Gordon Ramsey walks into a restaurant he’s doing one of his shows with, I don’t know which one it is, because I’m telling this story second hand (Don’t worry, it’s worth it).
He’s there to help a struggling restaurant and asks the chef to serve him his signature dish.
Gordon sits down to taste some kind of Oyster dish. On the first mouthful he almost gags, and proceeds to spit it out. The oysters were off.
He says these are disgusting, and asks the chef when was the last time he served them up, or tasted them himself… The Chef shrugs.
Sometimes things look good, but are rotten at the core. Sometimes we haven’t tested something in a while which is truly broken. We’ve got to keep an eye on our entire value chain. Make sure it’s all in order before we wonder why customers are disappearing, not coming or never came.
When was the last time you did a “taste test” of your own service?
More often than occassionaly we should taste our own medicine – every day.
A good example is.. when was the last time you used the search box on your website?
One of my sites gets around 50,000 visitors a month and it suddenly stopped working – yet I didn’t realise for a few days! That’s obviously not a good thing. You might set up a checklist of major features of your site that you run through on a weekly basis to make sure it all looks good, or if you are a fancy programmer you might write a program to do it for you automatically 🙂