The Perils of Disappointment

One of my favourite things to do is meet up with my girl chums. I’m very lucky to have some brilliant friends who provide me with so much incredible support, fun and laughter.  During these times there may or may not be wine and/or delicious food present.  When we are arranging to meet up, there is always a discussion about when we can all make it (the hard part) and then comes the ‘where shall we go’ conversation?  Some girl mates are brilliant at hosting, happy to cook and comfortable in the cleanliness and general order of their home.  I am not. 😊 The other day, mid decision-making Whatsapp chat, someone suggested a venue, and one of the girls said ‘oh no, I went there the other night and the kitchen was shut, so we spent all night famished’.

This particular venue is one that I really value and rate so I was struck by how this one experience was now preventing 5 of us from going there, each spending about £35.  Worse than that, when we would all be respectively arranging meet ups with other groups of friends, that venue has now been registered in our minds as somewhere that can no longer be relied upon as somewhere where you can show up and get food.

I instantly felt sad for the venue I loved and became very concerned about its future.  I know that sounds a tad melodramatic given that it may have been just a ‘one-off’, but unfortunately, these little incidents can have a catastrophic, cumulative effect – that’s just how tough things are within the world of service.

Jan Carlson, successful Swedish CEO, appropriately named every time a customer comes into contact with a business ‘A Moment of Truth’ – a grandiose title which gives a clear indication of how important every one of these interaction points are.  Get them right and customers love you, get them wrong, and people will do the thing that they do best, talk.

That one disappointment, experienced by one friend, has now sent a ripple affecting probably 30+. How much loss of income does that constitute?

What might have caused the kitchen not being open that night? Staff shortages? A food delivery not arriving? Who knows, but I do know that often decisions are based for financial reasons more than value-based ones. Maybe, to save money, they decided to shut the kitchen that night ‘Tuesday nights are our least busy, we’ve done the math, it costs us more to open the kitchen than we make in food orders that night. Shutting it on our least busy night makes sense.’

Financially, if you need to cut costs, then yes, that decision makes complete sense, what you are not considering however is the knock-on implication of that one person turning up that one night and being disappointed. The amplification of that disappointment has a deafening echo.

My fave (and now a Tiktok sensation!) Rory Sutherland talks so eloquently about the mysterious and un-financially quantifiable nature of customer value if you want to delve into this phenomenon more.  I also recently enjoyed this Eric Ries podcast with Gagan Biyani MBA thinking killed my startup  (FYI readers, the Cardiff Business School MBA is DIFFERENT, trust me on this, we have wonderful sessions on the importance of creativity and value and how the magic of business purpose needs to be protected. We are proud to be a School that teaches purposeful, successful business which not only delivers for customers and stakeholders, but delivers for society too) where he talked about how cutting the free truffle that was delivered with every ‘Sprig’ meal delivery to save 50 cents, marked the death knell of the business – TLDR: cut to his Linked In post.  Hell, I’ve even written about this before too Price Does Not Equal Value sharing John Darlington’s GENIUS ‘you’d never buy a new kitchen’ analogy.

It’s really critically important to try to understand what is it that your customers actually value.  In this particular venue’s case, I’d suggest that part of its appeal is that you can show up whenever and get something delicious. You don’t need to book, you just need to be there. When you start to erode what people value, i.e. you can no longer just rock up and guarantee that the kitchen will be open, regardless about whether that day is a ‘quiet day’ or not, you start to debase its value proposition. Other venues that are hard to get into, you’re not so surprised that there are only 2 days highlighted on the ‘OpenTable’ app for you to select in the next 6 weeks. Casual and reliable availability is NOT what you are looking for from those type of establishments.  You’re probably looking for the opposite – the scarcity of availability is part of their panache ridden proposition.

Maybe the chef that day was ill, maybe they didn’t have the cash to open the kitchen, maybe they ran out of food, it’s very easy for me to sit here in judgement, oblivious to what the real reasons were and having no responsibility for their finances.   The point is an important one however. It is absolutely essential to do all you can to truly understand the constituent parts of your value proposition before taking a decision which will impact your customers because the subsequent ripple effect will nearly always have more consequences than you bargained for.