Connected User Experiences & Kitchen Nightmares
Every episode of Kitchen Nightmares follows the same general sequence. Gordon shows up at the front door and greets the owner, and then heads into the restaurant. He is seated by a host or waiter and proceeds to order a meal. Generally, speaking that’s where the trouble starts. As Gordan flows into his meal, he’ll comment on the pace, the quality, and execution. After what is generally a horrible meal, Gordon heads into the kitchen to meet the staff and check the kitchen conditions. Often the most enjoyable part of the show is Gordan ripping into the freezers.
Your Digital Kitchen
Now take a minute to consider the connected experiences. Everything from the signage, the front door, the host, the menu, the table setting, and the freezers, and the kitchen is part of a connected user experience. It is relatively easy to see how a dirty kitchen or a rude host ruins a dinner experience. When a kitchen is genuinely highly functioning, everyone is working in concert. The wait staff, the cooks, the head chef, and the owners together create an environment. Everyone must work together across functions to truly execute.
Now consider your digital experiences. Are they connected? Is the digital food you are putting on the plate a representation of your organization’s capabilities? Or is it raw?
Michelin Star Guide:
- One star: Very good cooking in its category.
- Two stars: Excellent cooking, worth a detour.
- Three stars: Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.
When you think about the role of your digital experiences in your overall customer experiences, what level are you targeting? Being very good in a category is good enough for some. For the visionaries and digital leaders, the goal is exceptional. What makes an outstanding digital experience? What makes a digital experience one that is worthy of your audience going out of their way to experience it?
Meticulous
The critical bit of insight here is to consider each step in the experience as a connected step. Your digital experiences need to provide the same care and attention to detail as a Michelin starred restaurant. To earn that star, you need to be meticulous. Treat every digital experience as though it’s the night of the inspection. Make sure your audience experience is as exceptional as possible day in and day out. Being meticulous means that you are cleaning, tasting, testing, innovating, and only sending out food when it’s fully cooked in every step in your connected experience.
Disciplined
Great connected experiences require discipline. The pursuit of excellence requires constant attention to detail. Discipline requires your organization to know what audience they are serving.
- What type of digital food are you great at making?
- Are your digital experiences targeted?
- Are you authentic?
- Does your digital experience match your story?
Quality Products
In Kitchen Nightmares, a root cause of failure comes down to the quality of the prepared product. Starting with something frozen or processed is rarely a recipe for great connected experiences. When it comes to digital, it is imperative to evaluate the quality of the products you are using to prepare your connected experiences. Many times it comes down to how off-the-shelf or how custom you can afford. In Kitchen Nightmares, sometimes the food quality is too high for the audience or too expensive for the business to survive. In many cases, simplicity in execution goes further than trying to over-prepare or over-elaborate. That said, expensive products can often be the downfall of a business. If the margin isn’t there or will not sell to your audience, consider if simplicity is a better option.
Digital Mastery
In cooking and in digital, it’s essential to recognize that greatness is rarely the result of a lone genius. We don’t know any digital savants. Organizations that seek digital mastery understand that skill develops over time. Mastery requires learning overtime. Mastery means investing in innovation and experimentation. With food and digital, experimentation is vital. Without experimentation, your connected experiences will quickly go out of fashion. Beware of becoming the stodgy old restaurant that no longer relevant. Keeping up is a baseline expectation. Digital experiments are highly structured attempts at continual improvement, not at all arbitrary. Digital mastery requires experimentation.
Are you a fan of Kitchen Nightmares? Share you thoughts in the comments below.
Image Credit: “Camp Meeting Sketches: Cooking” by Winslow Homer (American, 1836-1910) is marked with CC0 1.0
