Preintervention Analysis and Improvement of Customer Greeting in a Restaurant

Abstract

We examined customer greeting by employees at one location of a sandwich restaurant chain. First, a preintervention analysis was conducted to determine the conditions under which greeting a customer within 3 s of his or her entry into the restaurant did and did not occur. Results suggested that an appropriate customer greeting was most likely to occur when a door chime was used to indicate that a customer had entered the store and when the store manager was present behind the service counter. Next, a performance improvement intervention, which consisted of the combination of the use of a door chime and manager presence, was evaluated. Results showed that during baseline, a mean of 6% of customers were greeted; during intervention a mean of 63% of customers were greeted. The addition of manager-delivered verbal and graphic group feedback resulted in 100% of customers being greeted across two consecutive sessions.

Structural and Treatment Analyses of Safe and At-Risk Behaviors and Postures Performed by Pharmacy Employees

“…The results of this study are consistent with other OBM studies in that they suggest that a structural analysis can be an effective tool for identifying a simple and cost effective intervention (e.g., Green et al, 1991;Therrien et al, 2005). Participants' wrist postures were substantially more safe when the small cardboard box was used during both the descriptive analysis and structural analysis phases.…”

“…An analysis of OBM research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management and the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis revealed only a handful of studies that reported pretreatment assessment information and how it was gathered (for some exceptions, see Austin, Weatherly, & Gravina, 2005;Pampino, Heering, Wilder, Barton, & Burson, 2003;Rohn, Austin, & Lutrey, 2002;Smith & Chase, 1990). In addition, almost all pretreatment assessments in published OBM research are informant-based (for notable exceptions, see Fante, Gravina, & Austin, 2007;Pampino, Wilder, & Binder, 2005;and Therrien, Wilder, Rodriguez, & Wine, 2005).…”

“…A structural analysis has also been employed to examine employees' customer greeting behaviors in a sandwich shop to determine antecedent events associated with customer greeting (Therrien et al, 2005). The structural analysis utilized five antecedent conditions: manager present, radio, door chime, uncontrolled, and a control condition.…”

Using a guest‐ and confederate‐delivered token economy to increase employee–guest interactions at a zoo

“…This study bolsters previous research demonstrating that token economies increase desired performances in the workplace (e.g., Bourdon, 1977;Kent et al, 1977;Zohar & Fussfeld, 1981), and providing feedback to employees about their guest service can improve future guest-service interactions (e.g., Brown & Sulzer-Azaroff, 1994;Therrien et al, 2005). Furthermore, to our knowledge, this is the first workplace token economy where tokens were delivered by guests and confederates rather than managers.…”

“…In another example, Therrien, Wilder, Rodriguez, and Wine (2005) evaluated an intervention to increase guest greetings by employees at a sandwich shop. The authors assessed the likelihood of employees greeting guests during different conditions using a preintervention analysis.…”