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> I learned it’s better to deprioritize that table and pay the normal amount of attention to everyone else. Better for those all to tip at a standard rate and g

> I learned it’s better to deprioritize that table and pay the normal amount of attention to everyone else. Better for those all to tip at a standard rate and give them a good experience than to let one group drag down the whole floor. The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff. Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments, while people are already paying a set price on the goods and/or service a restaurant delivers that should be planned for by management properly. A bad customer service environment only serves to ruin business. If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them, it can also wrongfully reinforce bias and discourage customers from returning which often drives even some of the most popular businesses (Denny's for example) down. Management too often plays the training tape for employees without reading their own training book properly.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
Without attention rules you're constantly rewarding people who seek out unneeded attention. You need to give employees an out when they perceive someone is abusing their attentiveness.
malcolmgreaves 5y ago
I really have a hard time believing that you have actually worked in a job that requires customer service. The way you frame your argument is divorced from the reality of these kinds of jobs. This poster isn't doing bad customer service.i have no idea how you got that idea. What they're doing is stoping one bad customer from ruining other customer's experiences! The customer is not always right.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > The customer is not always right. One of my favorite daily visits, is a site called "Not Always Right," and it has many stories like this: https://notalwaysright.com/newest/ https://notalwaysright.com/newest/
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    'acts of gord' was always amusing too.
- winternett 5y ago
  People who deal effectively and positively with difficult customers often find the best success in business, and endure best through bad economies. If you understand human nature, you also understand that sometimes people are just having a bad day, or feeling ignored, or on their last leg. Ignoring, or being dismissive to, any paying customer is simply bad business. If a company does that as a practice, they're probably in the wrong business. An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career. Those are not just my words, they're words from the bible of doing good business, and a lot of successful CEOs and business people would agree, except for the CEO of comcast perhaps.
  - sodapopcan 5y ago
    While it's true that putting up with overly-difficult people can be good for business, this creates a race-to-the-bottom situation and there's no reason it shouldn't change. Someone's bad day is never an excuse for abusing service workers. For what it's worth, I was a service employee who deprioritized these people and I can tell you I'm certainly not working customer service at Comcast now-a-days... which is a reference I don't even understand (I know what Comcast is but ya...). Tangentially, I feel that there should be a form of conscription where everyone is forced to work at year or two of customer service in their teens. While I'm sure it wouldn't discourage everyone from being a prick, it could certainly help.
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    > If you understand human nature, you also understand that sometimes people are just having a bad day, or feeling ignored, or on their last leg. A more thorough analysis of human nature reveals that a double-digit percentage of humanity suffers from a serious personality disorder. Some of these disorders involve taking perverse pleasure in ordering others around for no good reason. Most experienced wait staff that I know can tell the difference pretty quickly between someone having a bad day and a bully. The latter do not deserve good customer service.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    >Those are not just my words, they're words from the bible of doing good business, Yeah, that's kind of the problem with your whole argument: it reads like your entire understanding of the field is from an undergrad business textbook. For one, you keep equating a job having a customer service component with the specific job of customer support as you have it in the tech field. >An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career. Waitstaff to Call Center is not a career path I've ever seen anyone take. Too orthogonal to be a desired career change (if not downright worse if you're in a good market for service industry), doesn't build upon the skillset you've already built, and doesn't have the allure of long downtime that draws people into Security and Reception work.
sokoloff 5y ago
Another solution is “fire the bad customers”. You can’t do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating, but in most businesses, there’s a slice of your customer base that isn’t profitable to serve, never will be, and when you find them rather than staffing up to serve them, consider sending them away. If you can gift them to a competitor, you can double the win.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Another solution is “fire the bad customers”. You can’t do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating You can absolutely do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating, though that's normally for customers who harass and disrupt other patrons, not karens.
- sixstringtheory 5y ago
  In about 6 years of waiting tables I cut off exactly one party from alcohol… they threatened to shoot me in the parking lot later. Probably was the right decision, but not an easy one to make.
Permit 5y ago
You have misunderstood the article. The problem wasn't the lack of napkins, the lack of ketchup or a problem with the food. The problem is with the customer. Even if you got all of those things correct, they would be upset with some other aspect of their service. If you had brought everything out ahead of time they would have complained "Why have you put so many things on my table? I never asked for any of this!" This isn't a staffing issue.
yCombLinks 5y ago
Nah, working with the public enough shows you some people are never satisfied. The "Correct business response" may be to completely cut people like that. Your definition seems to rotate around your personal morality rather than profit motives or even other people's wants and needs.
colechristensen 5y ago
Some customers are actually just really awful and you don’t want them to come back. As management “staff” are also your customers and you want to serve them as well.
cassepipe 5y ago
As a former waiter I agree with both OP and you. Yes there are people that are difficult to deal with, and yes a system ought to account for that possibility. It's funny how that is playing itself all over again over a varieties of issues where people seem to be holding opposing views where in fact they don't have to be. Proponent of better systems can acknowledge indivual's flaws without renouncing to reforms. Morals-oriented people can acknowledge that shaming and or moral postures do not actually work without having to renounce to their feelings. Of course here, it's about economics. Better overworking employees rather than paying one more salary. That is the economic incentive is stronger than the "aim at the most efficient system" one.
phkahler 5y ago
>> The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff. Not so sure. Trying to accommodate the worst case customer seems a fools game. You're suggesting escalation, from running the server around to running the management around (and more work overall). Adding napkin dispensers at the tables may go against the entire aesthetic they're looking for, while not doing anything about the ketchup, water, and other frivolous requests. >> If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them... There is no choice but to make assumptions about them (even just a generic model of a customer) unless you want to form some kind of relationship with them, which is not really possible in a restaurant setting (with the exception of regulars). Besides, the idea of simply deprioritizing them is quite sound - keep the other customers happy but don't deliberately insult the difficult one. You can not please everyone, so have rules that allow you to please the majority and let the others go.
masklinn 5y ago
> The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff. Nonsense. Such customers are a huge cost and will always find reasons to overburden services. The correct business response is to find ways to identify and eliminate them as customers, but that is rarely possible, so barring that you absolutely have to limit them to avoid their power of nuisance. They are not people you can satisfy, or even want to: doubling staffing requirements in case one of those head cases swings by is not affordable. > Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments That’s exactly what you’re advocating for, and what GP is advocating against.
giaour 5y ago
> Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff. Condiments and napkin dispensers on the table are hallmarks of fast casual and otherwise down-market restaurants, aren't they? Last time I waited tables, I had a few customers like the ones the GP described, and the best you could do was give them whatever time you could spare after giving your other tables the attention and service you would normally give. If I had asked the chef/owner to put ketchup bottles on every table, I would have gotten a long lecture on the joys of fine dining and the importance of maintaining a luxurious atmosphere.
leetcrew 5y ago
different tiers of restaurants come with different implicit SLAs. you don't get to monopolize the attention of one out of three employees working at a pizza place just because you spent $3 on a slice of pizza. the restaurant simply can't afford to appease this kind of customer. if it's a fancy restaurant where you're paying $100+ per person, things are different.
throwmamatrain 5y ago
There is theory, and there is practice. If you do this kind of work, sometimes you will meet people that are completely unreasonable and there is no satisfying them. Try working at a Toys R Us at Christmas and get shouted down by a parent because you ran out of the hot thing that season. For a concrete example, it was Tickle Me Elmo for me. It is not your fault, or the business' fault, but you can reset assured you will be the lightning rod for this. As for serving, you can bet the people causing the most trouble are the least likely to tip. And at BEST they will tip nominally. There is some division that I don't understand between certain diners and servers that these diners consider their servers to not be their peers. The customer is not always right, the entitlement of customers is off the charts in the past ten years. Expectations of online shopping applied to real life are very extreme. "I just want to have a good experience" style reasoning, when sometimes, things just don't go your way, and that is life. Deprioritizing a table is a survival strategy, to keep the plates moving. How we solve this, I don't know, but I would say top down thinking is assuming that customers are 100% rational all the time, and I can assure you from the trenches it is not.
edude03 5y ago
I upvoted your comment however I disagree with the first part of your statement - it’s not an assumption when you see “abuse of service” happening already. If you had a client that insisted on uploading terabytes of data to your small “unlimited” text storage app, you’d likely tell them to knock it off, instead of buying more servers. This is a similar case
fsociety 5y ago
The service industry truth is that some customers are jerks. That doesn’t excuse poorly ran restaurants, but the good ones will occasionally fire the customer. It saves your mental health, and helps keep a healthy client base.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

Without attention rules you're constantly rewarding people who seek out unneeded attention. You need to give employees an out when they perceive someone is abusing their attentiveness.

malcolmgreaves 5y ago

I really have a hard time believing that you have actually worked in a job that requires customer service. The way you frame your argument is divorced from the reality of these kinds of jobs. This poster isn't doing bad customer service.i have no idea how you got that idea. What they're doing is stoping one bad customer from ruining other customer's experiences! The customer is not always right.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> The customer is not always right. One of my favorite daily visits, is a site called "Not Always Right," and it has many stories like this: https://notalwaysright.com/newest/ https://notalwaysright.com/newest/
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  'acts of gord' was always amusing too.
winternett 5y ago
People who deal effectively and positively with difficult customers often find the best success in business, and endure best through bad economies. If you understand human nature, you also understand that sometimes people are just having a bad day, or feeling ignored, or on their last leg. Ignoring, or being dismissive to, any paying customer is simply bad business. If a company does that as a practice, they're probably in the wrong business. An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career. Those are not just my words, they're words from the bible of doing good business, and a lot of successful CEOs and business people would agree, except for the CEO of comcast perhaps.
- sodapopcan 5y ago
  While it's true that putting up with overly-difficult people can be good for business, this creates a race-to-the-bottom situation and there's no reason it shouldn't change. Someone's bad day is never an excuse for abusing service workers. For what it's worth, I was a service employee who deprioritized these people and I can tell you I'm certainly not working customer service at Comcast now-a-days... which is a reference I don't even understand (I know what Comcast is but ya...). Tangentially, I feel that there should be a form of conscription where everyone is forced to work at year or two of customer service in their teens. While I'm sure it wouldn't discourage everyone from being a prick, it could certainly help.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  > If you understand human nature, you also understand that sometimes people are just having a bad day, or feeling ignored, or on their last leg. A more thorough analysis of human nature reveals that a double-digit percentage of humanity suffers from a serious personality disorder. Some of these disorders involve taking perverse pleasure in ordering others around for no good reason. Most experienced wait staff that I know can tell the difference pretty quickly between someone having a bad day and a bully. The latter do not deserve good customer service.
- Talanes 5y ago
  >Those are not just my words, they're words from the bible of doing good business, Yeah, that's kind of the problem with your whole argument: it reads like your entire understanding of the field is from an undergrad business textbook. For one, you keep equating a job having a customer service component with the specific job of customer support as you have it in the tech field. >An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career. Waitstaff to Call Center is not a career path I've ever seen anyone take. Too orthogonal to be a desired career change (if not downright worse if you're in a good market for service industry), doesn't build upon the skillset you've already built, and doesn't have the allure of long downtime that draws people into Security and Reception work.

sokoloff 5y ago

Another solution is “fire the bad customers”. You can’t do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating, but in most businesses, there’s a slice of your customer base that isn’t profitable to serve, never will be, and when you find them rather than staffing up to serve them, consider sending them away. If you can gift them to a competitor, you can double the win.

masklinn 5y ago
> Another solution is “fire the bad customers”. You can’t do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating You can absolutely do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating, though that's normally for customers who harass and disrupt other patrons, not karens.
sixstringtheory 5y ago
In about 6 years of waiting tables I cut off exactly one party from alcohol… they threatened to shoot me in the parking lot later. Probably was the right decision, but not an easy one to make.

Permit 5y ago

You have misunderstood the article. The problem wasn't the lack of napkins, the lack of ketchup or a problem with the food. The problem is with the customer. Even if you got all of those things correct, they would be upset with some other aspect of their service. If you had brought everything out ahead of time they would have complained "Why have you put so many things on my table? I never asked for any of this!" This isn't a staffing issue.

yCombLinks 5y ago

Nah, working with the public enough shows you some people are never satisfied. The "Correct business response" may be to completely cut people like that. Your definition seems to rotate around your personal morality rather than profit motives or even other people's wants and needs.

colechristensen 5y ago

Some customers are actually just really awful and you don’t want them to come back. As management “staff” are also your customers and you want to serve them as well.

cassepipe 5y ago

As a former waiter I agree with both OP and you. Yes there are people that are difficult to deal with, and yes a system ought to account for that possibility. It's funny how that is playing itself all over again over a varieties of issues where people seem to be holding opposing views where in fact they don't have to be. Proponent of better systems can acknowledge indivual's flaws without renouncing to reforms. Morals-oriented people can acknowledge that shaming and or moral postures do not actually work without having to renounce to their feelings. Of course here, it's about economics. Better overworking employees rather than paying one more salary. That is the economic incentive is stronger than the "aim at the most efficient system" one.

phkahler 5y ago

>> The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff. Not so sure. Trying to accommodate the worst case customer seems a fools game. You're suggesting escalation, from running the server around to running the management around (and more work overall). Adding napkin dispensers at the tables may go against the entire aesthetic they're looking for, while not doing anything about the ketchup, water, and other frivolous requests. >> If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them... There is no choice but to make assumptions about them (even just a generic model of a customer) unless you want to form some kind of relationship with them, which is not really possible in a restaurant setting (with the exception of regulars). Besides, the idea of simply deprioritizing them is quite sound - keep the other customers happy but don't deliberately insult the difficult one. You can not please everyone, so have rules that allow you to please the majority and let the others go.

masklinn 5y ago

> The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff. Nonsense. Such customers are a huge cost and will always find reasons to overburden services. The correct business response is to find ways to identify and eliminate them as customers, but that is rarely possible, so barring that you absolutely have to limit them to avoid their power of nuisance. They are not people you can satisfy, or even want to: doubling staffing requirements in case one of those head cases swings by is not affordable. > Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments That’s exactly what you’re advocating for, and what GP is advocating against.

giaour 5y ago

> Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff. Condiments and napkin dispensers on the table are hallmarks of fast casual and otherwise down-market restaurants, aren't they? Last time I waited tables, I had a few customers like the ones the GP described, and the best you could do was give them whatever time you could spare after giving your other tables the attention and service you would normally give. If I had asked the chef/owner to put ketchup bottles on every table, I would have gotten a long lecture on the joys of fine dining and the importance of maintaining a luxurious atmosphere.

leetcrew 5y ago

different tiers of restaurants come with different implicit SLAs. you don't get to monopolize the attention of one out of three employees working at a pizza place just because you spent $3 on a slice of pizza. the restaurant simply can't afford to appease this kind of customer. if it's a fancy restaurant where you're paying $100+ per person, things are different.

throwmamatrain 5y ago

There is theory, and there is practice. If you do this kind of work, sometimes you will meet people that are completely unreasonable and there is no satisfying them. Try working at a Toys R Us at Christmas and get shouted down by a parent because you ran out of the hot thing that season. For a concrete example, it was Tickle Me Elmo for me. It is not your fault, or the business' fault, but you can reset assured you will be the lightning rod for this. As for serving, you can bet the people causing the most trouble are the least likely to tip. And at BEST they will tip nominally. There is some division that I don't understand between certain diners and servers that these diners consider their servers to not be their peers. The customer is not always right, the entitlement of customers is off the charts in the past ten years. Expectations of online shopping applied to real life are very extreme. "I just want to have a good experience" style reasoning, when sometimes, things just don't go your way, and that is life. Deprioritizing a table is a survival strategy, to keep the plates moving. How we solve this, I don't know, but I would say top down thinking is assuming that customers are 100% rational all the time, and I can assure you from the trenches it is not.

edude03 5y ago

I upvoted your comment however I disagree with the first part of your statement - it’s not an assumption when you see “abuse of service” happening already. If you had a client that insisted on uploading terabytes of data to your small “unlimited” text storage app, you’d likely tell them to knock it off, instead of buying more servers. This is a similar case

fsociety 5y ago

The service industry truth is that some customers are jerks. That doesn’t excuse poorly ran restaurants, but the good ones will occasionally fire the customer. It saves your mental health, and helps keep a healthy client base.