Striking the balance with customer service, like anything else worth doing properly, isn’t always easy. Especially when so many people in the last decade have confused the expectation of good customer service with playing up like a spoiled six year-old.
Today, for example, three old ladies came in. Before you start, they’d be the first to describe themselves that way. They didn’t move particularly briskly but they ordered coffee while they were still coming through the door. By the time they’d got themselves settled – and it took some time – the coffee was cold. Oh, and some cake, young man.
I made them more coffee. Hot. I charged them for three coffees, although they’d had six. And I didn’t charge for the cake, because customers have a right to expect hot coffee.
I think that’s the way it should go.
But some people disagree. Someone last week came in and wanted cheese. There’s a cheese platter on the menu, a selection of different cheeses and some leaves and crusty bread and we’re more than happy to offer different cheeses, not just our choice of what needs shifting, as we’ve heard can be the case at some places.
The customer didn’t want that. They wanted some cheese. Any cheese. They didn’t know what. They didn’t want to taste any, or discuss it. Just cheese. And biscuits. What kind of biscuits?
“Ordinary biscuits.”
This was clearly someone who not only wasn’t really very interested in their food, which is their choice and only affects them, but someone who was also becoming either stupid or plain rude as well, which is their choice and it affects us. Which is a different country altogether.
Cheese and biscuits isn’t on the menu. We sell biscuits by the packet. If the customer had been even half-way interested in talking about it we’d almost certainly have opened a packet, given them some biscuits and eaten the rest ourselves. But they weren’t.
So we explained there was a cheese option on the menu, showed them the menu, explained what the cheese option was and after they’d decided (“Any cheese”) brought it to them. They paid. They left. Then told someone it was all a lot of money for cheese and biscuits which we didn’t have and they won’t be back.
And frankly, good. One of the really irritating things about all this is that the same people won’t ever dare try this on in the supermarket cafe where they prefer the prices. They sit on their plastic seats there, get what they’re given and pay up like good little lambs. It’s only where they’re actually offered some real service that kind of customer starts getting really arsy.
So you do what you can.
As we did today when a delivery driver in a hurry came bursting through the doors asking if we did food? We do sir. What would sir like to eat?
Scrambled egg. To take away.
So perhaps sir would prefer an egg roll?
