I went to the ITSMF conference in Auckland this week and stayed at the conference venue, The Pullman Hotel. The first morning I came down to breakfast, and started to fill out the form that asked your room number and what type of breakfast you wanted. I was told the form wasn't needed and i was shown to a table. I waited a whil and nothing happened, there were only a handful of people in the restaurant so I proceeded to help myself to a continental breakfast and hoped someone would come and offer me a coffee (there was no self service for that). I was reading the news on my iPad so wasn't too worried about the lack of service but half an hour went by and no one even came to ask me if I wanted coffee. Finally I went and found someone and they were helpful and coffee was supplied.
The next morning I arrived a few minutes after the Western Australian rugby team, the restaurant was full and it took time to find me a seat. This time I was asked to fill out the form and again initially served myself. However this time it was much easier to get peoples attention and they were very helpful despite clearly not having enough staff to cope with the influx to breakfast. I then started to think that not signing that form had something to do with the poor service the previous day, perhaps it triggered something in their process and by the seemingly helpful suggestion that I didn't need to fill out the form, actually led to me going missing from the perspective of how they operated.
Shouldn't have mattered, it wasn't hard in a room of about six people to come and ask me if I wanted a coffee. In this case the process was no doubt and aid to the smooth operation of the kitchen, but if you noticed no one had got the customer a coffee you might just be organised well enough to notice the increasingly dissatisfied customer. So two things go hand in hand here, follow the process for sure but don't be so lost in your process that you forget to ask the customer about the experience.
