DR INNOCENT NAHABWE: ‘Rat in my Milkshake!’ What we can learn from Café Javas incident

Hundreds of young men will tell you that their would-be houses were eaten at Café Javas. Whereas we had Nandos, Fidodido, and Steers among others in the early 2000s, these days it is CJs. The coolest place to have a date in Kampala is CJs.

Check your friend’s Instagram. You will most likely find a selfie at CJs. Imagine if all that money was spent on cement and bricks, I would have a mansion! Exclaimed a friend of mine! So when social media was flooded with the rat issue at CJs, he was a little happy.

Finally, after over 24 hours since the incident, CJs issued a statement blaming the incident on malice. It was late. Good customer care should empower front-line managers to handle such situations better. They didn’t. They instead had to deal with crisis management. By then, the risk is much greater. When it eventually emerged (the release) it had a little anger written all over it. I hope it rests the matter.

The complainant was arrested, I heard. I believe it’s the right action to avoid future incidents where malicious or opportunists play dirty games to hurt a growing brand like CJs.

See, from the word go, the incident felt like a malicious act. Having worked in a restaurant for over ten years, I know how the process flows. It’s hard to find a whole rat in a blended drink unless it fell in thereafter. The cups are transparent, stacked into each other, not allowing space to assume the rat was sleeping in the cup before the milkshake was poured. If it was indeed dead before the milkshake was poured, the smell would be all over the place. Anyone who has trapped rats in their homes will tell you, you can`t enjoy the milkshake till the bottom without the smell hitting you unless you have Covid.

It reminds me of the game we played in High School. They say scarcity is the source of innovation. So, out of hunger, with no money, we found a way to eat free. If you remember the latrines at schools, flies were and are in their hundreds and thousands. So, we would capture the fattest fly and pocket it, walk to the restaurant in the centre, and order food. We would eat till close to the end and drop in the fly we carried. We would then claim that the food is full of flies. We would join in the rest of the school to make noise and pretend to be hurt. We would then walk away without paying. Until our trick became too obvious, we paid with our butts getting strokes of the cane from LDUs.

While in S.3, we wanted to reject the posho prepared at school. We tried to influence guys to reject the food but in vain. Hunger among teenagers wouldn’t allow them to do so. We were not done even after the canes. We organized and sneaked into the dining while the others prayed with the rosary and put a little tomato sauce in the porridge which was already served in saucepans on the tables. When the students came through for breakfast, we passed word around that there were menses from one of the cooks. Much as it was a boys’ school a few knew about periods and the trick worked. The students rejected the food and the strike was successful though it led to our eventual expulsion (story for another day).

So, this wasn’t entirely new. It happens and can happen anywhere with varied interests.

Good enough, even before the statement, CJs had its thousands of satisfied customers fighting for it. Many who have consumed their products know and trust them for consistently delivering sometimes exceeding expectations. They are a love mark. People know it, know it for something different and know it for something they care about. They are lucky. Not many can survive such incidents.

From the incident, there is a lot we can learn

No matter what you do, so long as you are selling a service, it’s unavoidable to suffer a service failure. This might be a failure in communication, a failure in meeting the customer service expectations or a failure in the process like shipping a wrong product. When it happens, you need to swing in to do service recovery. This is a process of making amends for the customer. It is essentially the action a service provider takes in response to service failure. A well thought out process of returning an aggrieved customer to a state of satisfaction with a company/service. It’s best for any company to have service recovery protocols so that when there is failure, a quick response can be made.

The following steps will help you in service recovery

1. Anticipating customer needs.
2. Acknowledging their feelings.
3. Apologizing and owning the responsibility.
4. Offering alternatives.
5. Making amends.

Hospitalityinsights.ehl.edu writes as follows;

Why is customer service recovery important?

Failures in customer service are inevitable. Whether you’re just starting out as a business or a well-oiled machine, you’re bound to slip up and disappoint a customer at some point; your reservations desk forgets to accommodate a special request, your airline has to cancel a flight to a popular holiday destination, or a waiter in your restaurant is having a bad day and is impatient with an elderly couple. We are a part of an industry which is high touch and driven by human interaction, 100% error-free service is almost impossible, which is why how an organization recovers from those service breakdowns is what sets them apart from the rest.

It happens.

The good news is that this is where you have the opportunity to make a real difference. Left unresolved, service failures produce disgruntled customers – who will be quick to tell their friends, family and just about anyone who will listen about their poor service experience. In fact, research shows that on average, a dissatisfied customer will share their negative experience with 16 people. A helpscout report quoting newvoicemedia.com says that feeling unappreciated is the #1 reason customers switch away from products and services.

That will not bode well for your business.

Handled tactfully, however, breakdowns can be resolved, and even turned into opportunities to enhance customer loyalty and improve overall customer satisfaction. In fact the Service Recovery Paradox states that a customer thinks more highly of a company after the company has corrected a problem with their service, compared to how he or she would regard the company if non-faulty service had been provided. The thought is that the successful recovery of a faulty service leads to increased assurance and confidence among customers.
The key lies in mastering service recovery. With the right skills, and a little training, companies can not only recover from their service failures and win back customers – but learn from their mistakes and come out stronger on the other end.

How to build a successful customer service recovery program? (Here are some key pointers:)

1. Anticipate & understand the needs of the customer
Most problems result from a misalignment between customer expectations and the products or services actually provided. Do some research to deeply understand your customers and what services they expect along the experience pathway, so you can anticipate their demands before you make mistake.
Be realistic about what you’re offering and don’t oversell yourself; it will only set you up for failure if (or rather when) you can’t deliver on your promise.

Use the SERVQUAL Instrument – an empiric model designed by Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry to compare service quality performance with customer service quality needs. It essentially measures an organizations service quality performance against the needs of its customers on five broad parameters – Responsiveness, Reliability, Empathy, Assurance and Tangibles. This model allows you to find and plug the gaps between actual and perceived service.
Examine the customer experience pathway and identify what was/were the point/s of failure along the pathway. Once you are able to understand where along the customer experience pathway the failure actually took place, not only are you better positioned to solve the problem for the customer, but you can also keep track, record these incidents and train your team to avoid service breakdowns in similar situations.

2. Making amends
Making amends is a means for righting a wrong. It can be as simple as a sincere apology, sending a follow-up letter, or may include a small gift or token of appreciation. The knee-jerk reaction to a service breakdown is more often than not either waiving of a bill or giving something complimentary to the customer. These strategies do work – but only to an extent. The customer is more often than not, looking to be treated fairly.

In case of a service breakdown, they feel that they have not been treated fairly, so when we do end up making amends we must take the situation and the customer into account and make amends in a manner that makes them feel that they have been treated fairly. Try to offer alternatives to give the customer a sense of control and put them back in the driver’s seat. Define frameworks with your team and empower frontline staff to take certain decisions that allow for swift action and recovery.

Investing inadequate training on how to handle customer complaints will go a long way in improving your overall customer satisfaction. Arm your customer-facing staff (and especially your customer service team) with the right communications skills, and set clear guidelines on what solutions and gestures they can offer for different types of complaints.

3. Empowerment & Ownership
The Ritz Carlton allows, better yet encourages employees to spend up to $2000 to solve guest issues. More than the money it’s about giving control to the employees to use their time, effort and when needed – the company’s money to enhance the experience of any guest or recover from service breakdowns. Till the time your employee does not own the interaction and feel like they are in control to make decisions, they will not be able to execute high quality service recovery.

Build mechanisms in place that encourage frontline staff and management to take ownership of the situation. “I will solve this problem for you”. When things do go wrong, a customer wants someone who will take charge of the situation, rather than pass the responsibility around or blame others for the service breakdown. The breakdown in itself could have happened owing to a host of reasons or people for that matter. However, when it comes to recovering the situation, the buck stops at the person carrying out the recovery, so owning the situation and inspiring trust and confidence in the customer that you will solve the problem for them becomes a critical component.

4. Respond in a timely manner & Follow-up
When it comes to service recovery, timing is key. Be prompt and efficient in responding and resolving issues, to make sure that frustrations don’t fester for too long. The quicker you respond, the more likely you’ll be to resolve the issue before it turns sour, and turn a disgruntled customer into a loyal brand ambassador.

Even though you may have settled on an acceptable solution, it’s not the end of the road. Every complaint, big or small, calls for a follow-up to check if the customer’s issue was resolved and if they’re happy with how it was handled. Give them a call, or send a card or email to let them know you’re still concerned about their satisfaction. If possible, give them feedback on what measures you took internally as a result. For example, did you share the feedback with the staff, or implement changes to your reservations process to make sure that special requests are tracked more effectively? Make sure the follow-up is prompt and to not let too much time pass before checking in on the customer.

5. Keep an open line of communication

Encourage your customers to provide feedback by sending questionnaires and providing a direct line of communication for where they can share their feedback, experiences and concerns. Research shows that for every customer complaint, there are 26 other unhappy customers who have remained silent. So go in search of those customers who might be too reserved to share their experiences, as you’ll find it’s often the silent ones who can do the most damage.

In conclusion, if you have a business or service, it’s great to also have a service recovery protocol. Otherwise, you will wait to have a service failure crisis management and it can get messy.