Customer Service - It's the People Stupid

Customer Service – It’s the People Stupid

By David Eedle |

Amongst Fiona and my list of active assets is a small coffee shop in the heart of St Kilda, an inner city suburb of Melbourne, about 20 minutes away from where we live on the Bayside beach. One of the most questions most regularly asked of me about our lives is “why a cafe?”. On slow business days, like now when we’re in the dead middle of cold winter and it’s school holidays, the answer tends to be ‘because I need my head read’. However, on sunny day, with people spilling out on the footpath enjoying a glass of wine or a snack, or tapping away in a shady spot on their laptops, the answer is easier – it’s the people stupid.

We’ve spent ten years running online businesses, and enjoyed varying success. But without fail each one required hours of hunching over a keyboard, interacting with people around the world. And that’s great – I still, after all this time, think Skype is the best thing since sliced bread. I was in Seattle the other week, and was video chatting on Skype to our eldest daughter back here in Melbourne when room service arrived with my dinner. So naturally I introduced the room service woman to our daughter! She was fascinated that my daughter and I were casually chatting away on the web cam. I love all the technology, I love sitting here tapping away in my study knowing I’m reaching out electronically around the world. I love my electronic footprint – search the net for David Eedle and you’ll find my digital shadows echoing back to the early 1990s.

Shelving units at our coffeeshop in Melbourne

So much about running a business is about people – in fact they’re the core because they are your customers. It’s easy to become de-personalized via a web broswer. Easy to forget that at the other end of each email is a person, with a name, a story, a life. We tend to lean towards a generic approach, treating everyone the same, because we don’t have access to any clues to help shape our responses.

Contrast that with face to face customer service. Anyone who has worked in retail or hospitality knows what I mean. There’s nothing more honest and direct than dealing with a customer face to face, live and in real time.

And that’s pretty much why we own a coffeeshop. It’s about real flesh and blood people walking through a real front door, buying real products with real money in real time. And we’re open seven days a week, and nearly 365 days a year, we only close for a few days over Christmas.

I work the occasional day in the shop, and I have a ball. No matter how bad a day I’m having or what’s happening at home or in one of our other businesses, you have to hide all that from your customers. It’s not their problem one of my kids pissed me off before school this morning. We’re here to serve the customers, not vice versa. Our customers expect us to make their coffee the way they like, and deliver their food and drink with consistent and reliable quality.

Indeed, most customers expect us to remember their coffee orders after the first few visits. They assume that we will recognise them, call them by name, and make them their ‘skinny latte no sugar extra hot’ without needing to ask.

I’ve been hearing a lot about outsourcing lately, Fiona’s recent posts have covered off a bunch of ways we’ve found outsourcing a positive experience. But outsourcing a cafe ain’t a possibility – and I’m ok with that. I want the people interaction (Fiona thinks I’m completely nuts, must be the extrovert in me). Don’t get me wrong, put me in front of customers eight hours a day five days a week and I’ll lose my marbles – thus building a greater appreciation for those who truly do make it their career.

And one day I'll take some photos of our shop with customers!

I think every internet marketer should come work a shift in our coffeeshop for an afternoon each month. Or something similar. Standing face to face with customers reminds us of all the reasons why customer service is important, of why building rapport and familiarity with customers pays significant dividends in the long term, and how working as a team to deliver consistent, high quality products and services is both fun and profitable.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com, is credited with saying:

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”

There’s been a timely reminder of this in the last week with the ‘United Breaks Guitars’ saga, which I’d love to riff about now but which we’ll save for another day more focused on specifically dealing with complaints. If you haven’t seen the video you have to check it out now. I’ve seen someone somewhere say ‘customer service is not a department, it’s an attitude’. A mantra United Airlines is now learning the hardest way possible.

I was at Sydney airport yesterday, flying home with our eldest daughter, we went up for the night to see a concert with a band she loves (Short Stack rules apparently). We needed some breakfast, so ate at a cafe in the departures area. The experience was so awful I was Tweeting about it within minutes. Yeah, sorry Jamaica Blue at the Sydney Jetstar terminal, but you deserve a pummeling. Staff didn’t have a clue, and even the two 12 year olds with me realized they were being treated poorly.

I have to say, I suspect they get away with this because they really don’t have a huge repeat clientele – unlike our coffeeshop whose core business is founded around looking after the locals in our immediate area – the ones who come in every day for coffee, and lunch on the weekends. Stuff up with them and we lose them to the competition around the corner. And iff we lose our regulars, our repeat customers, we’re dead in the water.

To misquote several famous people ‘it’s the people stupid’.

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