Watching how some restaurant owners in the mountains treat their customers reminded me of my time in Rome. The Italian waiters literally ignored you. They perfectly concealed the fact that they had heard you. customer servicePhoto rights by Fotolia Even if you stood up on the table shouting at the top of your lungs in the middle of the restaurant, they wouldn’t even blink. With luck, they would attend to you when it was time to take your order and pay, although they would undoubtedly make you wait for a while so as not to spoil you. “Mistreatment” of customers in the world of gastronomy It seems strange that this can happen in the world of gastronomy, but in certain contexts it is possible. Imagine that you have been climbing a mountain for 3 or 4 years and have climbed 500 meters in altitude. You arrive hungry at the only restaurant in the mountains near you. They are simply located in such a way that there is no competition . It doesn’t matter how well or poorly they treat their customers. Bad reviews on Tripadvisor don’t matter too much either. The lack of alternatives will ensure that your business will be able to operate for a long time despite poor customer service. The same applies to bars and restaurants near central points in Rome (and other tourist cities around the world). There is simply so much foot traffic passing by them every day that they don’t give a damn about the bad reviews you’ll find on the web from customers angry that they’ve been charged around 10 Euro for a coffee and even looking annoyed at you for making them work. Types of business that do not require good customer service We can summarize two factors that allow businesses to be successful for a long time by treating their customers as a nuisance: Monopolies and oligopolies : when there are no alternatives, you have to put up with it. A couple of years ago, if you wanted a landline, you only had one option. There were no alternatives. As time goes by, more and more monopolies are falling and there are more and more customers hungry for their well-deserved revenge. Many will survive by sheer inertia. There are also customers that you can treat badly but who, out of sheer laziness to find a new provider, stay with the company forever. Demand is much higher than supply : As long as there are many potential customers and you don’t have infinite capacity to serve them (restaurants are limited by their number of tables and chairs), you can afford to treat your visitors poorly. You know that you will always have your business full. Especially in tourist centers there is not much repetition so even good treatment will not generate the loyalty effect. Word of mouth is not necessary for the reasons mentioned above. Obviously, treating your customer poorly is a short-term vision for several reasons. The most important is that you will rarely be able to expand the business . You don’t notice any negative impact for a while because you only have limited capacities. No matter what you do, you always have a full house. The context can change and suddenly you can have competition where there was none before. When alternatives do exist, you can be left without clients from one day to the next. Obviously, the culinary world is not well represented by the extreme examples mentioned in this post. The vast majority of them treat their customers well, either out of necessity or out of passion for their profession. Few businesses can afford not to serve their customers perfectly, and even fewer can act that way forever.
