Today marks a full month since my whole family stopped having burgers, fried chickens and fries from this one particular brand. It the quintessential fast food brand. People can’t talk about fast food without mentioning the brand.
Our family loves fast foods. We really really love them. We probably can’t go through the week without the crunchiness of a fried chicken, that juicy greasy burgers, that crunchy and fluffy fries with that oh-so-sweet chilli sauce. I picked up this habit from my Yed (father). The memories of him taking us to KFC Jam Besaq Sungai Petani in the 80s is still fresh. He would also picked up random kids (whose parents were probably hawkers in Jam Besaq food court) playing on the street in front of KFC to come and eat with us. We had KFC so often back in the 80s that I have somehow made it a habit of mine as well and this continues with my kids.
Back to the matters at hand, I have this habit of quitting a restaurant, shop or even brand if I encountered a very bad service recovery. The wife thinks I may have overreacted sometimes. And you know the wife is always right, If the wife is wrong, remember that they are not wrong, they are right.
Notice I said ‘bad service recovery’. Some folks describe service recovery as ‘complaint handling’. I personally prefer the term service recovery. We want to recover the customers from their bad experience. We don’t want to just handle the complaint.
So, it’s not the initial bad service, product or situation that caused me to quit them. It’s bad the recovery that made me quit them. We all make mistakes. We are all human being. Even experts in their fields make mistakes, much more us, normal folks working minimum wage salary in fast food joints. I am very tolerant to bad service and bad product. I just can’t tolerate bad recovery. And when the bad recovery is done by a high ranking management team, I more than happy to quit the brand/shop/restaurant.
The bad service and product
I’d like to share what caused me to quit this brand entirely. My kids have a Tae Kwan Do class every Saturday afternoon. Right next to the dojo is this big huge fast food joint complete with drive-thru. We make it our habit of enjoying lunch before class or having a snack after class together there. At the very least, we would just get a drive-thru snack. Every week I would spend at around 5o bucks. Not including mid of the week snacks and dinner in case both of us come home from work a little late and the kids are hungry. Easily 300 bucks a month on this brand alone.
Exactly 32 days ago, I went through the titular drive-thru lane and ordered the usual order of their spicy fried chicken and some burgers with fries. I will always change the drinks to Iced Milo as that is what the kids love. It was at this point the cashier Mr. Diaz (Not the real name – I borrowed the name from my current favorite TV show Cobra Kai), started to get on my nerves. He said there’s no Milo, but there’s a chocolate drink. I just need to add RM5+. Asked him if Milo is permanently no longer available? Mr Diaz said yes and only Chocolate Drink is available. I agreed to take up this chocolate drink since the kids really wanted Milo. Then I added a kid’s meal with a spicy chicken, Mr. Diaz said nope. That kid’s meal only came with the non-spicy meal. Disappointed again I just agreed lah. Total bill comes up to RM55. I paid and drove off. Kids tried the chocolate drink and both of them hated it. Not disliked it, but hated it. My youngest actually made this face where she almost throw up. I tried it, yup, hated it as well. I guess we aren’t fans of the chocolate drink. We discarded the drink after only a few sips. Well, it’s fine I guess, sometimes we got something we liked, sometimes not so much.
Here’s how one can screw up a service recovery
Disappointed, I then texted a former colleague of mine. He’s now working as one of the big shot there. Asked him if it’s true that Iced Milo is no longer there and replaced by this Chocolate drink? He said nonsense, they are still selling. I was happy to hear that. He added it could be that they ran out or perhaps not available due to there’s this water supply issue happening now. I said ok lah like that. Then I told him about that ‘no spicy chicken with kid’s meal’ issue. Of which he replied my text with a reply of a facepalm (🤦🏻♂️) emoji and followed up with a “terrible service bro”. I then shared a copy of the receipt so they can trace the cashier Mr Diaz and perhaps coach him for improvements.
No more replies from my friend. No apology, no thanks. That’s Strike one.
Strike two is when someone from the outlet called me a few hours later. They called me and introduced themselves as XXX from outlet XXXX. Did not tell me if they are the supervisor, cashier, or manager. Just XXX from XXXX outlet. Their first question was “I understand that you have a problem with our outlet. What is the problem?”
That really hit it for me. I politely asked, “Did you not have the details of my feedback?”. Only then did they started to tell me the details they got from my former colleague and started giving excuses after excuses why their service was so bad. No water supply, bad cashier, bad drinks barista and a few other things. I tuned out of the conversation towards the end. I’m just allergic to excuses.
At this point I no longer am interested to hear them giving more excuses. I didn’t complain to hear excuses. I give feedbacks to tell them to improve the gaps since I’ll be frequenting the more place in the future and I’d like it to be better next time.
At this point, I felt that it’s a waste of time giving them my feedback. I even regretted it. I then told them “Okay, let’s not talk about this anymore, I passed the feedback so that you can improve and close any gap you may have. Not to listen to excus…” I got interrupted.
Strike three happened while I’m talking to them about giving them feedback for improvement and they interrupted me with some empty talks and asked me to come again and eat for free for the same amount I spent earlier. Never interrupt an angry customer folks. Never.
The moment they finished talking, I waited for a few awkward silence then replied, “Thanks but no thanks. After talking to you I’ve decided stop spending money at your place and your brand altogether. Please tell my friend that.”
What to do so we don’t screw up service recovery?
So many things went wrong in the service recovery I experienced. It should be very simple. How simple? Let me share three QSR companies service recovery steps based on their training manual. I can verify that these are all correct at least since the 90s and 2000s. Huge thank to one of the best MIT trainer I have had the pleasure of learning from.
LEADS – My favourite pizza place!
1. Listen – Listen to the customer intently. Listen to understand, not to reply.
2. Emphathise – Express empathy. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes
3. Apologise – Say you are sorry and mean it.
4. Do whatever the customer needs – Solve their problems.
5. Stand by your promise – Make the customer happy. Give them a bit more than just solving his problems and thank them.
LAST – My favourite Fried Chicken place since I was a kid!
1. Listen – Listen to the customer intently. Listen to understand, not to reply.
2. Apologise – Say you are sorry and mean it.
3. Satisfy – Satisfy the customer. Solve their problems.
4. Thanks – Thanks the customer for their feedback, time and understanding.
TAALDTT – The place to get a Bigmac perhaps?
1. Thank the person – Thanks the customer for their feedback.
2. Apologise – Say you are sorry and mean it.
3. Ask for suggestion – Get from customers what we can do better.
4. Listen – Listen to the customer intently. Listen to understand, not to reply.
5. Don’t pass the buck – Don’t blame others, don’t pass the problem to others.
6. Tell the person what action you will take – Tell them you’re committed to it!
7. Thank them again – You can never thank your customer enough!
If you looked at the three examples above, we can see striking similarities. They all shared four main steps. They are Listen, Apologise, Solve/Satisfy and Thanks. So very simple, and yet so many failed to do it right.
I didn’t get any sort of listening from my former colleague. Obviously no apology. He didn’t solve my problems, and forget about thanking the customer lah. He did none of that. He did one thing though, he passed the buck to the person from the outlet. Good job there. He’s Director level mind you. Perhaps I’m just a lowly customer, so no need to entertain me that much. I totally understand that you probably have many more important things to do than recovering a single customer’s bad experience.
From the person who called me later that day, definitely no listening, I was interrupted in fact. You may ask, “How can they start the conversation and show to me that they actually listened?” One way to do it is by telling me the details that they received from my former colleague and then confirming if they got it right. If they got everything right, that means they really listened to my feedback and really understand them. So simple right?
Then she did apologise and promised to solve the problems they are having. Good that they did this. Though she did blame the cashier and the barista. It’s so easy to blame others right.
I may sound like I’m nitpicking. Of course lah. We are going through a case study on service recovery, remember? So we need to nitpick lah.
Let’s take this positively and learn from it. My wife will kill me for writing this as she told me not to write it. I feel I want to write this, by writing this, I need to really put my money where my mouth is. That is to continue not giving them my money and not succumb to temptation the next time CNY comes (that Prospe….be strong Shaik! Stop it!). And if somehow, in the future, I were to go back to them, they can be very happy to have recovered a customer. So it’s a win-win situation right?
That’s it folks. Remember, it’s not hard to Listen, Empathise, Apologise, Do it and Stand by your promise. It’s just a phone call away to listen intently and empathise. It’s not hard to apologise on behalf of your brand. Solving it was so simple in my case. Tell me you’ve got the product/service gaps sorted out and that Mr Diaz the cashier is coached for improvements. And lastly, you just need to thank the customer for their patient, their love and care of your brand (if they don’t love and care, they wouldn’t have taken their time to give you their feedback) and the time spent talking and giving you feedback. How you thank them is up to your creativity.
Till next time. Be safe and remember our SOP for Covid-19. It’s getting worse by the day thanks to our government incompetency and politicians lacking the discipline to follow SOP.
Peace be unto all
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