Foodie Friday, and I’ll bet that a number of you will be going out this weekend. We’ve all had the problem of placing a food or drink order and what you ordered isn’t what you get. It’s really a problem when you’ve ordered delivery. What’s more frustrating than your vegetarian pizza showing up with pepperoni or your steamed dumplings arriving fried?
Mistakes happen. I used to run an online store that fulfilled tens of thousands of orders each year. Mathematically speaking, if we performed perfectly 99.9% of the time, there are still 100 screwed up orders out of every 100,000 (and we did way more orders than that). What I used to ask my folks was to listen to the customer (and put aside their heated and often unpleasant language), apologize for the problem (even if we didn’t cause it), and solve it. Maybe they clicked on a wrong key or maybe our inventory system didn’t react in real time, telling them that something was in stock when it wasn’t. It doesn’t matter. They are customers, and it’s easier to retain a customer than it is to find a new one.
Let’s go back to our delivery example (since today is food-related!). Suppose the cook forgot to pack the drinks ordered with the pizza. How can you catch this before the customer even knows there’s an issue? Make every person in the chain responsible for checking the order. Does it match the ticket? As an aside, I always ask the restaurant to read me back my order when I place it and I’m always surprised when they don’t ask to do that themselves. If the ticket isn’t right, no matter what steps are taken along the way, the order is wrong.
But let’s suppose there is a failure and the food goes out without the sodas. When the customer asks where they are, you have a few options. Send out a second delivery person (if you have one), make a second trip (if you don’t), or empower the delivery person to hit a store near the customer and buy what’s missing. My guess is that this is the fattest, least expensive solution since it minimizes the time to correct the mistake. Another option when the customer calls to complain might be to credit back the missing items as well as some or all of what was delivered. The reality is if they care enough to call you need to care enough to keep them.
Any business is a team effort. No one can think, much less say, it’s not my job to take responsibility for making a customer happy. Whether you’re a food business or not, read back what a customer is asking. Say something if the order is right but something seems off (“oh, you DON’T want chocolate on the pizza, you want chocolate cake!”). Most importantly, be prepared for mistakes. They’re going to happen. The real challenge, beyond preventing them as best you can, is making a customer happy when they occur. How are you doing with that?
As usual, I have golf on the brain this morning. It’s probably because I’m in the midst of planning the annual soiree to 
Consult Keith 