Small Gestures Earn Customers

All the time, you hear business owners lamenting the fact that it has become so difficult to attract new customers and keep the current ones yet so many fail to do simple things to gain and maintain customers.

How a Small Gesture Earned Our Business

My wife and I stopped in a Pakistani restaurant looking for something on the menu that struck our fancy. We don’t know much about Pakistani food so were were quizzing the hostess, who turned out to be one of the owners, on different menu items and how spicy each dish was.

The owners, a husband and wife team, let us know that they would adjust the spiciness of the dishes to suit our tastes. They asked us what kinds of dishes we like so that they could recommend something that we would enjoy.

Their true desire to share Pakistani cuisine with their guests and to make sure that their guests had good experience was obvious. At first impression, nothing stood out and made us say, “I want to eat here” until the owners showed genuine interest in us.

The restaurant itself was on the plain side. Nothing gave us much feel as to what the food or the dining experience would be like. If we had been treated with pleasant indifference - which is standard in most restaurants - we would have gone to look for another restaurant.

A small gesture on their part earned two new customers. We spoke with them for two minutes at the most and from the two minutes spent talking with us they earned a $26.00 sale that they wouldn’t have made otherwise.

After talking with the owners, we were expecting a good meal and they really delivered. It’s everything we could have hoped for. On the way home, we were already planning when we would return. The true value of our brief conversation comes in the future as we make repeated visits.

Never underestimate the value of a small gesture because small gestures really do earn customers.Smal

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Tagged as: customer retention, customer service