This poster isn't doing bad customer service.i have no idea how you got that idea. What they're doing is stoping one bad customer from ruining other customer's experiences!
The customer is not always right.
One of my favorite daily visits, is a site called "Not Always Right," and it has many stories like this: https://notalwaysright.com/newest/
If you understand human nature, you also understand that sometimes people are just having a bad day, or feeling ignored, or on their last leg.
Ignoring, or being dismissive to, any paying customer is simply bad business. If a company does that as a practice, they're probably in the wrong business.
An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career.
Those are not just my words, they're words from the bible of doing good business, and a lot of successful CEOs and business people would agree, except for the CEO of comcast perhaps.
For what it's worth, I was a service employee who deprioritized these people and I can tell you I'm certainly not working customer service at Comcast now-a-days... which is a reference I don't even understand (I know what Comcast is but ya...).
Tangentially, I feel that there should be a form of conscription where everyone is forced to work at year or two of customer service in their teens. While I'm sure it wouldn't discourage everyone from being a prick, it could certainly help.
A more thorough analysis of human nature reveals that a double-digit percentage of humanity suffers from a serious personality disorder. Some of these disorders involve taking perverse pleasure in ordering others around for no good reason.
Most experienced wait staff that I know can tell the difference pretty quickly between someone having a bad day and a bully. The latter do not deserve good customer service.
Yeah, that's kind of the problem with your whole argument: it reads like your entire understanding of the field is from an undergrad business textbook.
For one, you keep equating a job having a customer service component with the specific job of customer support as you have it in the tech field.
>An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career.
Waitstaff to Call Center is not a career path I've ever seen anyone take. Too orthogonal to be a desired career change (if not downright worse if you're in a good market for service industry), doesn't build upon the skillset you've already built, and doesn't have the allure of long downtime that draws people into Security and Reception work.
This isn't a staffing issue.
If you do this kind of work, sometimes you will meet people that are completely unreasonable and there is no satisfying them.
Try working at a Toys R Us at Christmas and get shouted down by a parent because you ran out of the hot thing that season. For a concrete example, it was Tickle Me Elmo for me. It is not your fault, or the business' fault, but you can reset assured you will be the lightning rod for this.
As for serving, you can bet the people causing the most trouble are the least likely to tip. And at BEST they will tip nominally. There is some division that I don't understand between certain diners and servers that these diners consider their servers to not be their peers.
The customer is not always right, the entitlement of customers is off the charts in the past ten years. Expectations of online shopping applied to real life are very extreme. "I just want to have a good experience" style reasoning, when sometimes, things just don't go your way, and that is life. Deprioritizing a table is a survival strategy, to keep the plates moving.
How we solve this, I don't know, but I would say top down thinking is assuming that customers are 100% rational all the time, and I can assure you from the trenches it is not.
If you can gift them to a competitor, you can double the win.
You can absolutely do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating, though that's normally for customers who harass and disrupt other patrons, not karens.
Nonsense. Such customers are a huge cost and will always find reasons to overburden services.
The correct business response is to find ways to identify and eliminate them as customers, but that is rarely possible, so barring that you absolutely have to limit them to avoid their power of nuisance.
They are not people you can satisfy, or even want to: doubling staffing requirements in case one of those head cases swings by is not affordable.
> Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments
That’s exactly what you’re advocating for, and what GP is advocating against.
Condiments and napkin dispensers on the table are hallmarks of fast casual and otherwise down-market restaurants, aren't they? Last time I waited tables, I had a few customers like the ones the GP described, and the best you could do was give them whatever time you could spare after giving your other tables the attention and service you would normally give. If I had asked the chef/owner to put ketchup bottles on every table, I would have gotten a long lecture on the joys of fine dining and the importance of maintaining a luxurious atmosphere.
Not so sure. Trying to accommodate the worst case customer seems a fools game. You're suggesting escalation, from running the server around to running the management around (and more work overall). Adding napkin dispensers at the tables may go against the entire aesthetic they're looking for, while not doing anything about the ketchup, water, and other frivolous requests.
>> If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them...
There is no choice but to make assumptions about them (even just a generic model of a customer) unless you want to form some kind of relationship with them, which is not really possible in a restaurant setting (with the exception of regulars). Besides, the idea of simply deprioritizing them is quite sound - keep the other customers happy but don't deliberately insult the difficult one. You can not please everyone, so have rules that allow you to please the majority and let the others go.
As management “staff” are also your customers and you want to serve them as well.
Of course here, it's about economics. Better overworking employees rather than paying one more salary. That is the economic incentive is stronger than the "aim at the most efficient system" one.
If you had a client that insisted on uploading terabytes of data to your small “unlimited” text storage app, you’d likely tell them to knock it off, instead of buying more servers. This is a similar case
The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff.
Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments, while people are already paying a set price on the goods and/or service a restaurant delivers that should be planned for by management properly. A bad customer service environment only serves to ruin business.
If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them, it can also wrongfully reinforce bias and discourage customers from returning which often drives even some of the most popular businesses (Denny's for example) down.
Management too often plays the training tape for employees without reading their own training book properly.