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Friday, March 26, 2010

A tale Of Three Visits to Tantalizers

Tantalizers is a fast food restaurant in Nigeria, though it has been in existence for over 10 years, it has never appealed to me as a place to get some food or snacks, drinks? Maybe but not food or snacks.

On this particular Tuesday after praying so hard at church, my cousin, her friend and i decided to pop into tantalizers since it was just below where we had the church program. The aroma of the food had been disturbing and interrupting my thoughts throughout our prayer meeting and even though i wasn’t a big fan of tantalizers i was excited when my cousin suggested we got a drink from there on our way out.

We walked into the restaurant and to my greatest surprise it looked very appealing and clean , the food displayed was indeed tantalizing. My cousin immediately told me about their sausage rolls which she said tasted good and i thought “yup i did try it”.
Everything was going well until we decided that we were too hungry to wait and would like to start eating our food, at least some out of it while the rest got scanned or quickly scan the ones we were ready to eat while we waited for the rest. You need to have been there to see how this lady looked at us as if we were not human beings, she almost snatched the food from us and beat us up. While she was acting like a dog, her colleague was acting like a wilder animal to another customer almost biting her face off. At this point all i wanted to do was to leave and i said to myself “I should have known better”.
I left the restaurant trying to figure out what was behind the sales attendants’ attitude and why they frowned their faces at us as if we were disturbing their quite time. My experience negatively affected the taste of the freshly baked sausage roll i bought. I decided I’d like to visit tantalizers again, well..not because their service was great but because i wanted to observe the attitude of those sales attendants once more. I tried to convince myself that on this particular day i visited, the attendants got dumped by their boyfriends.

My second visit
So i returned to tantalizers the following week, let’s say the girls got hitched last weekend. The particular girl that attended to us was so friendly it was hard to believe that this was the same place we visited last week. the sales attendant smiled at us and didn’t mind us drinking our Pepsi before she scanned them. She was very excited and this made me want to go back another day. On this day the hot sausage rolls tasted so delicious i had to buy an extra one for the road.

My third visit
On my third visit... oh how I loved their service, the lady who attended to us greeted us politely, took our order with respect and didn’t complain or frown at our indecisiveness instead she smiled and assured us that we weren’t bothering her when we tried to apologise. Can I also add that i actually loved their roasted chicken i have never dreamt of buying food for my personal consumption from Tantalizer but now i honestly wouldn’t mind getting their roasted chicken to complement my lunch every other day..

First impressions count a lot ; there might never be another opportunity to impress your customers other than the first time. What if i didn’t make the second and third trip back there? i would have had only bad stories to tell about the restaurant. Consistency is very important when delivering quality services even if it is for the mere fact that you are not certain your first time customers will return the second time, at least leave them with good memories the first time they visit. You never can tell who they will share their customer service experiences with..

2 comments:

  1. Funny enough, I don't think I've ever had anything from there. Scotch eggs are my thing and I always got that my scotch egg fix from Mr. Biggs...

    Mr. Biggs just seems so dead now. They used to be great back in the day. They starting messing up when they started putting only a tiny "dot" of jam in their donuts. ok ok...ofcourse its I know there are more significant factors that created challenges for them but I just had to throw that in there :-) It must be really hard for them to keep up.

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    1. Mr Biggs scotch egg is still the best to me. There's none quite like it. They still have their loyal customers though.

      First impressions matters a lot. I wish more people would realize that. Thank heavens you visited there two more times ooo!

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