Yes, customer service still matters.
Charlie’s manager Jude Hogg knows how to give customer service. Picture: Hein Kaiser
Customer service is not dead. It sometimes feels that way when complaints disappear into call centres, automated responses or delivery apps. But every now and then a business does something relatively simple that reminds you what service is supposed to look like.
In this case it was Charlie’s Pizzeria in Benoni, where a badly delayed order, an apology and two replacement pizzas turned what could have been a poor first impression into a reason to go back.
It started on a very cold Friday night when we decided to try somewhere new rather than ordering from one of the familiar pizza franchises. Charlie’s Pizza and Coffee Shop came up on one of the delivery services, the menu looked interesting and we placed an order.
Then we waited. And waited. After about an hour and a half, with no food in sight, I found the restaurant’s number and called them directly to find out what had happened.
The first order took forever
They were extremely busy that evening, I was told and after checking the order they confirmed that the pizzas were finally going into the oven. It was not the answer I particularly wanted after waiting that long, but at least there was an answer.
Eventually, close to two hours after ordering, the pizzas arrived. By then we were ravenous and probably would have eaten almost anything, but fortunately that wasn’t necessary. The pizzas were very good.
Under normal circumstances that would have been the end of it. The food was late, we eventually ate it and the next time we wanted pizza we might have gone somewhere else.
But shortly afterwards I received a WhatsApp message from Charlie’s Pizzeria apologising for the delay and offering us two pizzas on the house to make up for the experience.
I was sceptical, because after all, businesses often make generous-sounding promises in the immediate aftermath of a complaint, but following through is another matter.
So I left it for two days before sending a message back and asking whether the offer still stood. The answer was yes. We could choose what we wanted from the menu, tell them when we wanted it and they would make the pizzas for us.
Good old fashioned customer service followed
It was less the value of two pizzas that impressed me than the fact that there was no argument about it. There were no conditions suddenly attached to the offer, no excuse us canned explanation about why the delay. They had said they would make good on the poor experience and, two days later, that remained the case.
That should be fairly ordinary customer service, but experience suggests that it isn’t always. I have had poor food from franchise restaurants in the past where even getting an apology was difficult, never mind having the meal replaced.
The problem is that businesses sometimes seem to view a complaint as an irritation to be managed rather than an opportunity to retain a customer. A bad meal or late order may lose someone once. The way a business deals with it can determine whether that customer is lost permanently.
When it was time to collect the replacement pizzas, I went to Charlie’s myself. Until then, my entire experience of the restaurant had been through a delivery platform, a telephone call and WhatsApp.
It was there that I met manager Jude Hogg, who had made the commitment to replace our order and discovered that Charlie’s is a family business. There is also, as it turns out, an actual Charlie behind Charlie’s Pizzeria, who owns the business.
They all deserve a “Bells”, as the old advertising slogan used to say.
Restaurant kept its word
I had told Hogg that I would be there at 11am to collect the pizzas and when I arrived, they were pretty much ready. Given how the relationship had started, the punctuality was not lost.
More importantly, the quality of the first order had not been a lucky accident. The replacement pizzas were just as good.
Charlie’s has a fairly broad menu of pizzas, pastas and other Italian dishes, and spending some time inside the restaurant rather than simply ordering through an app offered a better sense of the place. The aromas coming from the kitchen certainly suggested that pizza need not be the only reason for another visit.
But it is the service rather than the menu that ultimately turned this into a story worth telling. Restaurants have bad nights. A kitchen can become overwhelmed, orders can pile up and delivery platforms can complicate matters further.
None of that is particularly unusual and a single late order does not necessarily tell you much about a restaurant. How the establishment responds, does.
