The Kings Of Customer Experience

How Warby Parker’s Neil Blumenthal and restaurateur Danny Meyer combine tech and human connection

- Noah Robischon

Whether you’re arguing with your cable company or trying to rebook a flight, awful customer service encounters are a disheartening part of daily life. But Union Square Hospitality Group restaurateur Danny Meyer—who wrote the influential 2006 statement of customer-care purpose Setting the Table—and Warby Parker’s Neil Blumenthal are helping inspire a new generation of companies to overhaul how they think about interacting with the public. Meyer and Blumenthal have both turned their unusual philosophies into booming businesses with enormous loyalty, as they explain to Fast Company’s Noah Robischon.

How do you decide where and how to implement technology in your business? Danny, you’ve said that you’re going to have employees at the Union Square Cafe wear Apple Watches.

DANNY MEYER: First of all, the goal should not be to remove humans from the equation, but [to] empower human beings who actually have a beating heart and who are caring people to achieve a greater degree of hospitality. The moment you tell me that tech should be used to remove people, that’s just not something I want to be part of. Two kinds of employees will be outfitted with Apple Watches: managers and sommeliers. There is a gentle ping that could go from the manager to the front desk to say table 62 is ready. Or when a waiter places an order for a bottle of wine, the sommelier, who is wearing a watch, gets a ping and can bring you that bottle and save eight minutes. [Our] system can say table 42 has just paid their bill, and they can ping the coat checker and have your coats ready for you at the front door so you can be off. The bottom line of all this is, can we give you back the gift of time?