inconsiderate: why customer experiences fail

I got soaked by the tropical rain rather than staying another minute at the restaurant. We all have horror stories of terrible service. I bet you have yours. Think about it, and the emotions might get back to you: deep frustration and primal anger.

In this article, I'm exploring the many reasons why customer experiences can be awful, how service can fail, and how customer service can drive people to righteous wrath. In truth, creating a great customer experience is no mystery. Every business can provide outstanding service and build life-affirming and beautiful experiences, creating life-long fans.

This wasn't one of those experiences.

I should have taken the dark clouds brewing over the city as a sign that something was about to go very wrong. But I'm not superstitious. I also didn't think that they could screw up this badly. In hindsight, I kept very calm under the circumstances. I wonder how you would have reacted. I had almost reacted like most people.

Most people do not react at all when they have a bad customer experience.

You'd think that people would complain to friends, write wrathful reviews, or shout and make a scene right then and there. But no, that's not what happens. People get up and leave. The majority of people will not leave a review; they won't give feedback, and they won't tell you how you disappointed them. You won't know that your customer experience is bad because you can chalk up a few bad reactions to people having a bad day.

To create a great customer experience, you have to create feedback loops. They do not happen on their own. The waiter asks how dinner was. How do most people respond?

Fine.

To understand what's going on and what the reality of the customer is, you need to find direct and indirect ways of getting feedback. There have to be mechanisms to pick up on signals, to communicate them through the business, then to learn and improve from them.

It's easy to live in your own reality.

I don't know what reality the waitress was living in. When we sat down with our two kids, she handed us a single menu, a drinks menu, and a cocktail menu. I returned the cocktail menu as we would not booze it up at 5 pm late afternoon.

She asked something, but it had just started to rain, and I could not hear her clearly. This is not your northern hemisphere rain. Imagine standing in the shower with big heavy drops coming down on you. Rain at the equator is an experience— a loud one.

I apologized. Could she repeat her question? The words came fast. I looked at my wife. But she was as confused as I was, so this time, she apologized and asked her to repeat. But we still didn't get her. I shook my head. The third time was the charm. Only it wasn't charming. She looked irritated and got loud. At least we understood her now.

In any service business, you'll have demanding customers and difficult days. Your frontline staff are human beings. They'll have their worries, their bad days, their struggles. It's known that frontline work is not well paid. I speak from experience. I started in hospitality, barely making minimum wage. It's tough to be friendly if part of you wonders how to make rent.

A great customer experience depends on underpaid, often undertrained, and stressed people to provide amicable and courteous interactions. That applies to any industry. For the past 15 years, I had stints in consulting. The senior manager on the customer side does not care that you've just been 8 hours on a plane, are jetlagged, hungry, overworked, and pressured to perform. They see the suit and the friendly face. That's the job.

Her job, it seemed, was just to take our order and bring the food.

As the saying goes... "you had ONE job." I still remember the order. That's what emotions will do for you. They'll tie trivia into long-term memory. The more you try to get rid of it, the more you'll remember the details of your bad experience. I'm pretty sure you still have yours.

In this case, we had ordered a pizza margherita, a calzone, veggie samosas, halloumi sticks, mango juice, and a bottle of water for the table. You don't need to take notes for this one.

And yet, she came back three times. The first time, she hadn't taken my order and forgot the calzone. Next time, was it still water? Yes, it was. Tropical juice? No, mango. After taking the orders, the table was set with napkins, condiments, and ketchup. Did we need the ketchup? Maybe people use it with their samosas; who knows? That's what everyone got.

And that's the first problem with most customer experiences.

There is ONE experience. Did you order fish? Ketchup! Pizza? Ketchup! Spaghetti Bolognese? Well, that one I get, I'm fine with ketchup on top of it. No matter what the actual customer needs are or what their stage along the journey is, people go through the same process and get the same experience.

Businesses operate on two spectrums: custom and standardized. The latter allows efficiency, better margins, faster delivery, and more accessible training... There are many reasons for creating standard operating procedures. They make sense. The former provides individually tailored experiences for customers. This brings higher satisfaction, more loyalty, referrals, and close feedback. This also makes sense.

So, how do you make the trade-off?

The answer to this is simple: you don't. You can have your cake and eat it, too.

That's what we would have liked, but we did not get that far. When we got our cutlery, there were only 3 sets. Maybe she thought our daughter was too small for a fork and knife. We then got two glasses, no bottle. She came around yet again to bring the bottle and another glass. At this point, she'd been at the table eight times, and I stopped counting.

Instead, I got up and went to cancel the entire order. We hadn't eaten or drunk yet, and it didn't look like this would improve. The rain was heavy outside now. She looked wide-eyed. We were leaving? A bell rang. Your pizza is ready now. I looked at the hungry kids.

Fine.

The kids started eating, and we opened the bottle.

Customers will accept a bad experience the moment it turns into an acceptable one. That doesn't mean it is forgiven. Everything is - in fact - not fine. But most people will continue, deciding it's not worth dwelling on it and complaining. They are paying for your service, even if the service is nonapparent.

These are the hidden signals that many companies fail to capture. The silent discontent, the mediocre moments. These are opportunities for small improvements, little tweaks that cost next to nothing but are rarely done because the experience is "fine." Yet, this is more hurtful to a business than a truly awful experience. The truly bad are at least turned into stories like this. I haven't even gotten to the bad parts yet.

That's about to change.

The kids are halfway through the pizza. She has bad news. They're out of mango juice.

As a waiter, I had learned to read the room early on. What you don't do at a table of kids? Tell the whole table that you've lost the one thing they wanted. In such cases, I'd lean over to a parent and suggest alternatives. That said, I'd do that at the moment of the order, not 10 minutes later. You should know what's on the menu, the day's special, and what you've run out of. At this point, "orange juice" can no longer compete with the wail for "mango." That ship has sailed.

It is astounding how many businesses do not train their frontline workers to be fully familiar with the services, how they work, and when they are disrupted. What's worse is that most of the roles that are directly impacting the customer experience are not empowered to do shit about it. I am intentionally using this expletive here because if people cannot do shit to improve the customer experience, they will not give a shit about the customer's experience.

IT professionals like me would have you believe that you need complex solutions that run on the cloud and are AI-driven to solve issues like this. Yet businesses were dealing with this all the way to the beginning of civilization. All it takes is a checklist or a supervisor to make the rounds and provide guidance wherever needed.

A list of dishes not on the menu that day would have prevented a return visit after the calzone arrived. We're out of veggie samosas, but we're making you chicken samosas.

Now, I have a very high tolerance for idiocy. Colleagues always remarked on how calm I could remain with ignorant customers or in exhausting situations. Yet, when this happens to my kids or spouse, that composure quickly makes way to startling fury. Since my wife knows this, she quickly responded. No, she can't eat that. She's vegetarian. It's fine; she'll take the halloumi sticks. Those take another 10 minutes?

Fine.

Only it wasn't.

Yet, at no point did the waitress apologize, try to make up for the inconvenience, or try another way to save the situation. If this were in an overcrowded room with a reduced staff, I'd have sympathy for it. But there were only 6 other parties in the space with 15 tables. The place was half full. There were 3 other waitresses there. They did not seem to notice either.

Taking notice of breaks in the customer experience is not difficult. If you are wondering why the CSAT and NPS ratings of your service are not where they should be, just look. Literally.

In 2010, the first episode of "Undercover Boss" was aired. The premise is simple. The company's CEO disguises themselves as a frontline employee and then joins as a new hire. They go on to discover all the things that are going wrong both within the operations and in servicing customers. That's not customer research. It's not an in-depth investigation. It's literally just standing there and watching, listening.

Yet, like the waitresses in that restaurant, most roles that contribute to the customer experience only look at their part of the journey, their silo, their "responsibility." People do not look beyond that. They feel that it's not what they are paid for, and they can't do anything about it.

At Amazon, I heard the origin story of the "Amazon Andon Cord." You can find it online, but the gist is this: Call center agents knew which products a customer would complain about and why, but they couldn't do anything to fix it. So they didn't. Amazon introduced a process that allowed them to solve the problem.

You don't need to be a tech giant or introduce new technologies, elaborate processes, and expensive training to improve your customer experience. You need these 12 words that my hotel manager told me back when I was an intern:

"No one will blame you for trying to solve a customer problem."

I had risen to get the bill and leave. Obviously, no one cared that this dinner was going downhill, and we didn't see a reason to prolong the pain. At this point, the head waitress appeared and asked about our experience. Was everything fine?

It wasn't.

I took a deep long breath to calm down. The word "fine" was already on my lips. But I decided to be brutally honest instead. Starting from the beginning, I recited everything that went wrong, from the unfriendly conduct to the misses in service to the missed orders.

She looked, apologized, and left.

If you do ask for feedback from customers and actually get an honest reply, it is worth its weight in gold. But only if you aren't defensive. Being apologetic but indifferent is so synonymous with customer service that people only call a hotline to vent or to demand refunds. We have come to expect customer service to be inconsiderate.

Acting on real feedback is not difficult. The sad reality, however, is that most businesses do not act. They collect the data. They report on it. They look at the KPI. Then they do things to improve the KPI. But that's not the same as solving the customer problem and improving the experience.

Think of the dark patterns that online businesses employ to prevent you from canceling your subscription, shaming you into staying on, obstructing simple service requests, or preselecting options for you. That automatic LinkedIn opt-in to use your data to train AI models? It's buried in a TOS update you have received by email. It should have popped up on your screen the next time you opened the app, asking you if you want to opt in.

Ask yourself if your company is focused on short-term optimization or long-term customer experience. Even customer-obsessed companies routinely fail at their values by tweaking KPI instead of improving the overall experience. They ignore customers shouting their pain at them until it escalates to a level where they can no longer be ignored.

Which brings us back to the restaurant.

A guy showed up at the table. How is everything? It turns out the head waitress had called in the manager. She escalated to the level that could solve the problem. The manager listened to everything, apologized, and then got the bill.

This would have been the last opportunity to save the customer experience. You don't have mango juice? Send a waiter to the store around the corner and buy some. No veggie samosas? You have pizza dough, you have veggies, you have cooks. Ask them to improvise something. Add a piece of cake and an apology. Do not charge for the juice, the improv samosa, or the cake. Ask the guests to accompany them outside, holding an umbrella so they don't get wet in the rain. Give them a 10% discount for their next visit, and assure them that this will never happen again.

Customers are - for the most part - forgiving. People will give your service another chance. They will even tolerate truly bad experiences if you make up for them. But depending on what went wrong, a simple apology might no longer be enough. What people really want?

Consideration.

That's the key to a great customer experience. It is very simple, but not easy. It means considering what your customer will feel and go through at every step and aspect of what you provide. You don't need designers for this. You don't need AI.

You need to stop and think.

Consider what it's like to come with two tired and hungry kids through traffic, then be stuck inside in the rain and wait for the food while the smell of pizza drives the kids nuts. What would it cost you to give the kids two breadsticks on the house? 50 cents? Less? What would be the impact on these customers? Two grateful parents, two smiling kids, and a guaranteed return visit.

Do you need Chef Ramsey to come up with this? No. Any normal human being can think of this. Or hundreds of other factors in the overall customer experience that could be improved. That's as true for a restaurant as for any other business.

Inconsiderate: thoughtlessly causing hurt or inconvenience to others.

Customer experiences fail when the people who create them think and act inconsiderate.

This doesn't mean people are evil, or thoughtless, or stupid. It just means they haven't really taken the time to consider parts of the experience. They haven't considered what to do within operations to ensure a certain type of experience. They didn't care enough.

Neither did the restaurant manager.

His words were, "Sorry you didn't like the service. I'll get the bill."

I left through the rain, then took the car to the entrance so that my wife could get in. I preferred getting soaked to staying another minute at the restaurant.

The Moral of the Story

Now, I could have just given you the "5 things to do in customer experience" listicle version of this. It would have saved you 8 minutes of reading time. But here is the takeaway:

Customer Experience is set equal with views like "fast," "frictionless," and "seamless." Companies track things like NPS, FRT, and CES when they track their CX.

These all mean shit.

People will forgive a bad experience if the person providing it is considerate enough to realize it, care for the customer, apologize, and make up for it.

In my 2 years working in beach restaurants of a 5-star resort, I learned that you can spill soup over a guest if you spend the next hours making them feel like it was the best thing that ever happened to them.

On the other hand, you can improve all the typical CX metrics without actually improving the CX if 1) most customers aren't part of your feedback loop and 2) the people creating the CX are inconsiderate.

To improve your CX, you need to do two things. Tell your people:

1) to take the time to consider the experience of your customer.

2) to do anything humanly possible to improve their experience, and to solve their problems.

As for the restaurant?

I'm not going to name names. But I do leave Google reviews.

Do you have a customer experience horror story? Of course, you do. Share yours below. However, be kind and don't name people or companies. There's hope that they'll improve.

If you liked this story, share it with someone who would appreciate reading it.