Red, Hot & Blues : Outstanding customer service

How do you know when you’re delighting customers?    Is it when a well-designed survey tells you?  Customer satisfaction surveys are extremely useful and convenient.  But they’re not a one-size fits all.  Recently I came across another way of knowing.

It happened when my wife & I were in Prague on a break a few weeks ago.  One night we found ourselves in a Jazz & Blues restaurant called “Red Hot & Blues”.  The Creole food was tasty and very reasonably priced. But what really caught our attention was a great Blues singer being accompanied on the piano by a blind pianist who tickled the ivory like he was born to do nothing else.

Some hours later, when the music and serving had stopped, the pianist leaned on a friend’s arm as he slowly left the restaurant.  As he walked by tables where diners still lingered, something magical happened.  With no planning, and no exhortations, a spontaneous & rapturous round of applause broke out for that man.  He knew then that he had nailed his performance.  Could he bottle that and reproduce it another night?  Guess what?  It didn’t matter!