Hi Reader!
I've been thinking about customer service quite a bit lately. Mainly because it seems like it's going extinct.
My mom and I drove to Oklahoma yesterday to get two guardian dog puppies who are going to join our current dog, Lucy, on the farm. Guardian dogs are important in our world. They protect the other animals and keep predators far away.
It was a six-hour round trip to get the two pups, who are absolutely adorable. Both of them have excellent temperaments, and I've already threatened to snag one of them to keep Peanut under control. If you haven't met Peanut on any of my calls yet, he's a whole thing. A cat with BIG catitude.
What does any of that have to do with customer service?
Well, we stopped for lunch midway through the trip. We decided to pick up to-go from a nicer restaurant instead of doing fast food, so we ordered while we were on the way and arrived at the restaurant right when we were supposed to. I checked in through their app, and we waited.
And waited.
After 15 minutes, I called the number on the sign because I thought the system might not have checked us in properly.
"You're all checked in. We're just running a bit behind. I'll be out in just a few minutes."
There were a few other cars there when we arrived, and the rest of the to-go spots had filled while we waited. Over the next ten minutes, I noticed the other cars gradually disappearing, including several that had arrived well after we did.
By the time our food came out, there was one other car left, and we had been waiting for 35 minutes.
They did nothing to make the situation right. There was no apology and no offer to make up for the delay. They didn't pull an extra person to help the woman who was clearly trying to handle too much on her own. Our food was warm, and it was pretty good, but it wasn't hot. The ice in our drinks had melted (I'm sure that's a punishment in one of Dante's circles of hell).
It was a complete customer service fail.
What could they have done differently? So, so much, and I think those lessons apply to how we serve our clients as well.
1. Make sure you can deliver what you offer
If to-go food is going to be a major part of the restaurant's business, they need a dedicated team or a much better process to make sure the food is delivered when it is supposed to be and that the quality is as high as it would be inside the restaurant.
When you eat inside, you join the waitlist, get a table, are promptly waited on and served, and then you leave. The whole process is usually flawless. That same standard of excellence should apply to all customers, especially when lunch for two people costs $40.
It doesn't matter that one customer is sitting at a table while another is sitting in a parking lot. They are both paying customers of the same business.
This is something we need to think about in our businesses, too. It's easy to add a new offer, promise a faster turnaround, take on a retainer client, or give people another way to work with you. But every time you do that, you also have to consider what needs to happen behind the scenes to do it well.
You can't treat part of your business like an afterthought and expect the people buying that part of the business not to notice. If you offer it, it needs to receive the same thought and care as everything else you do.
That doesn't mean every service has to be delivered in exactly the same way. It does mean you shouldn't create a situation where one group of customers consistently gets a lesser version of your attention, communication, or work because you haven't put the right support in place.
2. If you get behind, let people know
Don't leave people sitting in your parking lot in 100-degree temperatures with no idea what is happening.
The restaurant knew it was behind. We didn't know until I called, and even then, I was told it would be "just a few minutes" when it was actually another 20.
Had someone told us the truth when we arrived, we could have made a decision. We could have waited, gone somewhere else, or adjusted our plans. What made the situation especially frustrating was that we had no information and no real sense of how long we were going to be there, and we needed to be somewhere at a specific time.
The same thing happens when someone decides to work with you. Most clients understand that delays happen and plans change. They become much less understanding when they have to come looking for you to find out what is going on.
If a deadline is going to move, tell them before the deadline. If something is taking longer than you expected, explain that and give them a realistic update. If you don't know yet when the work will be finished, tell them when they will hear from you again.
You don't have to have everything fixed before you communicate. You just need to communicate.
People generally handle bad news much better than they handle being ignored, and proactive communication can keep an itty-bitty problem from becoming a giant problem. It also gives the customer a chance to tell you whether the change creates another problem for them, which you won't know if you stay silent and hope they don't notice.
3. Make sure the work is still right when it reaches the customer
Our food was good, but it had obviously been sitting for at least some of the time we were waiting. It wasn't the same meal we would have received if we had been sitting inside the restaurant, where it would have gone directly from the kitchen to our table.
The restaurant completed the order, but it didn't deliver the full quality we had paid for.
We can do the same thing without realizing it by:
- doing excellent work and then rushing the handoff
- delivering a strong strategy without explaining what the client should do with it
- sending a project to them late, without context, after the client has already had to ask where it is
At that point, the client is past evaluating the quality of the work. They're considering how difficult it was to get the work, whether they could rely on you, and how much of the process they had to manage themselves.
The restaurant essentially handed us a good (but not great) deliverable 35 minutes late, after we had to chase them for an update, with no apology for any of it. We wouldn't describe that as excellent client service simply because the deliverable itself was okay.
The work we do matters, but so does how we deliver it.
4. Make it right
If you screw up, own it. Fix it. And fricken apologize.
I don't expect any business to operate perfectly all the time. People get busy and sometimes orders get missed. A project might take a wrong turn or something that normally works might stop working at the worst possible time.
What I do expect is for the business to recognize when something has gone wrong and make a reasonable effort to fix it.
An apology would have been a good place for the restaurant to start. They also could have replaced the watered-down drinks, checked that the food was still hot, offered a discount, or given us a credit toward another visit. It didn't have to be a big gesture. We simply needed some indication that they understood this wasn't the service we had been promised.
Instead, they acted as though nothing unusual had happened. Here's your food, transaction complete, goodbye.
That turned an annoying delay into a reason to question whether I would order to-go from them again.
When you make a mistake in your own business, you don't have to panic or give away more than the situation requires. You do need to acknowledge what happened, apologize without making the client drag it out of you, and decide what you can reasonably do to make it right.
A lot of trust can survive a mistake. You'll have a much harder time if you refuse to take responsibility for one.
None of this is about blaming the woman who eventually brought our food outside. From what I could see, she was doing the best she could while handling far too much by herself. The restaurant had filled every to-go spot without making sure she had enough help to serve the people sitting in them.
That's a business problem.
Businesses sometimes tell the person closest to the customer to provide better service while giving that person too little time, too little help, and no authority to fix anything. Then they act surprised when customers leave unhappy.
Customer service lives or dies on whether the business has created a process that allows their staff to help the customer in the first place.
For those of us running smaller businesses, we're both the owner and the person closest to the customer. That makes it even easier to become so focused on finishing the work that we overlook what it feels like to be on the other side of our process.
- Are your clients having to follow up with you for updates?
- Do they know what happens after they hire you?
- When plans change, do you tell them quickly, or do you wait until you have a solution?
- When you hand over the work, is it clear what they have and what they should do next?
- If something goes wrong, do you address it, or quietly hope they won't make an issue of it?
I want to make it clear that I'm not saying good customer service requires perfection. And I'm not suggesting you give customers anything they demand. I'm suggesting you think about what you've promised, have built or are building a business that can keep that promise, prioritize communicating when something changes, and take responsibility when you get it wrong.
The restaurant served us good food, but I'll think twice before ordering to-go from them again because of how the entire situation was handled.
Businesses spend an enormous amount of time figuring out how to get customers through the door. I think it's worth spending at least as much time making sure the way we treat them doesn't send them right back out.
Cheers,
Treasa
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