I recently arrived early in town to meet with a customer and decided to go for a quick coffee in advance to catch up with email and to collect my thoughts in the local coffee shop.
My pale skin gives me away as a local. I order my coffee and as the girl in the shop from Eastern Europe says to me in perfect tone in the Irish language “Slainte”. I say thank you and I notice this and that as she delivers coffee and buns to other customers in the cafe, they receive the same treatment. “Go raibh maith agat “, “Slainte” and a few other nice greetings.
On leaving, there is a bit of banter with her as I pay my bill and discover that she has actually mastered quite well the Irish language, the right sayings and can actually spell ‘as Gaeilge’ too.
The cafe is busy. It’s not a particularly stylish cafe. So I ponder that one of the reasons that it is so busy is because of not just her approaches to service and her job, but also the impact she has on other service people and the customers. The work still gets done, even though it appears a fun place to work.
You can’t teach a person these skills. If delivering service, they either have a good attitude or need to develop one. That cafe was not positioned in an ideal area for foot traffice, but yet was doing good business at a quieter time of the day with a lot of regular customers. Many visitors seemed to know the staff quite well !
It’s hard to place a value on a customer service person like this. Think about it, how do you retain and keep your own customers. Are you too busy trying to get new people to come in, and not spoiling your existing customers. Remember, it costs less to keep and retain customers and they bring others !
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