Every marketer yearns to provide a consistent, extraordinary customer experience. At Chipotle Mexican Grill, company officials and employees strive toward that goal each and every day.
During Tuesday’s third-quarter earnings conference call, company leaders discussed the power of the Chipotle culture and its impact on customer engagement and brand loyalty.
“Our excellent results are possible because of the strength of our special people culture,” co-CEO Montgomery F. Moran said, according to Seeking Alpha. “By hiring teams of top performers, empowering them to achieve high standards and developing them to be leaders for our company, we’re setting ourselves up to be able to provide a consistently extraordinary restaurant experience, while also maintaining a strong unit economic model. Like our food culture, building the right people culture is an ongoing journey and is one that requires us to constantly push ourselves to find ways to get better and to raise the bar on the quality of the experience we provide.
During the quarter, Chipotle recorded sales of $1.2 billion, which represented an increase of 12%, and also opened 53 new restaurants.
“During the quarter, we hosted our biennial field leadership conference to bring together all of our field leaders and support departments to talk about how we can strengthen our culture,” Moran explained. “It was a wonderful and inspirational two days focused on how our field leaders can make a bigger impact in their restaurants and help our teams on the road to Restaurateur. We discussed the importance of instilling an inspiring vision, creating encouraging circumstances, and how to best utilize our diagnosis and plan tools to identify negative themes that are standing in the way of a restaurant achieving Restaurateur status.”
Co-CEO Steve Ells is optimistic that Chipotle is on track another successful fiscal performance this year.
“More than that, I am proud of the fact that we continued to deliver such strong results by maintaining true to our vision to change the way people think about any fast food,” Ells said. “We’re realizing this vision through constant attention to our unique food and people cultures and by innovating to improve upon these key drivers of our business even in the face of challenges. Of course, changing the way people think about and eat fast food requires more than overcoming supply chain challenges. We focus a lot of our marketing effort on educating customers through entertaining and creative approaches.”
Ells noted that Chipotle hired its first-ever Chief Information Officer. Curt Garner will be joining Chipotle on Nov. 23 and comes from Starbucks where he held the same position. In his 18 years at Starbucks, Garner helped build the technology infrastructure that began with fewer than 2,000 stores to one that now supports a global business.
“We believe that Curt’s background and expertise will be a great asset to Chipotle as we continue to seek ways to accelerate our use of technology to help strengthen our business,” Ells said.