After a long time, I went to a ‘particular’ restaurant in the city. It’s a chain of theme-based restaurants and they are (were) the pioneers of the concept-based restaurants. I find them good to have even a mobile app to ease the table booking process. Also, I didn’t miss to notice their hunger to get customer data as much as possible to provide customer-centric service offering. All that sounds good and reasonable. Unfortunately, most of the businesses understand the concepts well but struggle to implement right. The table booking is just a matter of 5mins long phone conversation and I prefer the same. Having an app is a convenience if you are a recurring user. I was not really interested to share my personal information and go through the registration process. Believe me, some of us (maybe a lot of us) hate the time-consuming registration process in any app. While my personal data might help the business to serve better, I prefer to get served, impressed and asked for more information about the customer. If the customer is impressed, they will be chasing you to ‘admit’ them in your network. On top of all, I hate having an app sitting idle on my mobile, eating the phone memory and annoying me with notifications. In this case, I called the customer care personnel and he influenced to book a table using the app with a usual trick of booking via an app offers a special discount. Being a human, I was tempted to attempt it and went through their slowest, buggy app to register. I would have preferred a table booking without registering in the app or with minimal inputs. Their registration process seems to be using emotional intelligence 2.0 😊 After I gave the inputs, I got the status as pending and provided a nail-biting moment for few mins and finally got the confirmation to a restaurant which is a bit away from my location. I am told the closest one is full, and I got a sense of achievement when I managed to get a table irrespective of the distance (The business must know all the customer would give a fair chance and I did my part too).

I went on the given slot and in fact bit in advance hence, had a brief talk with the front desk guy and built a quick rapport. To my surprise, most of the tables were empty and much lesser than half of their capacity was occupied. The food has started to come in. An exclusive bearer mandated to take care of us. A very sincere guy tried hard to impress us, and I liked him for his desperateness to make the customer happy. Unfortunately, most of the smart business owners bind a good chunk of the salary with incentives. I can understand very well the need for care and the problem started from there. A good business knows if an employee chases for the incentive that involves honor killing of the customer 😊 They have started serving the food, none of us in the group were happy with the taste. The poor chap (yea.. he is a poor chap facing the customer and in the given scenario can influence the system only a bit) came in asked for interim feedback. I didn’t want to make him feel bad for obvious reasons hence I said, “It’s good”. He felt bad and asked very politely “Sir, why just good? And said, their rating scale is Good, Very Good, Excellent. And ‘Good’ rating means lowest to them”. A smart sales guy should have sensed it, maybe he did. He came back after a moment with his manager. A guy with more authoritativeness in the system asked for feedback again. He asked me to share feedback and gave assurance to make it right. After a few mins, offered a freshly prepared dish and unfortunately, that didn’t taste as well too (don’t doubt on our appetite guys 😉 the magic is not in the agony rather in the right ingredients and that includes the chef). Again, the feedback cycle started, and I started with ‘good’ and they pushed me to speak up. I told them the food can be better and asked them to do self and competitor analysis.

Whilst, they are the pioneers of the theme-based restaurant, the competitors were nailing it. The competitors are latecomers and they studied well the gaps in their model and started implementing it right. Being first to market gives a mileage at the same time brings this as a challenge. You can’t self-announce as a winner just because you are ahead in the curve and take your customer for granted. The challenging phase in the business is being even more competitive and provide the highest quality when you are failing”

I bumped back to the front desk guy and checking why the table booking confirmation took so much of time while in reality only half of the tables were booked. He confirmed that to just a give a feel to the customer on securing a table is a sense of achievement. Seems a good mobile app company has designed its product — Gamification 😊. Not just that, the reservation does not happen based on the availability of seats rather to even out all the facilities and keep them equally occupied. The business may have many logical reasons for that, but those who truly care about ‘customer-centric’ service wouldn’t agree with it, isn’t it?

Hey, it’s not stopping here 😉 yea I felt the same. The very next day I got a call from the restaurant and someone asked for feedback again ☹

Off late, I see in many businesses more than the product guys the customer service/sales/client relationship bandwidth is higher. A lot of care on collecting feedback, marketing, and sales which are much-needed activities, but the funnel starts with your core, the product/service offering. By the way, let’s focus on keeping the funnel straight not otherwise 😊