Hamish Champ: Managing the customer experience

Despite technically being on holiday over the last two weeks I couldn't keep from casting an eye over what's been going on in the pub world and one story that caught my eye gave cause to raise a glass in the direction of the Vale of Glamorgan.

Arthur O'Leary, who'd bought from Punch Taverns an under-the-weather pub, the Cross Inn in Llanblethian, decided to canvass the hostelry's customers on what they'd like from their boozer. His patrons were highly appreciative of this novel approach and by all accounts they have responded in positive fashion.

It sounds like O'Leary is set fair - other industry-wide issues notwithstanding - to gear up his business into a success story.

This take on customer service is about as exemplary as one could wish for. But I guess an individual tenant, lessee or freehouse licensee can, in theory, respond to the needs of their customers as they see fit.

It doesn't end there though. When I talk to those in charge of managed pub operations they stress their managers are imbued with a similar entrepreneurial spirit.

This may be true, but there are some instances when such verve - indeed common sense - is remarkable mainly by its absence.

For example there was the recent case of the customer who was asked to leave a Mitchells & Butlers pub because she was feeding raisins to her nine month-old baby.

Not on the same level of ineptitude but last week, while on 'staycation', I visited a pub in Blackheath, South London, and encountered a fairly typical level of customer appreciation.

The pub was the one I'd mentioned in a previous column in what I now fondly recall as the 'Brasso Incident'. Now I reckon I'm a fair-minded individual and willing to give people a second crack of the whip, so I'd suggested it as a venue for a get-together with some mates, albeit somewhat nervously.

My trepidation was sadly justified.

First - and I realise that while this sort of thing annoys the hell out of me it doesn't faze everyone - they served a leading cask ale brand in a glass bearing the legend 'Bulmer's'. It's not as if they were short of the right glasses. And this is a pub owned by the brewer wot makes the stuff. So much for all that hand-crafted brewing malarkey and marketing spend, eh?

Then, as a member of our party who was hungry mulled over what to order, the menu was whipped off the table, it being 9pm sharp and the kitchen was apparently shutting down for the night. No allowances for the famished patron there then.

Then at bang on 10.45pm we were told the bar was closing and if we wanted another - final - drink we should be quick about it. Charming.

Not quite on a par with chucking out a mother and toddler for eating dried fruit, I'll grant you, but little things like this still wrankle.

I appreciate bar staff have lives to live and homes to go home to. I realise that I am probably overly sensitive when it comes to the whole hospitality issue and customers being treated as a valued facet of a business rather than an inconvenience.

I'm equally sure that many managers positively bend over backwards to make their punters feel welcome and cater for their every whim.

But against an appalling background of seven pubs a day closing their doors for good the attitude of some who run boozers in this country just makes you want to cry.