Still No Love From Hard Rock

As a follow-up to my last entry (see Love All, Serve All... But Not All Of The Time), I have heard back from the electronic complaint that I left throughout the Hard Rock Cafe website. In fact I heard back twice, once from the website people to tell me that they had forwarded my message to the general manager of the Gatlinburg location and then from the Assistant General Manager for the Gatlinburg location.

It is interesting, and while I appreciate the fact that I did get a response, I have to be honest and say that I am still left unsatisfied with the complete interaction. Some of the key, but hollow lines that were included in his e-mail included "...I can honestly tell you that the standard is the same weather busy or not." and "The Gatlinburg Cafe works and strives to maintain a very high level of customer service and we take much pride in doing so, that is why it is very disappointing that you had this experience."

I guess the most disappointing thing about the entire experience was the resolution that this AGM of the Hard Rock Cafe decided was necessary:

The management team discussed this lapsed in service and we will use your experience as a focus point to "Coach" not only our Host but to re-focus our Team Members to understand that there commutations may be miss-understood.

Basically, other than an apology and a personal invitation to come back and visit them sometime, they are going to use my experience as a coaching situation for their staff. Quite disappointing, because if all they are looking for are coaching situations, I can sit down and write a dozen or more for them. I guess I was looking for a reason to come back, for example every time we go there to eat we get a chance to fill out a survey that gives us a coupon for $5 on next purchase here. Now $5 on a meal for two that is typically $30-$50 isn't a lot, but it keeps us coming back - or at least has in the past. I'm not so sure about the future now.

I suppose another disappointing thing about the whole situation was that in my response to him, I informed him that at one point, when the song YMCA came on all three individuals that had been manning host/hostess stations left their posts to join in with the dance. This meant that no one was left to watch the front of the restaurant for these three to four minutes. While I doubt the paper with our names was lost at this point (which is what caused our lengthy wait in the first place), as we had been waiting for over forty minutes by the time the song came on, there were three other parties that came into the restaurant while there was no one to greet them. Even though this was sent well over a week ago, I have not received a response at all.

Finally, and I guess this deals with customer service as well... You have an upset, fairly regular customer that you have to contact to address an complaint that he has made. One would think that it would be common courtesy to at least spell check the e-mail first. I mean you would do it if it was a letter being sent out on official letterhead, so why not when it is sent out through an official "@hardrock.com" domain. I doubt that I would find words like "weather" (instead of "whether"), "miss-understood" and "demo strait" aren't things I would expect to find in the writing from my secondary students (when I was teaching in a high school) or my undergraduates now, let alone from an Assistant General Manager sending out an official response to a customer complaint.

Tags: Hard Rock Cafe