Never Thought A Restaurant Incident Can Reveal Such A Crucial Management Lesson!

Some of the learning comes after reading books and some after bitter experiences. Customer experience is learnt best from experience and situational examples. My team members got one such experience that imbibed the importance of customer experience.

With stars on their side, they learnt it without burning their hands.

The festive season was at peak and New Year celebrations were rocking the chart few weeks ago. It was high time for parties, celebration and refreshing memories of the culminating year. After family, colleagues are people you spend most part of your year with. And thus, it makes a perfect sense to refresh memories with them.

That said, three weeks ago, I went with my team to one of the top restaurants in Chandigarh for a party. We were served with a four course meal – starting with snacks and mocktail to soup and salad, then the main course, and the desserts, at the end.

After finishing the main course, it was the time for ice-creams and also to wrap the party up. But before we would have wrapped up, the Murphy law – “If something can go wrong, it will – come into action”.

One of the team mates discovered a hair in the ice-cream bowl! The unexpected event triggered emotional outburst. Everyone was angry as this was contrary to the repute of that restaurant. And the cost of the party – was really high – added fuel in the flame.

The situation quickly went out of the hand of staff members and like any manager, the restaurant manager jumped in to handle the situation. Without much to say apology was the tool he selected to calm down the raving team over such an experience. After not getting hints of satisfaction he tried many bullets of good relationship management and customer handling.

The staff looked perplexed at the situation that how just a hair in the ice cream paled the effect of tasty food, good service and beautiful ambiance. They might be having a thought that it was so trivial that it could be neglected and despite everything else that was near perfect why on earth it brought havoc on them.

It is natural to think like this when we are at the service provider side but do we get similar thoughts and all rational logics when we are a client? No, seldom it happens.

This is nearly true for every client in every such situation. And on the feedback receiving side, the situation will not be any different for us.

It was a bitter experience, indeed, to learn the significance of customer experience at both sides. This made all my team members realize the importance of “A Single Dot Precision” in work, what we discuss every day.

“It takes an enormous effort to delight a customer and sometimes just a negligible mistake to lose one.”