"A Disappointing Observation"

I received the following email last week, subject line as above, from a customer who had a less than stellar service experience at BT on Thursday night:

"We are not frequent customers but always keep brooks tavern high on our list of special places, coming perhaps half a dozen times a year. Tonight (Thursday 1/22/09) we came to enjoy our favorite oyster frittata, arriving shortly before 8 pm, as always the food was outstanding, but the service was very poor. We had an inattentive waitress who either forgot or ignored our requests outside of taking our order, the only real service we got was from the busboy and it was flawed. The dining room was no where near full and most of the other guests were in the final stages of their meals so it was not a case of being overloaded with food coming out at the time we were being “waited” on (wait was the operative word). In these times when every dollar is hard to come by, it was disappointing. We will be back to try again but we will be more cautious about making recommendations until we have seen that what we experienced tonight was an aberration, not the norm. As a former restaurant owner and chef, I know that you want to hear when there are problems and I am sorry to be the bearer of this disappointing report"

I immediately printed out the note, and showed it to the crew members involved. The end result was a meaningful discussion - and often spirited - about what happened that (busy-all-at-once) night, and how service could have been better for the gentleman above. I replied back and received another email detailing the major issues that resulted in his disappointment and posted all of this as well, for our further education, as it were.

We know service at Brooks Tavern isn't perfect every time. Some customers prefer one server over another. Sometimes a server has a table way outside of their station, and if that station gets filled, forgets all about the customer on the other side of the dining room. (This unfortunate incident happened to Joy this past Saturday night.) On an extremely busy night, especially if we are at all shorthanded, service can become dicey and we have to be vigilante to catch the cases that get lost in the shuffle...we don't always succeed in that either. So we know we need to try to be on top of things at all times, busy or slow. The main point to be made is that this fellow took the time to let us know that we let him down. He made valid points in a constructive way, and, if we listen to what he has to say, maybe we'll win him back as a customer. He could have just written us off altogether and we never would have learned a thing. As it is however, we have gained a valuable lesson, and hopefully our "No customer left behind" policy will become better ingrained in our dining room.

Please let us know about any "Disappointing Observations" you have about the job we are doing, when they happen. We can't fix it if we don't know it's broken, eh?