Sevice Excellence

There is a particular Mamak Restaurant that's been around for quite a while and has quite a following. The food was quite good then it opened and l became quite a fan of it. As the place grew, I stopped going there regularly as I found the place rather crowded and parking was a nightmare. Though not as regularly, I would still stop by once in a way. But service weren't so good anymore blue to the large crowds.

I soon moved to a new neighborhood. By then, the same store had opened a branch (yeah, mamak shops had branches, too!) in the vicinity. l started to frequent the shop again but again kept being let down by the service. The final straw came when I had bad service over three visits in the same week. This time, a table after mine got served their food first while mine didn't. l chose to walk out and as we passed the manager, my wife took the opportunity to tell him why are were leaving. He apologized profusely but we explained that it was our third consecutive bad visit.

That was about two weeks ago. Today for some reason, we decided to stop there again, expecting the same crappy service. We recieved our orders almost immediately, and the manager came by to ask if everything was ok and to tell us that he had improved his production. I told him that I was pleasantly surprised and that, yes, things are much better this time around. He came by again asking if I needed to 'tambah' my roti canai, which I politely declined.

It was nice to know that things improved and that the manager took the trouble to tell me that I'm important enough for him to want my patronage. I don't go there as often as some people.

But here's the clincher in service excellence that not many people get: its about making every single customer important and making him know that his needs are attended to. Simple common sense, no MBA required.

The Buzz

Amongst all the projects I carry out, this particular one has got to be the most arduous. It was a cross functional project that was thrust to us about two years ago. Work commitments and lack of time ("the mind is infinitely creative at not doing what it does not want to do - Tony Buzan) to really think through the problem, resulted in the project not progressing beyond the initial proposal.
In the intervening two years, the rules changed and got tightened; we found an e-mail in our inboxes requesting a status update. We put our heads together and decided that if at all we were to make progress, we would need to look for a better project.
Fully prepared for the worst, we presented our case to resubmit for a new proposal. Surprisingly, the new topic was well received; there seemed to be a buzz of excitement from the committee and we are on our way.
In all honesty, this is not a project we can afford to ignore. Like it or not, to drop out of this program just because we don't want to do a project would be folly on our part. The only thing is to just get it done. So I guess the only thing to do is to chip away at it, 15 minutes at a time, until the block of granite is smoothed into a sculpture, just like Michelangelo's David, or de Milo's Venus.
What else is there?