By Francis Moran

I write an awful lot on this blog about customer service, mainly lousy customer service. Like most consumers, I run into my share of companies whose customer-service posture screams at me that they just don’t give a damn about keeping me as a customer. Having a blog gives me a soapbox from which to rant about them but given that this is supposed to be a blog about marketing, merely ranting would not meet our editorial mandate.

So my preoccupation with customer service is based on what I have come to call my first law of competitive differentiation, the proposition that, in an age when almost any technological or cost advantage will rapidly and inevitably be eroded, the only sustainable competitive differentiation for most companies is to treat their customers like the centre of the universe that they actually are.

Sadly, far too many companies pay only lip service to this.

Last night, my wife and I had an experience that showed us the other side of the equation.

It was our ninth wedding anniversary on Wednesday but my wife was in Houston at a trade show so we planned a belated celebratory dinner for last night. We chose to go to Play Food and Wine, an Ottawa eatery we had heard a lot about, whose chef and founder we liked, but that we had not yet managed to try. Reservations were made, nice clothes were donned and off we went.

The first bit of unusual customer service should never have been noteworthy at all. We were greeted immediately upon arrival — a rare enough occurrence at restaurants these days — and they offered to take our coats! I know, that used to be standard operating procedure at restaurants but, upon reflection, I had trouble remembering the last time that had happened to me.

Upstairs we went, drinks were ordered and we looked over an imaginative menu of tempting dishes fitting Play’s tapas-style approach of small plates designed to be shared. We made a few selections, and our waiter brought out the first two, reserving the third one until we had finished off the first two.

Unfortunately, my wife, who had risen at 4am and had been spent much of the day traveling home on bumpy little planes, unexpectedly developed a wonky tummy just as our first courses were being served. She bravely tried to eat a bit but I ended up clearing off both plates as she waited in vain for her stomach to settle. Since it was clear she wasn’t going to be feeling better any time soon, we explained the situation to our waiter and asked him to hold off on our third plate if he had not already ordered it. Clearly thinking that I still deserved to have dinner, he said he could get it on our table within five minutes but I declined, saying it really would be best if we just grabbed our bill.

He was solicitous and attentive at every stage, occupied solely with our well-being, and so he should have been, given the consummately service-oriented business in which he worked. But then he went above and beyond, and here’s why I must sing the praises of Jordan, our waiter last night at Play.

He brought our bill, telling us that he had not charged for the glass of bubbly my wife had barely touched. Very nice gesture.

But wait, there was more.

When he brought back my credit card and slip to sign, he also brought me a small sampler of the hanger steak I had been very much looking forward to having as our third dish. Just enough for me to relish the dish; not so much that my wife had to wait more than a few minutes for me to finish it off.

With a few small gestures, Jordan raised our experience at Play, disappointingly foreshortened though it might have been, from the merely satisfactory to the extraordinary. As soon as I publish this post, I intend to call Play and bring all this to their attention. Meanwhile, my wife has made us a fresh reservation for Saturday night, when I hope we get Jordan again. Although, given the generally fine service we received from everyone else at the restaurant plus the fact that Jordan was empowered — that’s the key word, by the way, when it comes to superior customer service — to go the extra mile for us, I’m sure that whomever is our waiter at Play will deliver the same exemplary customer service.

Technorati Tags: , ,