooking” that is meant to save time or effort and serve a mass of people poorly-prepared food, which is convenient for the kitchen but repulsive to the patrons it serves.
Relating this to customer experience: beware of making the efficiency of a business operation your primary concern. Cutting costs to boost profits will always be an attractive option for the accountants who are concerned with expenses, but if it compromises the experience of the customer, they will be less willing to provide revenue from which those expenses are paid.
A second principle for customer experience is customized and just-in-time delivery. In the present day customers are less prone to humbly accept a product that has been mass-produced and more likely to demand a product that has been tailored to their needs, and they are willing to pay more because customized products are more valuable and relevant to them.
Serve a smaller menu to a more limited clientele.
In terms of cuisine, nouvelle was not created as the cuisine for everyone – the majority of people would cling to traditional ways and were perfectly happy eating slops from a community caldron. The nouvelle tradition did not lower itself to provide what the masses wanted cheaply, but catered to the wealthy and, over time, gained popularity with the masses without compromising its standards.
“Serving a smaller menu” translates into becoming more specialized and limited in your product lines as well as making products that are specifically designed to meet a small number of needs (perhaps to perform even a single task) in a competent and effective manner rather than offering so many products or so many features that you lose focus and expertise in doing any of them particularly well.
Relating to customer experience: beware of trying to be everything to everyone, as the low quality of experience that characterizes most industries is the result of attempting to do exactly that: to identify and conform to the lowest common denominator in order to attract as many customers as possible. It can regularly be seen that new products begin with a small following and spread slowly over time – and it is necessary to be patient, rather than attempt to have broad appeal immediately.
Consider the dietary needs of your guests by avoiding red meats, frying, and the use of excessive amounts of salts and sugars.
In the culinary world, nouvelle cuisine addressed a new problem in the dietary habits of the modern age: people no longer suffered from lack of enough food, but suffered from the wrong kinds of foods. And while red meats, fats, and salt were agreeable to the palate, they were harmful to the healthiness of the diner, which is ultimately in the long-term interests of the chef that serves them.
In terms of customer experience: beware of things that customers think are attractive, but which are ultimately contrary to their interests. This requires sellers to avoid the “low hanging fruit” of things that customers think are good, and providing a product that serves their actual needs well – recognizing that things that are superficially attractive will secure a quick sale, but things that are actually valuable will secure greater long-term engagements and repeated sales.
Do not shun new techniques and devices, but leverage them for their value.
In the culinary world, cooks of the time were insistent upon using outdated techniques and took the attitude that anything that made a task faster or easier would result in an inferior product. But the nouvelle school dismissed this irrational prejudice and maintained that new tools and methods were not to be automatically shunned – but embraced so long as quality was not compromised. The customer will never know, and does not care, if his meal was heated in a convection oven or a regular one – and so long as taste and texture are preserved, there is no reason to shun this new device.
In terms of customer experience: beware of clinging to processes and technologies simply because there is an insistence that “it’s the way we’ve always done it” but at the same time do not be too quick to adopt any new process or technology if it is detrimental to the quality of experience. The customer does not know, nor should they care, what software package you use to pay your vendors, and so long as the package delivery service you use gets the item to their door as promised, they should not care about the partner you choose.
Innovation, creativity, and distinctiveness are to be valued over adherence to tradition.
Particularly when you are preparing a well-known and traditional cuisine, diners have a rigid and clearly defined set of standards by which they will assess what you serve, and expect it to conform exactly to tradition. But nouvelle cuisine is about breaking from tradition and offering clients something they may never have experienced before, and may find pleasurable and even preferable to traditional standards.
In terms of customer experience: beware of giving people exactly what they expect because they have become accustomed to receiving it, particularly when you are adhering to traditions that have nothing to do with the value that the product delivers. Just because people are used to waiting in line at a cash register doesn’t mean that they value this element of the experience, and it likely should not be preserved simply because it is expected.
Not everything old is bad, and not everything new is good.
I’ve heard seemingly well-informed people pontificate that nouvelle cuisine is a product of the twentieth century, when rapid transportation, refrigeration, and motorized kitchen appliances enabled preparations that had not been at all possible before these technologies existed. Unfortunately, that perspective is dead wrong.
“Nouvelle” cuisine made its debut in the 1730s, nearly three hundred years ago, and many of the principles of nouvelle are as valid and valued by today’s diners as they were then. Certainly, technology has made nouvelle cuisine available and affordable to far more people than it originally was, but the concepts it embraces are quite old and well established, and worth preserving.
Often, what people mistake for nouvelle cuisine is the school of molecular gastronomy, which uses chemical preparations and laboratory equipment to do very bizarre things with food, such that it is not recognized as something edible and delivers an experience more of fear and wonder than culinary delight. In the hands of a skilled practitioner, molecular gastronomy can be quite good and enjoyable as a novelty, though it may be decades or centuries before it becomes common practice in the home kitchen – but in the hands of a novice, it can be quite disgusting and produce a meal that qualifies as “food” merely by the fact that it is not poisonous.
And at the risk of being tedious, the same is true for customer experience: people still seek to fulfill the same needs with today’s products as they have been seeking to fulfill for as long as the species existed, and many of the “old” principles of customer service are not to be discarded simply because of the date they were discovered. Neither should any “new” principle or practice be automatically adopted on the assumption that novelty has greater value.
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