Customer Service is my ‘thing’. I consult on the topic, deliver workshops, help organisations develop strategies around it and most importantly I am very passionate about it.

I’m always on the lookout for someone delivering excellence and go out of my way to let them know what an outstanding job they’re doing.

So when I’m in the process of receiving poor service I use it as an opportunity to help the business by making suggestions on how they can serve me and others better.

Unfortunately not all take on my advice.

So here’s the story….

Friday night I was at an awards dinner here in Adelaide where my husband was one of the recipients being honoured. As a result we were invited to receive a complimentary dinner by this hardworking, underfunded organisation.

We were seated in a function room with 40 other guests upstairs in a restaurant with a set menu of 5 main meals to choose from.

As the waiter came over to take my order I asked if I may have a vegetarian meal as all 5 choices contained meat. The waiter went to “find out if we can do that” and returned with “no, you have to order from the set menu”. I explained once again that I was vegetarian so was unable to select from the options but he only offered “we can’t, sorry”.

I made a suggestion that I could order from the standard menu which is served in the restaurant downstairs and they could bring it upstairs and in addition was happy to pay full price for the meal. After going off to “find out is we can do that” again the waiter returned with only “no we can’t do that”.

Since there was another person at the table who required a gluten free meal we both decided to go downstairs to the restaurant ourselves where we ordered a meal from the standard menu, waited for it to arrive and then took the meal back upstairs ourselves to sit at our  function table.

A simple solution which was made unnecessarily complicated by the restaurant.

It astounds me that in today’s world businesses are still putting Process ahead of People.  Identify what your customer’s needs are and then finding a way to accommodate or exceed them needs to be top priority.

This organisation had held previous functions at another restaurant but was unhappy with the quality of their food. Based on this experience they will now need to find yet another restaurant that is willing to host 40 people for at least 4 functions per year.

This business not only created a poor service experience for these 40 guests, it has also missed out on the lifetime value of these customers.

At $30/ head plus drinks they will miss out on approximately $9000.00 this year alone.

How many more opportunities for repeat business was made available to this business? It costs 6–7 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one!

Some studies show that 31% of people will complain on social media about poor customer service. That may also impact on other potential customers.

All this could have been avoided if only they focused on the Customer Experience.

Have you had a similar experience?