Are you excited? Do your customers know?
I stopped in at a coffee shop in the valley yesterday and probably won’t return. It had what I thought I needed; good coffee, pretty good snacks/food, great location, free wifi, smiling staff.
What went wrong?
The owners.
The staff worked hard to engage, serve well and were mostly successful. The owners however, hovered and seemed preoccupied with evaluating the product, the operation and the issues of running their shiny new shop. In short, the stuff that was important to them. The customers were invisible to them, talking over all our heads about their plans, their issues. The customers were to be served by staff, so they had a bunch of them - too many.
When tables, chairs are set up, food and beverages offered and served, you are inviting others to use this space to meet, discuss business, share thoughts, think, work, exchange happy or awful news, build a relationship, mend a relationship or just sit and read a book with some good coffee. A coffee shop is a refuge from the street, from the office, maybe even from home. This purpose needs to be honored and catered to by the proprietors or customers won’t return. They’ll figure out that you, the owner, don’t care or just don’t get it.
When it is done well, you, the customer, just know it. The owners get it and it filters down to your experience in their shop. Some local experts in Hope BC that I know are Gord Younie at the Hope Drive In, Graeme and Sonia at the Owl Street Cafe, Wes Bergmann at the Blue Moose and Mark Spencer at Jungle Juice Company. Laurie and her staff in Yarrow’s Vedder Mountain Grille also truly get it. You’ll recognize people like them in your own community by their eye contact with you, the attention to detail and the obvious open invitation to stop in again soon because they’re really glad you came by.
