3. Imagine that you have decided to implement a script for your frontline employees. Write the service script for bakery clerks. It has been two years since you took over your family’s chain of specialty neighborhood bakeries located in areas with high foot traffi c.76 Throughout the city, your stores are the choice for birthday cakes, Christmas cookies, Valentine’s Day cupcakes, and the daily doughnut.

Even though sales are steady, you want to grow and are having a diffi cult time fi guring out exactly how to increase revenues. For the past three weeks, you have spent each day in a different store, stocking cases, slicing bread, and generally pitching in where needed, but mostly you have been observing.

As luck would have it, about 80 percent of your stores are located near or next to a Starbucks. On your way to the stores each morning, you have stopped to get your morning coffee, and at each Starbucks, you have been greeted quickly, chatted with the clerk, ordered, heard your order repeated across the bar, used a loaded Starbucks card to pay, been asked if you want your balance, and been told to have a nice day. Today is the same.

As you wait for your coffee, you think about the contrast between this prescribed sequence and what you have been seeing in your own stores. Even though your clerks serve customers effi ciently, they do so in various ways.

Some clerks are outgoing, talking and laughing with the customer while assembling the order. Other clerks are more reserved, fi lling the order quickly but with little conversation and barely a smile.

Now that you have noticed these differences, everywhere you shop you’ve been paying attention to sales speech patterns, which appear scripted and repetitive but pleasantly predictable. From the grocery (“Do you have any coupons?” and “Paper or plastic?”) to the fast-food restaurant (“Do you want fries with that?” and “For here or to go?”), the patterns are most noticeable during busy periods. Clerks follow the same speech sequence with every customer.