I thought Customer Service was dead! I am happy to say it is not! You see every week in our staff meeting we have a time to share great customer service stories with the staff and for the last three months I have been on able to share any real great experiences but last night that all changed. My wife and I were out on “date night” and went to a brand new restaurant. Yes, I branched out and decided to try something new and different, which turned out to be great. Why, was it so great you may ask? Well, at first it started out a little shaky because we were sat at our table and five minutes had went by and no server had approached us. Now, one thing I always do is time how long it takes for someone to greet us and take our drink orders. This comes from my days of working in the restaurant industry back in college. Okay, so finally we were greeted and the first thing our server, Sloan, did was apologize for us not being greeted. You see, we had had a glass of wine from the bar and she thought that someone had already taken care of us, but nonetheless she felt bad and immediately tried to change the situation.

Lesson number one – if things start out bad you still have time to change the outcome but you must act fast. Apologize and start trying to create a memorable experience.

Okay, so once she apologized she started to create a memorable experience for us. First, she told a story about the wine we purchased, which was really cool. Then, she made some really great recommendations  on the menu. And finally, when we had a hard time choosing between two different items she offered to split both plates with half of each order. What was interesting about that was the couple next to us asked their server if they could do that and he had some lame excuse as to why it could not be done. So here is lesson two.

Lesson two – be different and create an experience. It wasn’t that I absolutely loved the food, but the service and memory that Sloan,our server, created for us.

I can not begin to tell you that in this economic time period “Customer Service” is going to make the difference between your training or someone else. People will buy but will buy great memories!!!

Coach Dave