About Better Customer

It’s time we have an honest conversation about the customer experience.

It seems there’s a never-ending stream of horrible stories where customers and businesses attack each other. On one side there are companies (restaurants, stores, hotels, etc) doing everything they can to provide great service, only to be faced with difficult customers who ruin everything. On the other side there are customers with a specific set of expectations and when the service doesn’t meet them, the experience spirals out of control.

You just need to read popular blogs and websites written by the people who work in the service industry, or read reviews written by the customers to quickly feel the animosity. It’s like they can’t even talk to each other and the majority of the time, the comment section becomes a war ground of name calling and obscenities.

What can we do to improve the situation? What can be done?

Who Is the Best Customer?

If you ask this question to anyone who works dealing with people, the answer is always the same: the people who work in the industry. When a customer knows exactly what’s happening behind the scenes, he or she becomes more understanding and adjusts their behaviour accordingly.

For a long time I resented difficult customers with their unreasonable expectations. How could they not know they were being unreasonable? Did they not realise that many times (not all the times), the experience is ruined because of them? Not the establishment?

The simple answer is that customers don’t really know anything about the business. I’m not talking about evil obnoxious customers who wreak havoc everywhere they go; I’m talking about good people who always seem to have a horrible time.

Unless you have worked in a restaurant, shoe store, or hotel, you don’t really know what happens behind the scenes. In the same way customers expect business to “behave” in a certain way; businesses also expect customers to behave in a certain way.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a guide on “how to become a better customer.” If you want to drive a car, you need to study the traffic rules, learn about how cars work, and then pass a theory and practical test. If you’d like to be a lawyer, you need to pass the bar exam. If you’d like to be a doctor, you need to graduate and then do a long residency. But what can you do if you’d like to be a better customer?

This isn’t about being polite, although it certainly helps a lot. There are plenty of polite people who still go to a restaurant and have a dreadful time. So, it’s not the type of thing you can learn at home — your mum and dad will not teach you about how restaurants work. And sadly, you cannot learn it through trial and error like riding a bicycle; you’ll carry on making mistakes until someone explain how things work (and even then it’s probably going to be too late for you to change).

Better Customer

So, “Better Customer” was created exactly to address this issue. This is a place of education; it’s where people can learn about the service industry and hopefully become more understanding. If customers truly understood businesses’ day-to-day activities, their relationship could potentially improve.

I’m not saying customers have to agree with businesses’ policies and the way they run their companies, but by knowing exactly what’s going on, customer’s can reassess their expectations and have fewer disappointments.

I worked in the restaurant business for a long time and I kept a log of all the issues that happened with customers. Some of these issues were very specific (a unique problem in a certain situation), but others, happened consistently with many different customers.

It didn’t take long for me to find a pattern. After creating a list of nearly 100 issues, I organised them into different categories (Booking, Arrival, Ordering, Service and Departure) and wrote more extensively about each problem, with examples and consequences for the customer and restaurant, and more importantly, I wrote about how to be the best customer.

I suppose my frustration with customers forced me to create a guide on how to be a better [restaurant] customer. I thought that if at least one person learnt about one issue and changed their behaviour, there would be a happier waiter or waitress in the world.

I find that most of the people who enjoy reading about restaurant and customer service stories are the people who work in the industry. I doubt many customers, especially the ones with “the customer is always right” mentality, will read this guide. But if you learn something interesting here that you think would benefit a friend, please share it with him or her.

It’s worth noting that this is not only about restaurants. I welcome anyone who would like to educate their customers to write thoughtful and specific articles about their businesses, showcasing common issues and how they should be addressed.

This publication is not about sarcastic or demeaning articles about customers. I also welcome customers, especially the ones who disagree with something, to have a mature conversation about an issue so everyone can understand both sides.

So, what will you teach? What will you learn?