“I think she likes me.”
A former colleague, cup of coffee in hand, had just returned from the Pret A Manger on the ground floor of our office building.
“Who?” I asked.
“The girl down at Pret,” he said. “One of the cashiers.” He held up the coffee. “She just gave me this for free! And she gave me a free muffin last Thursday!” He sipped the coffee. “I mean, how else do you explain it?”
This former coworker, an irascible and peevish man, did not strike me as someone who would have struck the passing fancy of a Pret worker. He did have a striking accent, though, an attractor I have always underestimated. Perhaps that could explain it?
I shrugged. “I guess she likes you!”
~
I no longer work with that coworker, but years later would still chuckle whenever I thought of this story. A romance blooming across a Pret check-out counter! It had all the makings of a rom-com, or one of those New York Times “Modern Love” columns.
That is, until a few weeks ago, when I came across a passage in Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.
The item that jumped out at me was in a section exploring how certain retailers create “moments” for customers by “breaking the script,” basically, injecting some spontaneity into the experience that upended their expectations. Such moments could create powerful brand loyalty, refashioning what might otherwise be a boring retail exchange into something dramatic and unexpected, supplying an anecdote you would thereafter (tiresomely, no doubt) repeat to your friends and family.
For retailers, the opportunity to create such script-breaking moments, however, is paired with a challenge: your script-breaking should not be predictive. In other words, you cannot break the script in the same way with consistency. If you do, it gets baked into your customers’ expectations.
For example, if your bar starts giving out free well shots with every pitcher of beer on Thursday nights, patrons will be delighted by the free alcohol the first couple of Thursdays…but then they will begin to expect those free shots. (Worse still, you will be hard-pressed to take them away, once they are expected!) You’re no longer breaking the script—you’ve just rewritten it. Here are the Heaths explaining one retailer’s strategy for leveraging the power of script-breaking while avoiding this fate:
So how do you break the script consistently enough that it matters—but not so consistently that customers adapt to it? One solution is to introduce a bit of randomness. At the café chain Pret A Manger, for example, regular customers noticed that, every now and then, they’d be given something for free with their order. One service expert wrote, of getting free coffee, “It has happened a few times over the last few years, too often for it to be a coincidence, yet so infrequently that it is unexpected. This makes me feel valued as a customer, puts a smile on my face and encourages me to visit again.
These “spontaneous” gifts are only half-spontaneous, as it turns out. Pret A Manger employees are allowed to give away a certain number of hot drinks and food items every week. Pret CEO Clive Schlee said of his staffers, “They will decide ‘I like the person on the bicycle’ or ‘I like this guy in the tie’ or “I fancy that girl or that boy.’ It means that 28% of people have had something free.” […]
Other retail chains provide discounts or freebies to customers who use loyalty cards, of course, but Schlee told the Standard newspaper he rejected that approach: “We looked at loyalty cards but we didn’t want to spend all that money building up some complicated Clubcard-style analysis.”
This is ingenious. Pret A Manger has restored the surprise and humanity to perks that, in a loyalty card scheme, would have been systematized. Note that giveaways are satisfying for the staff as well as for the customers. In an industry where rules tend to govern every employee behavior, it’s a relief for employees to be given some discretion: Hey, every week, give away some stuff to whomever you like. It broke the script for them, too. In the service business, a good surprise is one that delights employees as well as customers.
There was a delightful push-and-pull for me in reading this passage, vis-à-vis my coworker’s experience: some justification—see, those gifts were planned!—only to then realize that the cashier might actually have liked him, after all! (“I fancy that girl or that boy.”)
In a sense, both of us were right: my former coworker about the cashier liking him (or at least liking his dress shirt, etc.) and me about there being more to a free coffee than appearances would suggest.
Taylor Coe 