My daughter turned nine over the weekend. To celebrate, I ordered an ice cream cake from Cold Stone Creamery. Although I had requested the cake be decorated with "assorted flowers in her favorite colors of purple, blue, and turquoise," when I stopped by to pick up the cake on Sunday afternoon, I was presented with the underwhelming cake pictured left.
Disappointed, I asked the counter employee if she could enliven the cake by accenting it with more color and, perhaps, flowers as originally requested. She responded that she was incapable of decorating cakes but that, if I could return later, someone qualified to add decorations would arrive in one hour.
For any parent who has picked up a child's birthday cake on the day of their party, it's understood that waiting an hour usually is not an option. So I took the cake instead to my local King Soopers supermarket. Being that it has a full-service bakery, I hoped that a decorator would be willing to add a little pizzazz to an otherwise nondescript cake-even though it had been purchased elsewhere.
In the bakery, I encountered a decorator named Jenny. After explaining my dilemma, she dropped what she was doing and spent the next five minutes transforming my daughter's cake from boring to spectacular! In the process, she reinforced my loyalty to the King Soopers brand while proving once again that the difference between ordinary and extraordinary really is that little "extra."
About the author
Steve has 20 years of experience between hotel operations, sales and marketing, training and development, and customer service roles working for Marriott International, one of the premiere customer-focused companies in the world.
Don't settle for ordinary. Choose extraordinary. (It's always a choice.) Order Delight Your Customers: 7 Simple Ways to Raise Your Customer Service from Ordinary to Extraordinary (AMACOM Books) by Steve Curtin or purchase from select retailers, including Barnes & Noble.
