What bad eggs teach us about customer service

Plenty of businesses put loads of effort into the big, visible parts of what they offer. The shiny bits. The “this will impress people” bits. And sometimes they absolutely nail those. But customer service is the thing that decides what your customer believes about you overall. It’s not an optional extra. It’s the lens that everything else gets seen through.

A gorgeous room and inedible eggs

We love the Canaries and we try to visit Tenerife at least once a year. This year, we stayed at a hotel and paid £180 for one night, including breakfast. The room was lovely. This time we didn’t get a sea view, but after an initial disappointment, we realised that the view up to El Teide is just as magnificent. The room was clean, modern, with an excellent bathroom and shower. So far, so good.

And then there was breakfast.

Not a small “ah well, never mind” kind of breakfast either. The sort of breakfast that makes you instantly question the whole operation. I’m by no means posh, and honestly my expectations have been underseeded by different levels of incompetence over the years. So I’m not hard to please.

My husband loves cooking and he said, “I couldn’t make a fried egg as bad as that even if I tried.” That pretty much sums it up.

The hotel guests were about 50% German and 50% British, so they catered for both. Cold meats and rolls for the Germans, fry-up options for the Brits. Great idea in theory. But the way it was presented seriously stank of “I don’t want to be here. I hate my job.” The bacon looked like it had been cooked hours ago, the eggs! The whole setup screamed minimum effort.

One weak link changes the whole chain

The funny thing is, as a guest you start doing detective work. You don’t want to, but your brain goes there because you’re trying to make sense of the mismatch.

• Do the kitchen team only get a tiny budget per guest?
• Are the kitchen staff underpaid?
• Are the staff undertrained?

You start asking yourself those questions because you’re looking for a reason that a place can get so much right in one area, and so wrong in another.

And that breakfast didn’t just lower my opinion of the kitchen. It lowered my opinion of the hotel. Full stop.

Customers don’t split a business into little boxes. You don’t think “great room, shame about breakfast, but those are separate departments.” You think “this place is either on it… or it isn’t.” One weak link changes the whole chain. A single bad experience colours everything else.

Your customers don’t see departments, they see one experience

Most of us have experienced some version of this. The tradesperson who does brilliant work, but takes three days to reply to a simple message. The restaurant with amazing food, but staff who make you feel like you’re in the way. The online shop that’s lovely on Instagram, but disappears the moment a parcel goes missing.

It’s never just that one thing you question. It makes you question everything else.

That’s what makes customer service so important. It isn’t a fluffy “nice to have.” It’s the thing deciding what your customer believes about you. Products and services get you noticed. Customer service decides if people stay, come back, and tell their pals.

Finding your “breakfast moment”

Every business has a few moments that matter more than the owner realises. In a hotel, breakfast is one of them. It’s one of the main daily touchpoints, so if it’s grim, guests feel it hard.

In a service business like ours, responsiveness is a big one.

When I look at our customer service, we try to be super responsive, even while on holiday. That’s the path we’ve chosen and we’re OK with that. It allows us to look after client websites even while spending time in the winter sun. I feel quite smug sitting on a cruise ship working on a client website.

We never put an out-of-office on because we’re both always available. We’ve spent holidays with friends who are employees and they couldn’t understand why we’d spend time working while away, but it works for us. My husband was updating a hairdresser’s website this morning and I was knee deep in hosting server issues trying to resuscitate a website (successfully). It doesn’t matter where we are. We try to be responsive at all times.

After over 20 years in business, it’s something we’ve gotten used to. And to be clear, it’s not because we think everyone should live like this. It’s because we know how much trust is built or broken in those small moments when a client needs you and you show up.

Simple ways to tighten your service

A quick way to look at customer service is this:

• Expectation: what did the customer think was going to happen?
• Experience: what actually happened?
• Extra mile: what tiny thing could have tipped it from “fine” to “brilliant”?

You don’t have to overhaul your whole business overnight. Most of the time it’s one small adjustment in one key moment. A clearer process. A faster reply. A better handover. Tiny moves that change the entire feel of your business.

A quick check for this week

Going back to the disgusting eggs, what does that say about the hotel or its management?

• When did the owner or manager last experience their hotel breakfast like a guest?
• Is kitchen staff motivation low?
• Have the staff not been trained?

Those questions matter because they shine a light on what customer service really is: paying attention to the parts that customers actually touch.

So here’s the uncomfortable question to take away:

What’s your breakfast like?

• What’s the part of your service that customers experience every day (or every project) that you’ve started to treat like background noise?
• When did you last experience that part exactly like they do?

Fix that one thing, and the rest of your business instantly feels higher quality without changing a single other detail.