Skip to main content

Café Happy Day

Three days back I bought three Eggy Wraps from Cafe Coffee Day (CCD), Yelahanka Old Town. When I came back home I saw the paper carry bag had six pieces instead of three. Someone wasn't paying attention at work! Since I was having an upset stomach I hadn't planned to eat, however we all enjoyed the wraps...



My wife kept nagging me for paying CCD the pending amount for the additional wraps, I kept postponing this although I was driving back home on the same route everyday. Today she'd called up in the afternoon and while hanging up reminded me to pay up for the other pieces we had all gobbled up and I told her that perhaps they were anyway charging more per piece & I wouldn't pay. She would hear none of it. I hung-up the phone without any intentions of paying.

The elevated road on top of NH7 is so good that you just whizz past after getting off it right after the Jakkur aerodrome. So I was about to cross the CCD at Old town, Yelahanka when I was reminded of paying at the CCD after getting off the elevated road on which I was driving at 110 kmph for a few seconds, just a few seconds back. I went up to the counter and the conversation went like this:

Me: "3 days back I bought 3 pieces of Eggy wraps, I paid for 3 but you gave me 6 pieces, so I thought I will pay you for the other 3 pieces." Then I whip out my card.
The man winks and says: "It was our mistake! You need not pay Sir!"
"You sure", I ask him quizzically.
"Yes Sir. Thank you Sir!"
"OK thank you", I say and walk out.

To be frank I had never expected such behaviour. We are in any case frequent CCD customers but they have made a more loyal customer by this very honest action! A moment of truth.

Comments

  1. That's a wonderful thing for CCD to do. That should be the norm. In the west I've noticed they follow this principle. So much so say if you buy a sandwich or an ice cream and it accidently falls inside the store they replace it for free. It doesn't cost them much but builds a strong loyalty base.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Interesting, yes in services marketing management this is termed as a moment of truth.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Shamit, if I may add another perspective, only because we brought in the "moment of truth" here :) ...

    The reality might have been that the folks behind the counter had no clue as how to get into the system and change a old bill to right a wrong. You were lucky to be on the positive side of this anomaly.

    I was on the negative side once. We had picked up 2 tins of cookies, and within a minute of billing, without even stepping out of the store, realized one would have been enough. Went back to the counter and requested to have that returned with a bill in hand only to be told that all sales are final an binding! Funnily enough just a week ago we had a similar situation at another CCD location where the a similar purchase of chocolates was happily received back by the person behind the counter.

    Taking nothing away from the gracious behavior and a "moment of truth" for you! No coffee shop in the US has made me feel as comfortable as some of the CCD outlets in Bangalore ...

    ReplyDelete
  4. I know, that is true. I was also thinking about the variance in service from CCD location to CCD location. However, they could have directly made a fresh bill too and that is what I thought they would do.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Google BigQuery & Apache Hive

Google BIGQUERY is a fast, economical and fully-managed enterprise data warehouse for large-scale data analytics. Details of querying your custom table in BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/quickstart-web-ui The Apache Hive ™ data warehouse software facilitates reading, writing, and managing large datasets residing in distributed storage and queried using SQL syntax. Built on top of Apache Hadoop™, Hive provides the following features: Tools to enable easy access to data via SQL, thus enabling data warehousing tasks such as extract/transform/load (ETL), reporting, and data analysis. A mechanism to impose structure on a variety of data formats Access to files stored either directly in Apache HDFS™ or in other data storage systems such as Apache HBase™ Query execution via Apache Tez™, Apache Spark™, or MapReduce Procedural language with HPL-SQL Sub-second query retrieval via Hive LLAP, Apache YARN and Apache Slider. More details on getting started: 

IIMB PGSEM SOP Essays.

The IIMB PGSEM application for 2008 had a SOP section which required 5 short essays to be written. Here are the ones I had written: Statement of Purpose How do you see the PGSEM helping you in your goals? (150 words) My taking up the PGSEM course has twin objectives, namely, self-development and learning all aspects of setting up, managing a commercial/social enterprise. Having worked in the software industry for five years, I have closely seen the software development life-cycle. However, there are several aspects of business and the economy that are of interest to me and I find the time ripe to explore these in a formal way, through academics; specifically strategic management of a firm, innovation strategies, and the scope of strategic consulting. Getting ready to usher in acceleration in growth opportunities in my care

DNA newspaper plagiarizes my photographs!

The newspaper DNA (Daily News and Analysis - http://www.dnaindia.com/bangalore ) seems to have involved in not verifying its sources of photographs and having used my photographs (does this amount to plagiarism? I think it does) after it carried some of my pictures in the 'After Hrs' section of its newspaper on 31st January 2009, which I had taken at the IIMB Yamini 2009. It is good that they covered the event but they should have cited/verified the sources of the photographs. In all probability they or their sources just picked up the photos from my blog, with the belief that no one would notice anyways - seems they could not escape as luck would have it, I spotted them in the DNA paper on Saturday. It was early in the morning when as I flipped open the last page of the supplement that I was stunned to see my pics, which I was able to recognize immediately - however there were no credits anywhere in sight! Please check the photos below from the e-paper version on their website