A lesson of excellent service.

I have seen plenty of people in the restaurant business thinking that they are in the trade of selling food in the same way that I have seen plenty of people in transport thinking that they are in the business of selling transportation.  It is so easy to forget that people invest far more than just money in return for a core product.  They also invest their time and they expect to receive an experience that amplifies whatever the core product may be.  Companies that understand this, embrace the full experience as their core product. 

It is a very rare occasion that you see excellent customer service in trains in the UK (the video reflects the expected norm).  Most routes are monopolised by companies that do not seem to care about the customer experience because competition is not really an issue.

So you can imagine my surprise one morning when I was privileged to see a ticket conductor offer amazing service to a customer who had seemingly lost her ticket (Lets call him Dave).  What caught my attention was that for the first five minutes of the interaction as the lady was frantically looking for her ticket, she was at the same time talking on her mobile.  Now if you catching trains on a daily occasion like myself you would know that the average ticket conductor would have lost his cool 3 minutes into the interaction.

But not Dave, he retained a professional calm that you only see at the concierge of a five star hotel. He then proceeded to squat and maintain eye contact whilst conversing with the customer the way you used to see airline staff resolve a situation (now you only see evidence of that sort of body language training in airline business class rarely in economy).  He resolved the situation swiftly and elegantly with the kind of professionalism only exhibited by people that truly like people.

People like Dave are the real assets of companies. So I emailed his company about my experience praising him. I received a response a week later thanking me for my compliment and assuring me that the message was sent to the section manager who would then be responsible to pass my message to Dave….

Now if I wanted Dave to just have a minute of feeling good about himself I would have told him myself on the spot that I thought he did a great job.   I chose to write to his company in the hope that they could recognise exceptional service and consider that at the very least they should consider the opportunity that Dave should be part of their training team.  Of course I was not expecting anything like that to be communicated to me but the message that my message was passed onto a manager who may then pass it on to Dave left me a little deflated and back to reality where the pursuit of great customer service comes a long way down at the very bottom of a long long looooooooong list of misguided priorities…