Service

 First published in Column 8 on the 20^th of November, 1991

 Whoops! Even cautious columnists occasionally come a cropper.

After last week’s column I was bluntly reminded that the Presbyterians meeting together in Invercargill were not the Synod but the General Assembly. It was rather like calling the Government a regional council.

To change the subject. You’d think in these days of precarious employment, and businesses being on a knife edge, that anyone who wanted to survive the recession would consider pleasing the customer their top priority.

I’m a bit hot on this subject at the moment, because I’m reading A Passion for Excellence. This book repeats an age-old message in various disguises on every page – ‘the customer is always right.’

The matter isn’t so much that the customer is always right, but more that if we don’t see service to the customer as absolutely essential, we don’t see anything.

(Hands up all those who remember a time when there were creatures called Public Servants? Ten points to anyone who was actually served by them.)

Lots of businesses in Dunedin, and round the country, haven’t yet got this matter of service right. Service isn’t an American approach to business, it’s an approach that keeps you in business. In fact it’s the only approach.

On Friday evenings, if I haven’t had the energy in the morning to prepare something for my tea break, I go out for a meal.

My usual eatery has been one where the salad servings are so abundant they drop off the edge of the plate. I love their food, and their garlic dressing, but I never feel as though I’m very welcome there. (I’m not welcome at home either, after the garlic.) Perhaps I’m not a regular enough customer for them.

I’ve recently tried another café where the owner goes out of his way to find something quick and filling – and economical – and where he takes time to treat you as a person. Service in its best sense, in other words.

One evening, however, I tried a place where I won’t be going again. Service was definitely not on the menu.

Though there was no queue to think of – only two ladies waiting in front of me – it took five minutes to be acknowledged. The hold up? No potatoes in the Bain Marie. The young man serving was undecided whether to say potatoes were off, love, or to call his superior.

He did the latter. His superior was a girl in her twenties. She wasn’t very impressed at having to deal with the problem. She went out the back, and eventually returned with a potato that had been on a diet.

Then she turned her attention to me. Though I’d had ample time to read – and understand – the menu, she didn’t think I knew what I wanted. She tried to give me what she thought I’d asked for, implying I wasn’t quite with it.

The helping ultimately consisted of two fatty slices of ham on two bits of beef sharing the plate with three skimpy servings of salad. If you don’t get service to your customer right, at least give them decent helpings.

The lettuce was elderly, and sour; the beetroot slivers were tasteless, which was just as well since they were companions to two strawberries. The saddest part about it all was that this particular restaurant isn’t just geared to serving local yokels like me; it’s targeted towards tourists.

An episode like this is enough to put customers off for a considerable time. As the authors of A Passion for Excellence note, dissatisfied customers don’t go home and sulk alone. They warn all their friends.

 

A cafe in France - not the one I went to!
courtesy Velvet

Somewhat ironically, almost twenty years later I wound up working with the Presbyterians, which considerably improved my knowledge of who was who and what was what.