Kenny Chapman shares a restaurant story from Balboa Island where slow service nearly lost a customer, but staff communication and an apology plus a waived wine charge saved the day. Mistakes happen in service, he says. What matters is owning them fast.
Hey, everybody. Kenny Chapman, the blue collar coach, your contractor coach and sales trainer, coming to you live this week from our place on Balboa island where we stay a few months a year. And as you can see behind me, the tide is kind of out at the moment and the sun is beating down on me as I want to get together with you here for just a moment and talk about this week's topic. This week's topic. I really want you to think about how it shows up in your company with what you do, because here's the reality. We're in the people business, right? We have to deal with. We get to deal, I should say, with clients and technicians and people. And we've got Frontline, we've got back end, we've got all these different working components. And with that, we make mistakes and our people make mistakes, but what happens when we make the mistake? So last week I came to you and I talked about how it was handled when a nationally known company had made a mistake before with Christy and I and how that felt and how that resonated. Now this week, I'm talking about the very same day that night. We had a different service experience and it wasn't great. But then the way that they handled it, they really made it different. They made it better. They made us want to come back even though it wasn't a hundred percent, just based on the fact that we didn't have to complain, we didn't have to ask to see a manager. We didn't do any of the normal things. We didn't treat the service or crappy. We didn't do any of that stuff. And they exceeded our expectation based on what had taken place. So we come in. It takes forever to get our food. It takes forever to get our drinks and some of these types of things. And then just apologetic, just stopping by the table, hey, man, sorry it's taking us so long. We're under the gun a little bit. We're going to get with you as soon as we possibly can. Communication, obviously, that's a big theme of what we do at the Blue Collar Success group is communicate. Communicate with your team, communicate with your clients, communicate with your prospects. These people just want to hear from you and know that everything's going to be okay. So then when they showed up and brought the bill and said, hey, you know, just so you know, we went ahead and we took off that wine for you. It's not about the price of the wine. It's about the gesture that they got it, that they had made a mistake and they were willing to step up to the plate and go, it's mine. I own that. What about us? What about us and our companies? What about our front line? What about our brand as it resides in the marketplace? All of us are going to make mistakes. That's part of the service business. That's part of doing what we do. What matters most is what we do when it happens, how we handle it, and how effectively we can get these people to come back. Because now I'm telling all of you in the written word, I want you to go back. I want you to go test this place, try this place, give it your own experience. Not, hey, don't ever go there again, because they treat it as bad. And it took forever to get. We understand service. We're in the business. You guys are in the business. You understand it. But how does your brand show up in the marketplace? I'm Kenny Chapman, the blue collar coach, coming to you with a live version of Freedom Friday Focus from Balboa Island, California. Until we talk again, have a better than fantastic week and I'll see you next time.
