If you’re a regular reader, you might remember this story about Beyoglu, a Mediterranean restaurant on New York City’s Upper East Side. Either way, let me summarize: a few months back I described the indecipherable policy about bread and customer service at Beyoglu. It made no sense then, and it makes even less sense, now.
Except, of course, for the fact that the story seems to have caused a change in policy at Beyoglu. And the latest situation may actually be an even worse customer service fiasco than the earlier one. I hope you’re sitting down.
Beyoglu, presumably in response to my earlier story about bread and take-out ranking—at the moment— #3 on Google for the search phrase “Beyoglu Take Out“, has decided to stop doing take-out orders. Period. Except, not really.
Call Beyoglu and ask to place a take-out order and you’ll be told Beyoglu doesn’t do take-out. Walk into Beyoglu and ask to place an order for take-out and you’ll be told the same thing: “no take-out at Beyoglu”. But take a seat at the bar and ask for take-out and Beyoglu will sell you whatever you ask for, package it for take-out, and put it in a take-out bag.
I expect that policy will soon change, and if you’ve found this loophole and have been taking advantage of it I apologize for my part in closing it up. But with any luck, this time the folks who run Beyoglu will open their eyes about the right way to do customer service instead of acting like petulant children.
Having just returned from a trip to Los Angeles for the Barbara Yablon Maida Memorial Service at UCLA and since I’m running on fumes, that’s the whole story.Then again . . . that really IS the whole story. Customer Service is important, and making your customers’ lives unnecessarily difficult is never, ever the right choice.
And if you think that was something, just wait for my story about what passes for customer service at the airline Virgin America. We’re about to get a new enshrinee on The Answer Guy’s Verizon Wireless Customer Service Wall of Shame.
Carry on.