Behind the Scenes

Give ‘em the pickle! – Abbie (Customer Care Rep)

By Ben Sebborn
26 Aug 2019
3 min read

One of the most valuable key factors of a business and part of our core ethos is being customer first.

Back in 2015, we became the first ticket agent to offer full refunds including the booking fee when an event is cancelled or postponed as part of our Fair Refund Policy.

Bob Farrell was an American motivational speaker and entrepreneur with a signature lecture “Give ‘em the Pickle!”, which became one of the most successful training videos ever made.

In brief, he received a complaint from one of his regular customers who is usually given free pickles with his meal as he had been told he could only have an extra pickle if he paid. The customer told Bob he would not be returning to his restaurant if that’s how he ran his business and he had lost a loyal customer. Bob instantly changed his ways by insisting the customer could have as many pickles as he wanted. ‘Give ‘em the pickle!‘ is a phrase now famously used as a secret to customer satisfaction.

Inspired by this, the Customer Care team have recently been exploring the ways in which we can give our customers that all-important pickle!

So what is Skiddle’s ‘pickle’?…..The booking fee!

This is the margin that we apply to each ticket so that we can provide an event discovery platform. The list of overheads is rather long but one of the most important things it covers is tea bags for staff brews. They do say Britain is run on tea and Skiddle is no different!

Here’s what happened when we identified some opportunities to surprise customers whose experience would be improved if we refunded their booking fee as a gesture of goodwill.

This customer’s query had taken a little longer than normal to resolve.

In this case, we refunded both the postage and booking fee as a gesture of goodwill following a human error where their physical ticket had been damaged.