{"id":3431,"date":"2011-06-15T09:00:29","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T08:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com:\/blog\/?p=3431"},"modified":"2011-06-15T09:00:29","modified_gmt":"2011-06-15T08:00:29","slug":"bills-customer-experience-i-preferred-them-before-they-were-famous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adrianswinscoe.com\/2011\/06\/bills-customer-experience-i-preferred-them-before-they-were-famous\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill’s Customer Experience: I preferred them before they were famous"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bills<\/a><\/p>\n

I was on the train the other day when I noticed a review in The Metro as I was flicking through it. Now, I don’t spend too much time reading The Metro but this article – Bill’s Cafe And Produce Store offers style over fab sustenance<\/a> – caught my eye as it was about a business that I am familiar with and have written about before in Customer retention: How do you make your customer waiting experience sticky?<\/a>. The Metro article was a review on their new store in London.<\/p>\n

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Here are some extracts:<\/p>\n

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“Way to rip the soul out of somewhere, guys.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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“As soon as you sit down, you\u2019re encouraged to order items from the groaning shelves: <\/span>\u2018a bag of Bill\u2019s\u2019. “<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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“There\u2019s nothing farm-y about the place now: no earthy potatoes, little evidence of seasonality or locality; nothing on those blackboards ever seems to be scored out.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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“But I\u2019d happily eat in the shonkiest East End kebab joint if the food is great and not dictated by the spreadsheet.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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“The hand-knitted shop in East Sussex was the real deal: naturally evolved, run by an individual, a stranger to the stylist. The roll-out is the polar opposite. Even if Collison (Ed. Bill Collison – The Founder) is still involved, it\u2019s now <\/span>a corporation-managed machine masquerading as something warm and loveable, like a Blade Runner fembot. It\u2019s just a big, fat fake.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The thing that concerned me was the ‘transformation’, according to the reviewer, of the Covent Garden experience from that of the original stores.<\/p>\n

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It made me ask myself: Why do new ‘owners’ or managers of businesses insist on ‘adding value’ to something that is already great?<\/p>\n

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Thinking about this a bit more, it occurred to me that this seems to happen a lot. Here’s some examples that I thought of:<\/p>\n