"Customer care exisits in the mind of the customer"

I remember being taught this and then repeating it to my staff on staff training days but what does it mean?

Well, I guess the point being made is that it doesn’t matter how hard you think you are trying or if you think you did a good job what actually matters is how the customer perceives your effort.

Whilst that sounds harsh and in ‘normal’ life we are led to believe it is your effort that counts, in hospitality or perhaps any customer interaction that is not the case.

When using this as part of my training I would be pointing out to our staff that it is not enough to say that the customer is wrong and that you did do something well.

Customer care is different to customer service.

Service is a checklist, it is held by the member of staff and in their control to decide if every customer service task on that list was completed.

Saying hello, serving within a set length of time, perfect serve, checking back, table service, saying goodbye… these are all service touchpoints and staff can be taught to do them in a particular way at particular times and with a smile and whilst they can be done perfectly as perceived by the server it doesn’t alone make for a good customer experience.

Customers need to be genuinely cared for, we are a caring profession.

Every owner-operator got int into this business because they cared, cause it certainly wasn’t because it is easy or because we were going to make a fortune. Many of us genuinely saw an opportunity to make the world a better place if only just in our small sphere through caring for others and creating spaces where others feel safe and looked after. The problem sometimes is that we forget that, and we certainly forget to explain that to our staff.

As customers, in fact, as humans, we know when we are experiencing genuine care we have inbuilt instincts to recognise fake smiles and disingenuous gestures so in hospitality teaching our staff a ‘checklist’ is not enough.

I have had too many experiences in venues where the checklist has been ‘performed’ but I have come away feeling embarrassed or upset by the insincere staff.

What we and our staff need to remember is that whilst our customers are visiting us we are inviting them to be vulnerable.

We ask them to take their guard down in order to relieve themselves of their burden of responsibilities from their normal lives and take a break, the chance to just be themselves with the promise that whilst they are with us we will look after them.

If we let them down, it is devastating for them, it leads to embarrassment and shame and these are the worst two emotions that humans experience. Someone once told me that almost all bad behaviour from other humans derives from embarrassment and shame and whilst I don’t know if that is true (I haven’t studied or researched it) I have certainly experienced it in my own behaviour and in others.

When I operated a fine dining restaurant all our reviews were 5* and we had a set of gushing loyal customers who genuinely loved us, but I noticed something. Sometimes these customers who were passionate advocates of us would complain and the pattern I noticed was that this only happened when they came with guests.

I realised that what was going on here was the heightened expectation of these customers.

They had advocated for us they had gone out and told everyone how great our restaurant was and how wonderful we were and then insisted that their friends and family join them for a night out.

Once they arrived, they no longer viewed us through their own eyes, now every interaction every touchpoint was being viewed by them but through the eyes of their guests who were not just judging us as a restaurant, they were judging their hosts their friends, judging their taste and judgement. So now every interaction was more important with higher stakes.

Obviously we were brilliant so there were never any major mistakes or flaws but still, these customer who had previously been a breeze were now hard work for us questioning and calling us back, demanding more of our attention and expecting absolute perfection.

Nothing had changed in our service or care of the customer what had changed was their perception.

So, “customer care exists in the mind of the customer”.

It is not you or your staff who can judge if your customer goes away feeling cared for, their experience is their own. It is for us as operators and servers to have the flexibility to adapt to them, to find out about them to know what they need and to deliver that and these are much more difficult things to teach. Of course, we should all be aware of the to-do list with regard to customer service, but we are in this because we genuinely care about our customers and we shouldn’t forget that, but caring for others is not a list of tasks.