If you don’t get your bill, the treat is on us!

Photo by karl chor on Unsplash

"The cost of your product fades into insignificance, if you provide great service." 

- Miles Burke

Meet Alia, a petite cheerful barista and cashier at a brimming coffee shop (let’s call it Cafe Coffee Store, or CC$ in short) in Bengaluru, pursuing her college degree, a boyfriend and all along dreaming of the day when she can pull her life on to the fast lane.

Meet Kushal, a perfectionist who loves his coffee and ace’s his job at every challenge thrown to him. A guy who likes to believe he is an expert trouble shooter with an eye latched to nit-picking loopholes so that he can exercise his frontal lobes for start-up ideas. Well, his friends think he should rather take it easy in a city like Bengaluru!

On an early winter morning, Kushal decides to have a cuppa of coffee before strolling to his office. But the misty winds seduce him to ditch the ₹10/- waala coffee for a ₹150/- Cappuccino at CC$. With such a steep leap of faith early morning, our guy is expecting nothing, but the finest arabica served in the most perfect way.

There goes Kushal, looks at the menu and voila, free Biscotti served with every cup of hot coffee! It appears CC$ is leaving no stone upturned to make this morning a wonderful moment in our man's life! However, Alia has other plans in store. She takes the order and requests politely, for Kushal to take a seat. When his order arrives, his nit-picking brain working deliriously amidst the sanguine environment finds no Biscotti! Worse still, it questions Kushal why is he not given the receipt for the amount paid, on that all of a sudden expensive Cappuccino?

The winter morning mist, still carrying a shade of its charm, let’s Kushal come over his initial apprehension and call out Alia to ask for his free Biscotti. Alia of course appears surprised that anyone should notice this at all; a free Biscotti after all! Up she goes to the counter searching for that box of Biscotti which has never been touched and now needs to be opened in vain.

With the Biscotti in hand, the coffee seeding his conversations, its time to go to office. He causally walks to the counter to a smiling Alia welcoming him. He asks for the receipt not far from a plaque stating, “If you don’t get your bill, the treat is on us”. Alia, (yet again) surprised begins to search for the receipt and does not appear to remember where she had kept it. She offers to give him a hand-written paper statement.

What happens next is a story that turns a delectable coffee to a bitter tasting experience leading Kushal to wage an all-out war with CC$.

Fast-forward to today...

Kushal and Alia are fictional characters of a true story which I was privy to be part of. What happens next, is the coffee outlet accepts its mistake, apologizes and serves the free coffee, but only after a 15 mins call, 2 emails and a follow-up call. All seems well here except that there is a 100% chance, such an incident will keep repeating at the store. Three things stood out in the way the café franchise handled this situation.

First, their assumption that customers do not care. After the complaint was brought to cafe's notice, they had no procedure defined to handle a situation where customers are not issued receipts. They assumed no customer is going to bother.

When processes are incubated at a service delivery point, the important question of “what if this process breaks or fails and how do we respond?” is a critical thought process which needs to be questioned and built within the capability framework. Processes are not marketing strategies to appear customer-centric, but a promise that tells customers “we take all responsibility and have you covered, should our services fall short of your expectations”. Don’t get caught surprised when your service fails, and customers notice it!

Second, 99% of the time it is never a personnel issue, it is a system issue. Was Alia to blame for what happened?

I don’t think so. A lot of times we take employee training for granted. We integrate amazing tools with quintessential processes to take care of service engagement. Tools and processes only account to solving half the problem. The other critical half is in the hands of the company representatives who will engage with customers. Empathy needs to be nurtured and practiced repeatedly. How many times does a branch, or a territory manager walk into their stores as customers to learn the training needs first-hand and ensure their staff is proficient with the processes to wow their customers?

Third, owning up mistake is not enough. Don’t let the customer feel that you are obliging them by correcting your mistake!

Thank you for the free coffee, but wait, no thank you! Deep down Kushal was expecting that he will be delighted by CC$ for their mistake. A good enterprise owns its mistakes if bought to their notice and delivers its promise. A freaking awesome enterprise keeps a hawk’s eye on customer service, 24/7, scurrying loopholes and goes all out to delight the day lights of its privileged customer when they fall short of expectations. All it could have taken is a small piece of delicious cake with that free coffee, just to let the customer know, the store felt deeply for the trouble it caused! Is that too much of a bite to ask for?