8 Customer Service Mistakes You’re Making

Tips on how you can provide unreasonable customer service from Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara

Published in

TwosApp

3 min readMar 5, 2025

Here is a list of 8 common mistakes people make in customer service from the book Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara.

I hope you’ll learn from these mistakes so you can provide unreasonable hospitality to your customers and clients.

1. You chase fads

Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.

It’s about connecting with people.

“People will forget what you do; they’ll forget what you said. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou

2. You don’t sweat the details

Intention means every decision, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane, matters.

To do something with intentionality means to do it thoughtfully, with clear purpose and an eye on the desired result.

It’s easier to learn the right way to do things at the high end than it is to break bad habits. You can always take it down a notch later, but it’s harder to go the other way.

The way you do one thing is the way you do everything and that precision in the smallest details translated to precision in bigger ones.

“People can feel perfection.” — Walt Disney

3. You assume the worst

Assume the best of people even when they weren’t behaving particularly well.

Maybe this person needs more love and more hospitality than anyone else in the room.

4. You’re always stingy

Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly.”

5. You’re afraid of change

Don’t let tradition get in the way of hospitality.

No aspect of your business should be off-limits to reevaluation.

6. You think you need to be perfect

It may not be possible to do everything perfectly but it is possible to do many things perfectly.

The definition of excellence is getting as many details right as you can.

Follow through to the last inch, no matter what you’re doing.

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” — Penn and Teller

7. You want to be right

If you’ve corrected a guest because you don’t want them to think you’ve made a mistake, you’ve made a much bigger mistake.

If hospitality is about creating genuine connection, and if that connection happens only once the guest has let their guard down, shaming them makes it highly unlikely you’ll ever be able to get that connection back again.

Their perception is our reality.

The customer is not always right. Abuse should not and cannot be tolerated, period.Saying sorry doesn’t mean you’re wrong.