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Random versus Consistent
What a Wonderful Story!
A customer service expert tells a wonderful story about a random act of wow by a restaurant chain. She was extolling the virtues of this restaurant, and the story in her own words, was about, “how they treat their customers.”
It seems that a young woman was sick and confined to her bed at home. On Facebook the young woman posted about her sad condition and said that the one thing that she was craving was a particular dish from this particular restaurant.
One of the employees of the restaurant happened to see the Facebook post. She showed it to her manager, who told the staff to pack up the woman's favorite dish and take it to her. What a wonderful story! It truly is a fabulous random act of wow.
That's the Trap
But it's not how that restaurant treats its customers. It's how the restaurant treated one customer on one day when it did something special. You see, that's the trap. We get all excited over some out-of-the-ordinary thing that we do, or a story about something that a superstar employee does, and we say that's our standard of performance.
Somebody stop the madness! It's great that this restaurant took the surprise meal to the sick woman. Yay! The people there are to be congratulated. But it's not by any stretch of the imagination how those same people treat their customers in any meaningful way.
Regular, Everyday Customers
If you want to know how they really treat their customers, then you need to find out what their regular, ...
