{"id":1394,"date":"2019-02-10T14:35:00","date_gmt":"2019-02-10T14:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/customerschampion.com\/a-not-so-caky-experience\/"},"modified":"2019-02-10T14:35:00","modified_gmt":"2019-02-10T14:35:00","slug":"a-not-so-caky-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/customerschampion.com\/?p=1394","title":{"rendered":"A Not So Caky Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

About two weeks ago, I walked into a popular cake shop in Nairobi to place an order. There were 3 ladies at reception chatting but it took them almost 3 minutes to ask me ‘what I wanted’ without even greeting me or welcoming me to their shop.<\/p>\n

As I placed my order, I could not help but listen to their conversation. They were talking about their colleague in another branch who offers bad service to clients; they were also saying that the new shop opening would be a total fail because the colleague in question was going to head that branch.
\nListening to that conversation changed my perspective of that brand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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Image from dinedelish.com<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The reason I still went ahead to place my order was that I was short of time and they make very delicious cakes. Business owners should not just be happy when they have customers who are with them for lack of better alternatives: rather they should be happy because their customers are with them because of the great experiences they have with the business.
\nCustomers who are only there for lack of a better option could only be good in the short-term, as soon as they find better services or have good experiences with brands that may not necessarily have the best products, they move. It is cheaper to maintain customers that it is to acquire new ones. More often than not, happy and loyal customers will share their good experiences with anyone who is willing to listen. Having delightful and memorable customer interactions is ultimately the best form of advertising for any business.<\/p>\n

My customer experience would have been different if:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The shop attendants welcomed me to their shop.<\/li>\n
  2. Made me feel important by reducing the wait time before interacting with me.<\/li>\n
  3. Paused their story till after I’d left. I found it inappropriate for them to continue with that kind of discussion in my presence. <\/li>\n
  4. Converse with me and even give me options; what I had was more of a one-sided conversation.<\/li>\n
  5. Thanked me for stopping by.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It is the little things that always count. Customer service and customer experience should not be a department but rather an organisation’s culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    About two weeks ago, I walked into a popular cake shop in Nairobi to place an order. There were 3 ladies at reception chatting but it took them almost 3 minutes to ask me ‘what I wanted’ without even greeting me or welcoming me to their shop. As I placed my order, I could not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1587,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-customer-facing-staff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerschampion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerschampion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerschampion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerschampion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerschampion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/customerschampion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerschampion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerschampion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerschampion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}