Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Epic Win: Cafe Metro

Let me let you in on the most important part of my day:  deciding what to eat for lunch.  The website Midtown Lunch really changed my whole attitude about lunch in midtown where I work from considering it a wasteland of overpriced chains to an adventure of weird, ethnic, or greasy food.  It shames me that in the interest of being healthy, I do end up eating boring choose-your-own salads quite often.  What really gets me about these is that not only are they boring, but they're always expensive - around $8, when a pile of street meat in creamy white sauce over rice is only $5.

Then I discovered that the chain Cafe Metro offers really good deals if you order over it's website - $6 instead of $8 for a salad, and you can pay online and just walk in and pick it up.  More convenient AND cheaper!  So I order online often, then walk half a block to go pick it up.  Feel free to ask me more about my exciting life.

There's only one hitch:  sometimes I like a little midday ice coffee pick-me-up. The convenience of online lunch shopping is that you can order the ice coffee and select from a menu what kind of milk and sweetener you want.


Although I know from experience that Cafe Metro has Sweet'N Low available at all their locations,  there was no option on their site for it:


So I wrote an email to their customer service, with a suggestion that they add Sweet'N Low as an option.  A day later, I got a reply from their head of E-Commerce that not only are they going to implement my suggestion right away, but they were also going to give me a coupon for a FREE SANDWICH!

I bet you thought this story was going to be boring right?  You had no idea a free sandwich twist was comin' at ya!

Moral of the story is: I guess maybe it's better to politely suggest instead of angrily complain on the void of the internet.  Nah....

2 comments:

  1. My name is Jerry, and I am the eCommerce director for Cafe Metro. I want to thank you for your blog, not so much because it reflects favorably on us, but because it shows that, done right, the system really does work, and that sometimes (maybe most times) being polite actually does get you further than being aggressive. You made a legitimate suggestion, and since my job (or part of it, anyway) is to listen to my customers, I was more than happy to implement it, in the knowledge that if one person preferred an option to order Sweet'n Low with their coffee, probably others did as well. So it was a win-win. And we all like win-wins, right? Thanks again for your fine suggestion, and enjoy your free sandwich.

    Jerry Jodice
    eCommerce Director
    www.CafeMetrony.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. See? You yell into the void and eventually. . .

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