When Customer Culture Fails: A Telling Dinner Experience
Waiting 30 minutes for a server to take our order. Clearly, they’re understaffed. Along comes a young man, full of goodwill, determined to give us the least bad experience possible. Dinner was tedious but not because of him. This young server was dedicated, attentive, and did his best.
I struck up a conversation to understand the hotel’s dysfunctions. He explained that two cooks and three servers had resigned in the middle of summer, that management ignores the warnings, and that the head of food service is on leave.
The symptom: understaffing, disengagement, and sacrificed customers.
Everything makes sense now. Here is a business so little customer-focused that it drives away its employees… and soon, its customers.
- Why don’t you leave? I asked him.
- I love this job, I want to keep learning. I’ll finish the season, then I’ll go.
I left him a generous tip and a few words of encouragement. He deserved better than this broken system.
But beyond this scene, a broader unease seems to be setting in: the feeling that the quality-to-price ratio is deteriorating.
Haven’t you also felt that bitter sense of paying far too much for service that no longer meets expectations?
What’s happening?
Rising costs force businesses to cut expenses. When poorly managed, this directly impacts quality. Recruitment difficulties push many establishments to operate in degraded mode. And then there are the remaining staff, too often demotivated, disengaged, and losing their taste for a job well done.
Yet… some businesses are thriving remarkably well.
No recruitment problems, no motivation crisis, and service quality that meets expectations. Result: satisfied customers who feel they get their money’s worth.
How do they do it?
Nothing has changed
They had been building their customer culture for years, not as a trend, but as a foundation. They invested in the long term, in behaviors, in empowerment, in listening. Customer culture was their bedrock.
And today, it’s their best defense against the crisis.
While others are brutally discovering their internal flaws, these businesses are reaping what they sowed.
Because yes, some companies saw customer culture as just a passing fad. Today, they’re paying the price: disengagement, dissatisfaction, instability.
I fear this period will be painful for many of them, and, incidentally, for many customers caught in the dysfunction.
But perhaps what will emerge is a healthier market, with businesses genuinely and durably focused on the customer.
Not those who say so. Those who embody it.
Author: Guillaume Antonietti