New restaurant
On Friday night, I decided to try out a new restaurant (Piccolino in Sheffield city centre if you must know). The food was good, the décor quite impressive and the location excellent. But the service drove me mental.
Bad service?
I’m sure everyone can point to incidences of appalling service they’ve had in the past; it’s easy to identify surly behaviour, plain rudeness, consistently getting orders wrong and dawdling to the point of starvation as “bad”. But what got on my nerves on Friday was what some people – including the staff at Piccolino – would regard as good, bordering on excellent, service.
‘Good’ service that’s actually bad
It was clear that the staff had been trained, but evidently the training manuals overdid it somewhat. It seemed as though someone was in our face every two minutes, asking whether they could take our coats, give us a different menu, refill the wine or just ask how everything was going.
And it was consistently done in that obsequious manner that comes across as false as the “Have a great day!” in an American fast food joint.
Constant interruptions
There was no co-ordination – two or three different people would come over to ask exactly the same thing. This is annoying when it’s something useful, such as “Would you like the dessert menu?” and absolutely infuriating when they’re constantly interrupting your dinner to see whether you’re enjoying it.
Breaking point
At one point, I snapped. A chap who looked like the manager became the third person to ask how our main course was. I replied with a forced grin: “Fine at the moment, but could you send someone else over in a couple of minutes to check again?”
He seemed to have got the point and mumbled an apology, but unsurprisingly, yet another gushing minion showed his face with the same polite enquiry within a few mouthfuls.
Driving test service
To me, this is the equivalent of doing your driving test and making ostentatious displays of turning your head to look in the mirror, just to demonstrate to the instructor that you are looking in the mirror. It’s actually bad practice, but it shows that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing.
But good service isn’t about following a list of instructions and intrusively showing that you’re following them. It’s about judging the needs of the customer and behaving accordingly.
Hotel greetings
In a similar vein, I can’t stand it when I arrive at a hotel to be swarmed over by seven eager lackeys wanting to take my bag and smother me in refreshing towels. I also don’t want to have to sit down with a cheap fruit cocktail drink in a wine glass for twenty minutes while someone reels off a list of facilities.
And when I finally get to the room, I certainly don’t want a 15 minute tour of it in order to learn how the taps or the bed works.
Good service
Just get me checked in as quickly as possible, with the minimum of fuss, and then leave me to it. If I’ve got a problem, I’ll let you know about it. If you know there’s a problem, deal with it without – if at all possible – me having to be aware of it. That, my friends, is good service. And if more people within the hospitality industry could be aware of this, then it would be greatly appreciated.
Tags: hotels, restaurants, service
Spot on. Good service is invisible – it should be so tailored to the individual that the person on the receiving end shouldn’t be aware that it is ‘service’ they are getting. It should feel like decent, normal human interaction. (And yes, that means knowing what I like and expect simply by looking at me: nobody said good service was easy.)
The best hotels and restaurants (and by that I don’t mean ‘the most expensive’) don’t provide service as such. Instead, they have people who know what to do – and when – in order to make your & my experience the best possible FOR US.
The worst – which can range from Piccolino’s (they really didn’t know who they were dealing with, did they?) to the flashiest luxury hotel – impose service on their customers because it’s easier FOR THEM to do so.
Quality – so hard to find. That’s why people need travel journalists, to sort wheat from chaff.
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the great work Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Fairly amusing Dave, I can relate to everything said. The 15 minute tour of the bedroom is even worse when the minion in question hovers expectantly for a tip. Perhaps I’m a tight bastard but $5-$10 for showing me how the TV remote works just doesn’t fly.