A Tale of Two Pizzerias
Tonight my friend Tim and I had an interesting experience that allows me to give contrasting examples of good and bad customer service in the restaurant industry. We both love a terribly bad breath inducing pizza: sausage with garlic. There are two places in town we get this pizza, both have excellent pizzas.

Back in the fall, after one of our friend's had completed his grad vocal recital, we went to one of these places and the two of us ordered said pizza (as two single guys we can partake in the consumption of what is probably the equivalent of half a head of minced garlic on a pizza with no worries).

When everyone's food came out the waitress brought us a pizza which had sausage and pepperoni on it. We pointed out the fact that there was pepperoni and no visible garlic. The waitress told us it was probably under the cheese and for us to try some and let her know when she came back if there really was no garlic on the pizza. We did, and there was none. We sent back the pizza, minus two slices (because we each tried one as per her orders) and then preceded to wait another 20 minutes, while all our friends enjoyed their meals, for our pizza to come out.

Twenty minutes pass and our new pizza comes out. She sets it down, proudly, and we look and see that there is, indeed garlic on the pizza. However, there is also no sausage, only peperoni. Rem member, we never asked for peperoni. In fact, Tim doesn't really like peperoni. We point this out to her and inform her that we will gladly keep this pizza in order that we may at least have some dinner this evening but feel that we should be compensated for never having gotten the wrong order.

We finish our meal and the bills come. We get a check with both pizzas charged and one is marked at half price. We complain, since we only ever ordered one pizza and never actually got the pizza we ordered, and sent back the first incorrect one. She gets her manager to come talk to us rather than try to clear up the issue. The manger accuses us of eating both pizzas and informs us that it obviously wasn't her mistake since she had been working there for five years. Aside from the fact that longevity at a job doesn't make one immune to mistakes--even if you have a doctorate in your field you are still likely to make a mistake from time to time--we argue that it was obviously someone's mistake and not ours. We manage to get them to remove the first pizza from our bill and get half off our second (though still incorrect) pizza. We leave feeling cheated and upset for being chastised by the manager, and embarrassed for causing a scene in front of all our friends.

Tonight we went with some friends to establishment B that we get this wonderful, smelly pizza and order one to split. When the orders come out the waitress points out that somehow the order got messed up and the kitchen put onions rather than garlic on our pizza. She offers to leave the incorrect pizza for us and informs us that she has put a corrected order in and will bring it out as soon as it is ready. We laugh, and inform her of the above story and ponder why it has suddenly become impossible for us to get this pizza prepared correctly. We eat the mistake pizza happily, staving off hunger and are saved the annoyance of having to watch friends eat happily while we starve because of a mistake that was not our own. Shortly the corrected, and even upgraded in size pizza arrives and we enjoy this one very much. We leave, each with take-out boxes, happy.

Now, neither of us has been back to establishment A since the incident back in the late fall, and we have no plans to go back any time soon. We will readily go back to establishment B any time in the near future.

The cost for each place was probably the same, they each made two pizzas for us (actually, the cost for establishment B was a little higher since they upgraded our second pizza). However, the cost in the long run is that establishment B has kept two customers and has managed to make them even more loyal. Establishment A drove off two semi-regular customers and generated a good bit of negative word-of-mouth publicity in the fall from a whole table full of people. In addition to this, the waitress helped herself out in that we both tipped over what we normally would have tipped (I tend to not under-tip based on bad service but I will over-tip based on exceptional service).

I'll leave you to figure out the moral of this story, I have pizza in the fridge to attack.
- posted by Nick @ 3/01/2009 10:48:00 PM | 1 comments