Customer Service is About Asking The Right Questions

We have been Roaming at home lately, so I have been a little “lazy” to post events from Jacksonville – mea culpa.

Last week may have been the week of mediocre food, as I had two experiences where the server could have really saved the day, but they simply were not asking the right questions.

SCENARIO 1: At a business lunch, the server (who was pretty scarce once he delivered the food) never asked how our meal was, and didn’t notice that I had only eaten half of a small portion meal.  At the end of the meal, he had but one question for me:

Are you done?

He didn’t ask how the meal was, or why I had left so much food on my plate, nothing. Since he didn’t ask me how things were, I chose to keep my mouth shut. I know some of our fans will scold me for not opening my mouth – but I was in a business lunch, and didn’t think it was necessary for me to suggest a fix their problems at that time.

SCENARIO 2: Toi and I are having dinner, and really it was only OK, nothing to brag about. At the end of the meal the the server asked the question:

Was everything OK?

OK, yes, it was just OK, was my reply. But she didn’t get the subtlety that it was ONLY OK.

No business is perfect, but we have to work on improving things a little at a time. I know we have times when we don’t ask the right questions, and we continue to learn and grow.

When taking a Cruise Ship vacation years ago, I was continually asked by the staff how things were. However, their gratuity depended on my opinion of the trip, so the did not just say …

How Was It ?   or  Is Everything OK?

If you’ve been on a cruise, I bet you’ve experienced this too, the questions go like this:

Was your dinner EXCELLENT this evening?

Did you find everything in your stateroom to be EXCELLENT?

Was the entertainment EXCELLENT?

Was your excursion Excellent?

There are TWO parts to this idea, though. ONE they want to bump their gratuity – fantastic, and I am all for them training me to believe that I have had an EXCELLENT experience.

BUT here’s the bigger part, if it’s not EXCELLENT – then they know where they can make an improvement, and work to make my experience EXCELLENT.

So what questions do you ask you customers? Do you look for ways to make it an EXCELLENT experience, one they’d like to repeat over and over again?

Just think about the ways you can simply CHANGE  your language, to make it more thoughtful for the customer and more beneficial for you.

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We’ll be posting more from the Jacksonville Roams, and we look forward to seeing you in our travels. We are also beginning to look for sponsors who’d like to be included in future broadcasts as we start putting together more shows.

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