Take a moment, think back … what’s the best customer service you’ve had recently? … how did it make you feel about  the company at the time? … and who did you tell afterwards?

Here’s mine: Claire and I love to wake up to the aroma of freshly baked bread. As Bloomsbury Bakery wouldn’t let us move in, we sometimes fire up our 22 year old Russell Hobbs bread maker. We needed a new loaf tin, so with limited expectations, we called Russell Hobbs.

Our bread maker is so old that they don’t even hold records on it. But the chap on the ‘phone –Russell himself? – did a lot of digging to try and help us. When his search wasn’t fruitful, to our astonishment, he didn’t suggest we trawl eBay, he proffered a brand new machine, delivered to our door, for a substantial discount.

We were blown away by this and the net result is that a) we had some first rate bread this morning but more importantly, b) we’ll be hunting out their appliances next time we need one and, c) we’re telling you about them now!

So, customer service matters to them and it’s always mattered to us at Cafe Allez!. We are massively aware that folks love a bad news story and they love to tell others about it. It’s almost cathartic to have a good moan when we’ve received bad service. Now let’s layer on top of that the fact that we’re British!. I read a Tweet from a newcomer to the UK the other day who was incredulous that “Brits will complain to everyone except the one person who could fix it for them” and there’s more than a grain of truth in this. And by extension, they may lash out and give a hard-working team a crushing review online.

So how do we go about delivering outstanding service? It starts with recruiting the right people: to a huge extent we can train coffee skills etc, but if somebody just doesn’t have that “hospitality” mindset and that ability to naturally want to give customers the best experience, we’re not even certain it’s train-able. So we take great pains to recruit people who share that mindset. To explore this, we’ll often pose a series of scenarios when we interview, most based on actual events in the cafe that we shudder to recall, and ask our candidate how they’d have dealt with it. Often there is no definitive right answer, but we’ll learn a lot from whatever we hear.

Over this, we must layer on some good training, so each team member knows how the systems work and knows that they’re empowered to put things right, (erring on the side of generosity), when they go wrong.

And go wrong they will! For all the care we take, we’re human beings operating under pressure. And now, we’re trying to take orders accurately through a thick Perspex screen, when the customer is often wearing a face mask on one side and the coffee grinders are roaring on the other side. On a frantic day we are taking orders for many hundreds of products, so assuming a 0.1% error rate (which would be fabulous), 1 customer per day is going to experience a mistake.

But here’s the thing. We might have made the mistake, but as Danny Meyer, restaurateur extraordinaire and author of the must-read, “Setting The Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business”, said: we usually have the opportunity as a team to “write a great last chapter”. In other words, the customer will naturally want to tell others about our mistake, but if the last chapter includes a happy ending whereby we’ve been honest enough to “own” that mistake and put it right with bells on, then the story can end well for all of us. In fact, some of the examples Danny gives of his team going to extraordinary lengths to turn around a bad situation made me laugh out loud, but his ethos is that “the road to success is paved with mistakes well handled” and who can argue with that?.

Taken to the next level, we’ll very often try and rectify mistakes not of our making too: it just feels like the decent thing to do. After all, we certainly wouldn’t have blamed Russell Hobbs for the failure of a 22 year old bread maker, but the fact that they still felt inclined to help tells us all we need to know.

We’d love to hear your stories of receiving or delivering great customer care, especially the spicy ones where things started badly…!.