Footprints on the Mountainside

I read this post Work Happy Now! » Give Employees the Power to Impress Customers and compared it with a really bad experience at a local coffee shop last month. Gauri, Ashish, Asha and I (friends from ISABS) went out for a coffee after one of our regular meetings. Should have been an uneventful situation, yet, it wasn’t a good service experience.

This place, a Barista was reasonably empty as we had arrived early in the evening. A young man came to take our orders. As we told him what we wanted, he suggested options and one of the menu items was not available. In short, not a single item was written down straight as requested. After a while, it got really frustrating, and Gauri lost her cool (as much as she does - she’s wonderfully composed, unlike me) and simply asked the man to bring us what we had asked for unless he didn’t have it. He left.

We spent some time talking about this mysterious behaviour. We investigated the menu, and the items he had suggested in the place of the ones we wanted weren’t priced particularly higher or lower, or newly launched, or anything. There was no pattern that we could see, and no particular reason we were given to opt for them rather than our original choices.

Time passed, and we got tired of analyzing the man’s behaviour (for a bunch of behavioural scientists fresh from a meeting on the subject, this is a LOT of time). People trickled in, places near us filled, Gauri met several people she knew, I met a friend I know….. No coffees…. a reminder or two had been made when we thought of it…

We were in no particular hurry, as we were enjoying our conversation, catching up, making plans and all, but we would have enjoyed it more over our respective coffees. Finally, I rudely called the chap as he was passing by and asked him if he intended to serve us “today”. At the scene, some action seemed to have happened, and with Gauri taking things further with some very direct statements to “get coffee-NOW” we finally got it.

Needless to say, I haven’t been to the place since. What I remember is that they didn’t want to serve me what I wanted, then they didn’t have what I wanted and when they took orders, they didn’t act on them. (I felt like asking them to burn the menus and simply tell customers what they wanted to serve). Bottom line was it felt like they didn’t want me to have coffee there. So I didn’t after that.

Comparing that with Yaro’s Starbucks experience, it is clear to see how it is not just the goof ups that drive customers away, but insensitivity. The waiter offering him a free beverage voucher when alerted to a delay made Yaro feel special and acknowledged. The inconvenience wasn’t that big a deal when compared with the sensitivity showed toward it, and a treat - it was a step to create a special memory for a customer. Why wouldn’t he go there again? He knows he is appreciated there, and immediate action is taken about inconveniences to him.

I bet he went there more often after this.