Your Customer Service Experience Depends on the Little Things

“Fun is good.” - Dr. Seuss

An expe­ri­ence after a recent boat cruise got me think­ing about the lit­tle things that make up a con­sis­tent expe­ri­ence for your clients – the kind that you want them to have.

After a great time on the water, we walked back from the wharf to a cool, old Eng­lish pub. The place was buzzing.

We had a ton of fun, as we told sto­ries and laughed, and laughed — appar­ent­ly a bit too loud­ly for the wait­ress. Twice she asked us to be qui­et. The sec­ond time, she told me to ​‘use my inside voice’ because oth­ers around us were hav­ing din­ner. Ouch.

I know I can be loud when I laugh and have fun, but our behav­iour wasn’t bad, at all — and not inap­pro­pri­ate for our sur­round­ings. This wasn’t a place of wor­ship or a bal­let per­for­mance. It was a pub — a real­ly great spot, with excel­lent food, drink and ser­vice. They’d done every­thing right, but it was clear­ly a ​‘no fun’ zone.

Now, to me, an Eng­lish pub is a place where the own­ers want the patrons to have a good time – to share a laugh with a group of friends. So it struck me as sil­ly that it was impor­tant to this per­son that the pub should be quiet.

More than that, instead of mak­ing a qui­et request, or enrolling us in solv­ing her prob­lem, she put me down.

I don’t know if it was the pol­i­cy of pub for peo­ple not to laugh, vol­ume restric­tions, if the wait­per­son had a headache, or a bad day. As a cus­tomer I don’t know, or care.

That cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence remind­ed me that you can do every­thing right in your busi­ness to build cus­tomer loy­al­ty, but one lit­tle thing – or per­son — can elim­i­nate it forever.

Next time we’ll go some­where else.