Let's compare apples and oranges...

Today, I thought I’d share a couple of short emails that I’ve received recently. One of them is an example of excellent service, where an employee went out of their way to satisfy their customer. The other is an example of truly poor service, where a customer was left feeling that their money and time were not valuable.

First, Jay writes:

“Just had the most remarkable experience at Tim Hortons on Topsail Rd.(Waterford Valley mall, in with Ches's and Jungle Jims).

Ordered an XL tea. The fellow behind the counter explained that they had run out of XL cups. This was fine... happens sometimes. I had just opened my mouth to say, "large is fine" when he said, "Hang on now". He had noticed the supply truck in the parking lot was offloading Tims supplies. He ran out into the parking lot, asked the guys unloading the truck for a box of XL cups, carried it back inside, broke it open, got out a cup, and served me my XL tea.

I was floored. Wish the young man had been wearing a nametag so I could write Tim's head office!”

Hopefully someone at Tims corporate is keeping on top of their media monitoring and this employee (or at the very least, the manager of this store) is recognized for the effort.

Then I got this email from Andy:

“My family and I dropped in to City Honda one evening to look at cars. The receptionist was on the phone, engaged a personal call. We stood in the show room for about 10 minutes (no other customers around). Finally the receptionist paged for a salesperson. After several more minutes a sales guy came out with his coat on, said he was on his way to dinner but had time to answer a question if we had one. Needless to say we did not feel like we he was trying to sell us anything.

We have owned two Civics before so were genuinely interested in Honda. We left and spent our $34,000 elsewhere!”

Wow. I know many, many people who don’t make $34000 a year, yet it seems like nothing to this Honda employee, whose primary job is sales and customer service. Perhaps he had an appointment or something, but there are ways to handle such a situation without making your customer feel like an annoyance while they’re standing with their wallets out!

That’s all for the moment. I hope you check back later on today for the weekly Twitter recap!