CAFE MENTORS MALAYSIA: Customer Service Of The Café/ Coffee Shop In Malaysia

What’s your requirement of how you will be treated when you walk into a café?

To a certain standard, I wouldn’t care how best of your service. With all due respect, each human on earth deserves a basic attention in your café.

As they always say, “Customer is always right.” Yes and no. Customer service has just one definition in a café, yet attention varies when it comes to different scenario at the point of the service is happening.

Customer service isn’t just physically serving food on the table. What if you’re serving food to the person who plays the most important part in supporting your financial status or perhaps once saved your life? What’s on your mind if the person is your idol or your loved ones?

Your mindset in serving customer is your crucial term, not just by comprehending it, it’s an experience. It motivates you to initiate some effort in providing certain level of attention to assist the customer even when they reveal an awfully long face.

Right in your face – whether unintentionally or the other way round, it doesn’t matter.

We don’t need to put up with a poker face, yet we should serve with better expression.

Service is always about the attention we’re giving to our customer. Be it a first-timer or regular customers, every customer deserves basic attention. Either at the moment they are walking in or after complimenting on the coffee you made for them, the moment you’re serving a hot chic or the fuzziest guy in the cafe. In the end, it’s still has to be ‘our pleasure to serve’ them.

As generations are evolving, technology has been advancing and helping F&B to make coffee taste better. Why does customer service has been so vital to a successful café business then? Hasn’t the technology overcome human skill? Why do we still need a coffee maker in person?

Simple as it is. Every human in café world, couldn’t survive so long without human connection.

If a robot can take your advice to make the coffee slightly lesser sweet than it has been, just for you. Well, you can consider investing the robot over your café then.

If a robot can understand your sign language of you could get the bill instead of your friend, that’d be wonderful.

Yet, not all human got certain sign reading, observation or analysing skills too.

Realistically each customer considered as a business. Even if they spend the very least amount off your menu, each amount accumulates to a whole business that supporting and partly sustain the cash flow. Each positive attention to the customer is crucial in order to keep the business recurring. Yes, recurring.

When satisfaction met, eight out of ten of them return and they need to feel the connection from you, me or all of us.

Reason could be insightful. There’s always a higher chance we will go back to where we feel belong to or familiar with. We most likely goes back to the café when price is much more reasonable yet if we’re willing to spend much more there’ll be another café that we feel closer, connected or the staff and owner have already familiar with our consuming habits.

We spend with habits and attention has unintentionally been in one of our shopping habit list.

Sometimes, we’re more than glad to make the trip of getting back to the café to relax or have good chats with the baristas. When bond is firm enough with the regulars, that’s when the business rapport grow.

By just growing the rapport with the regulars isn’t enough for any business. Each business is meant to influence or spread for good. Thanks to the social media nowadays that, just by making a café exists and known by the world is so much easier, more than a decade ago.

Yet good-service-reputable café would able to sustain the business for at least a decade. The most valuable social spread is still word of mouth as it is the most sincere and honest expression of an unforgettable experience that they enjoyed so much, it needs to be shared to others as well.

I learnt from one of my best manager that customer service, not a task. It is attention that we should put much effort for different customers in the café. Therefore, any employee in any position could provide similar amount of positive or at least welcoming attention to each consumer.

There are a few distinctive customer services that many cafés do not share. Even if they have shared, not many people would aware the importance of it.

Being attentive doesn’t mean just socializing with each customer; some need some time to be left alone. When being left alone doesn’t mean the customer would never need help at all.

Observe. They might need a little idea at some situations that we might never notice it as we’re too busy with mobile.

A kind gesture doesn’t mean it must be from someone who’s kind enough to show off. It’s from someone who observed enough in different situations.

When a family with a toddler walks in, the very least thing we should be empathising about is suggest or offer them high chair. Perhaps mummy or guardian might need hot water to prepare baby food or some just need it to warm up the baby milk.

When we see someone walked in with laptop, they might need a table with socket nearby.

No matter who walks in, noticing their needs give us loads of opportunity to make connection with our customers; most of them will be surprised and delighted when we could help them even without them voicing it out.

So baristas, keep your head up when you’re done with the latte art, please! Look around for opportunities.

When socializing doesn’t even mean that you’d just complimenting or complaining about life in front of them.

Some customers find your knowledge in coffee making very resourceful to them. It made their day to find that the cuppa they’re taking have so much stories behind. The terroir, the country, the process and why they can taste it.

No, it’s not always about coffee though. It’s because we are specialising in food and beverage, we need not always talk about it all the time though.

Some need our attention in listening. Take it as we’re also retrieving new learning from them.

Take your time educating them, one message a cup and eventually, they’ll appear as your regulars, time after time. Meanwhile, take your time to listen little by little, gives them a little sense of superiority to teach us something in their aspect.

I really don’t know what scares people away when all I wanted to do is to make their day. Perhaps overly attended to customer annoys and make them mad.

A standard or good customer service can be trained and improved. A significant service made your customers become friends. Then you would feel guilty for having to holiday and not having the chance to serve them for someday and I’m sure, you’d be missed too.

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