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Olive Garden Case Analysis Essay

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Case Analysis of Olive Garden Restaurants Division
Brief Overview
On Tuesday evening around 8:15 pm, Mr. Martin A. Wallace accompanied by his father and two daughters, entered an Olive Garden Restaurant expecting to be greeted with a friendly smile and great customer service. This was not the case. Instead, Mr. Wallace was not greeted by any host/hostess, but instead an empty station. After waiting about ten minutes, he went to the bar to find someone to seat him and his family. Only then did a hostess take them to their table and appeared to be annoyed. The hostess tried to seat them in a section that was not possible for Mr. Wallace’s father to get to easily since he is handicapped. After a short conversation, she then took them to a …show more content…

The critical issues relevant in this case are: the employees as well as the manager showed no signs of respect for the customers’ physical needs, time, or opinion of the restaurant by both verbal and non-verbal cues; and key corporate customer service strategies were not being implemented. The key concerns for the corporate office should first and foremost be the fact that their own customer service strategies were not being implemented in this location. Olive Garden uses the term Hospitaliano, as their slogan meaning 100% customer delight (Anonymous, 2011). The first sign of this not being followed was the issues with the hostess. There was not anyone waiting at the hostess stand to greet newly arriving customers. Once the customer did track someone down to wait on them, the hostess then responded with her facial expressions and body language as though she was ready to go home and was not happy about having to seat another customer. She also did not pay attention to the customers’ needs, by not grabbing the appropriate menus and trying to sit the customers in an area which was physically impossible for one to get to. She showed no regard to the customer being handicapped and almost irritated that it might take longer for her to go home. Another example in this case of corporate strategy not being followed was the customers had to wait over 15 minutes to order a drink or food and that was only because a waiter from a different section realized they

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