A Tale of Two Businesses

Let me tell you a story about two firms I did business with last year. I’m not going to name any names; I’m not even going to identify which city either one was in; I’m not into getting sued and it doesn’t matter anyway. The point is that while these transactions may seem as different as chalk and cheese, they are actually about the same things: customer service and getting it right. It can happen in your current city as easily as either of the ones I lived in this year, in any kind of company that deals with the public, and there’s no reason every business can’t get things right just the way our positive example does – and every chance they will screw up the way our negative example did…

Let’s start with the company that did some framing for us. This is a service that is, to put it mildly, screamingly difficult. Everyone has their own ideas about art and aesthetics, and that includes what looks good with what and what should go in which frame. There is practically no upside to providing customer service in this business; if you attempt to offer guidance there’s a good chance the customer will blame you for things not turning out they way they envisioned, and if you don’t there’s an even better chance the customer will blame you for not telling them that their vision was idiotic…

Of course, in this particular case, the customers in question were my wife (who has an amazing eye for artwork) and my stepmother (who does this sort of thing for a living). Still, there are an amazing number of things the framers could have screwed up on, both in terms of the work we commissioned them to do and also in the administrative/billing details, and I am pleased to report that they avoided doing so in all cases. They took somewhat longer than they had estimated on the job, but let me repeat: it was a time estimate, not a fixed deadline. They also got things done exactly as promised, billed the right account for the work, packed everything up for transportation, even helped us load everything into the Torrent for the trip home…

Now let’s shift to consider a slightly less exacting service: breakfast. I know I’m on record calling food service the Hardest Business in the World, and I stand behind that, but that’s running such a company and making a living; the actual act of toasting a bagel and slapping cream cheese and lox on it isn’t actually that difficult. Except that the past seven months have taken us far from our beloved Manhattan Beach Bread and Bagel Company, and we’ve eaten bagels in several other cities. It was one such bagel joint that drew my attention because of their apparent inability to speak English – or, at least, hear it…

Each of the times we ate there, the folks behind the counter managed to get our order wrong, even though it was only for a bagel with cream cheese (and in one case, lox) smeared on it. We’d ask for food to eat in and get it packed to go (or visa-versa), order chips and have them left out of our order, get the wrong food items or the wrong drinks or whatever. If we were ordering complex, multi-course meals with dozens of menu changes I’d have a different opinion, but the fact is we were asking these people to sell us their primary product on days when their shop wasn’t even all that busy…

Okay, so it’s a simple story and you’ve heard it before. And I know it’s not fair to hold the minimum-wage bagel-smearers to the same standard highly-paid, highly-qualified framers. I’m just saying that in both cases, the company has selected the product or service they intend to sell, and set the price at the level they believe is acceptable to the customer. But one company is building goodwill, making strong relationships with their customers, and earning repeat business, while the other is annoying people with money to the point where at least some of us would rather get our breakfast at Burger King…

It’s worth thinking about…