You decide to eat out this beautiful evening with your spouse, and you order for your favourite. It is probably a meal you always cherished from childhood. But then, this doesn’t taste as exactly as the one you know you’ve eaten elsewhere. Why? According to food scientists, this could be attributable to different variables such as the cooking process itself, some hidden chains of flavour, and yes even the personality of the person cooking. Yes, that too.Professional cooks will tell you that two cooks can prepare a certain meal individually and both will come out differently; same ingredients. same timing, same recipe, Yet a somewhat different taste. Well, this is not a food article. But we’d draw the parallels with the above. Often, organisations in a bid to standardise professional conducts when it comes to service, come up with operational guides or manuals which spell out in black and white, everything down to the details, from dress code to expected process time,
Every professional in the service industry would readily agree that once in a while, certain things could go wrong in the customer service of a business. Either the supply could be a little late on delivery, or the machine breaks down some minutes into production leading into service failure. Other times, it could be a staff’s mistake spilling the coffee on the customer’s shirt, or the device supplied to a customer stops working just on purchase. There are a thousand and one things that could go wrong even in the best of customer service excellence. Sometimes, these could be issues that are completely out of our control as humans. Other times, and regrettably too, some are errors that we could have averted but for our lack of attention to details. However, for every customer contact gone wrong, there are two broad options to salvage the situation, to either explain away the error or seek a genuine resolution to the matter at hand. Herein lies the wi