Chick-fil-A restaurants offer crispy chicken favorites, but their culture is based on more than the food menu. Decades ago, the chain’s late founder Truett Cathy established workplace and customer-service practices based on kindness. Like his founder and his restaurant crew, Chick-fil-A franchisee Kevin Williams believes in a benevolent approach to business. His book overflows with inspiring stories and encouraging messages, offering a perspective on corporate culture that unabashedly derives from his Christian religious beliefs.
In Kevin Williams’s three Chick-fil-A restaurants, employees can give away free food.
Here’s an experience you won’t witness in most fast-food restaurants, unless you’re eating at one of Kevin Williams’s three Chick-fil-A outlet in Canton, Georgia, north of Atlanta.
A restaurant team member named Cooper carefully prepares a handwritten note – a Cooper Coupon – and gives it to a diner, a little girl. His one-of-a-kind note announces that she is entitled to a free ice cream cone, and it invites her to come back to the kitchen where she can prepare her special treat all by herself – a VIP pass to a memorable experience.
Was this a special promotion? No. Did Williams instruct Cooper to write the note and give it to a customer? No. Cooper thought it up and decided to do it on his own. Did he get in trouble for giving away free food or for inviting a child into the off-limits-to-customers kitchen? No. And did his kind gesture make a new Chick-fil-A customer for life? Sure.
Williams encourages his employees to be kind to everyone, most notably their customers. If that means giving a little kid a free ice cream cone, that’s fine with the boss.
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