The cost of customer happiness

Went to Wimpy recently and ordered my usual bacon & cheese burger. When the burger arrived it only had one piece of bacon on it. Surely not I thought, so I asked the lady who served me and she said one piece was all I got.

I politely asked if they would be so kind as to put at least one more piece on my burger because a solitary bacon slice seemed a touch stingy. She kindly obliged, took my burger back, and went to on ring up a R3.00 extra on the till. I was appalled and gave the lady a choice - give me what I had originally paid for (bacon on my burger and not just one piece) or lose me as a customer forever. The choice wasn't hard for her - she chose to lose a customer because she would get fired if she didn't charge me for the extra bacon.

Lets not try and calculate the cost of losing a customer but instead focus on the cost of making a customer happy - one piece of bacon. The cost isn't the R3.00 it's a fraction of that for a single slice of bacon (ignoring the fact that they should have used at least 2 anyway). This is such a minute cost. Wimpy will argue that the national cost of using an extra slice of bacon on every burger sold will be quite high, but isn't that what I paid for in the original price? And what is the cost of losing more customers?

My advise to Wimpy:
Give your customer facing staff more adaptable rules instead of laws
Give the customer what they paid for in the first place
Cutting costs within your product is always noticed by your customers - don't do it
Losing a customer for life over a piece of bacon is not a good trade

It always amazes me how cheap it is to make a positive impact on your customers, and how rarely companies bother to even try.

This attitude from Wimpy is in direct contrast to their marketing campaign which shows a customer getting old and still using Wimpy. Maybe the person in the advert is getting old while waiting for a decent amount of bacon on their burger!