If you’re reading this, you’re interested in becoming a better server.

I have ten years of direct face to face customer service under my belt.

I’m going to share a few tips and tricks with you that will hopefully make life easier for you.

Please note that this post is for the benefit of my Odyssey Cinemas employees.

Hopefully, whoever you are you can get something out of it too. Some of these guidelines are applicable in the real world. I invite you to try it out for yourself.

If you feel like some of the bad examples are about you directly there’s an easy way to prevent that happening in future.

5: Only apologise if you massively messed up and it’s your fault.

You overhear the person serving beside you, “Sorry for the wait”. You start thinking to yourself, is my colleague deliberately serving slow? Why am I working at full speed if they are taking their sweet time? The customer begins thinking, why am I stuck with the slowpoke, let me go to someone else. Everyone is a bit more miserable because of this.

The above is of course nonsense. No thinks that the person apologising is being deliberately slow. Everyone is working as quickly as they can, but that raises the question. Why is the person apologising?

You aren’t personally holding the queue up, are you? People understand that they are going to have to wait. You and I can’t control when people show up at the cinema; you also can’t control the decisiveness of a customer.

What I’m trying to say is you’re apologising for aspects out of your control. So apologising is unnecessary.

Another aspect of apologising is that the more you do it, the more you devalue genuine apologies. I don’t apologise for all that much, so people know that when I do, it means more.

4: Talk the right amount

Talking the right amount is something that you will have to gauge for yourself over time. Some customers are terse and give grunts; others will tell you their entire life story.

Talk the right amount so that you aren’t coming across as rude or abrupt but make it clear that you have to work not chat. It’s not rude or “not nice” it’s business. You understand that as does the customer.

Building relationships with individual customers is something that you can do over time. You will notice regulars, and in that case, you can get into deep and meaningful if you want. Trying to force it on the first interaction is weird and creepy.

Notice also when a customer engages in conversation, it’s always after they have got what they want.

Customers don’t want their time wasted but don’t mind wasting yours. Be polite but make it clear that other customers now need you.

Customers will also talk for the sake of talking. “Is it any good” is a weird question. They don’t care about the answer they want to talk. “I’ve heard it’s good” is all you need to say.

3: Be repetitive, be repetitive, be repetitive

Customers in their head know what they want, they know it so well that they think that they don’t need to tell you. This is where the power of repetition comes in. Parrot back to the customer their order because it reduces the risk of error.

Customers will also leave gaps in information. You can be more efficient by attempting to fill these gaps.

“One ticket for Star Wars.”

“One (Adult) ticket for Star Wars (now at 6 pm)”

“No, I want a student for Star Wars tomorrow at 10 am.”

Repetition may seem a bit clumsy and unnatural, but it keeps you right. If there is an issue, you can say that you checked with them before proceeding leaving the responsibility with the customer.

2: Tell, don’t ask

Customers want to give you their money. There’s an expression with car salesman “No one steps onto the lot unless they want to buy a car”. Our expression would be a little more clumsy. “No one walks around the foyer for 10 minutes before looking for times on the foxy Fridays leaflets unless they didn’t want to buy a ticket”.

Doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?

Customers want to give you their money as quickly as possible before they talk themselves out of it.

Customers want to hand over the mullah minimum fuss.

How can you upset this, by giving them too many choices? The customer wants a cinema ticket a popcorn and a drink. They don’t care about how much they spend, make it easy.

How can you help the customer simplify the process?

By telling them and not asking.

Way off the mark

“Gimme a drink and nachos.”

“Absolutely, what drink would you like.”

“What do you have?

“We have coke, diet coke, coke zero, sprite, Fanta. Also how much ice would you like? Also, would you like the cheese on the side with the salsa over the top with a little fence of jalapenos or would you like me to spell out your name with the cheese while using the nachos and salsa to do a historical reenactment of the eruption at Pompeii with the crumbs representing the ash cloud? Or I could use the nachos to represent the ocean with the salsa the BP oil spill, and jalapenos represent seagulls and the cheese the shoreline”.

You probably thought what the point of that last paragraph was? Congratulations that’s what the customer feels when bombarded with choice.

Decision-making fatigue is a problem. The modern world bombards us with choice and the fear of missing out.

The cinema should not be that kind of experience. The best way to make it better is by removing the choice.

Better method

“Gimme a drink and nachos.”

“Medium coke, cheese, salsa and jalapenos on the nachos.”

“Sprite for the drink, no jalapenos.”

Tell the customer what you’re giving them. If they agree, happy days you’re one step closer to becoming a psychic. If they disagree, then it’s up to them to tell you what they want.

Here is the thing, the customer knows what they want, and there is an experiment that you can try out to prove it. Let’s say there is Deadpool 2, Star Wars and Avengers starting within half an hour. A customer comes up “What’s on?” The customer knows what they want to see; they’re too afraid to ask, I don’t understand why that is, you notice over the years.

Here is what you do, “Deadpool 2 and Star Wars are starting soon” I guarantee they will ask about Avengers. Removing the choice makes people more determined to have it. Try this out for yourself, and you will be surprised.

Tell the customer what you are going to do and let them correct you.

1: “Would you mind, because”

If you’re finding it hard to get members sign ups I’m about to introduce you to the most persuasive four words in the English language.

Would you mind because?

Insert these words into a sentence, and you just increased the likelihood of getting them to comply.

A customer approaches you “A ticket please.”

Say the following as it’s written below:

“Would you mind signing up to our members’ scheme because then I can give you discount on the tickets.”

You have now increased the odds of them signing up.

All that matters is that you tell them that they can get the tickets for less. I have heard some people overburdening customers with information, “You get money off at Eddie Irvine’s”,

Too much information can be as bad as too little.

I can’t prove to you about how effective “Would you mind, because” is but I ask you to try it out on people even when your not in work.

See how you get on.

I’ve told this method to a few co-workers, you can ask them how useful the phrase is.

Hope you found this helpful

Hope you found this helpful, I may write a more.

The easier we make it for ourselves, the easier it is for the customer, the easier for the customer, the easier it is for ourselves.

Life is hard; the cinema is an escape.

Let’s make life that much easier for everyone.

I was a big fan of Metal Gear Solid. The game came out when I was starting grammar school, and I was hyped. The game wasn’t that long, I finished it in a weekend, but it was great. It was the first game that I had played that had voice acting and stylishly directed cutscenes. It also featured the fourth wall breaking moments and overall I loved it.

Years and sequels passed. I stopped playing after Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, it went out on a high. Didn’t have a PlayStation 3, so I never played the fourth entry. I bought Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain on Xbox 360. I enjoyed it but didn’t play it that much.

Last month Xbox Games with Gold had released The Phantom Pain as it’s the free game that month. I reinstalled it on Xbox One and played it again. I’m going to share my thoughts with you in regards to why, although enjoyable, it is a broken game.

1: Metal Gear Solid Grinding

This is my biggest problem with the game. It is a grind. The Phantom Pain has a lot of resource management for a game series that was supposed to be about spying.

As you progress through the game, you are gradually introduced to more and more menus. You have to develop items, send soldiers on missions and build extensions to your base.

I don’t know how optional all this is but the game taps into that psychological need to collect everything. You want to max out every aspect of the game.

Part of me wonders did Kojima put these aspects in deliberately. The game keeps you playing for longer because you’re waiting for projects to complete. That means you play for longer. You ask yourself, why am I playing this for so long and your brain backwards rationalises that the game is good.

The problem with this is that the game becomes less challenging the more you play it, and the more you grind.

2: At odds with itself

Metal Gear Solid has always had a unique sense of tone. For every sad character death, there is some moment of slapstick nonsense. It was part of the charm but as graphics improved it has led to a jarring sense of tone.

There are aspects of the game that is ridiculous that also make it way to easy. The Fulton extraction where you strap a balloon to someone, and they magically show up at your base. I know it’s a video game and I’m not insinuating that it’s a bad thing. My problem is it’s hard to take the dramatic scenes seriously with this nonsense going on in the background.

3: Episodic nature Side missions are the same from

The first Metal Gear Solid was excellent because it was set over an 18 hour period. It wasn’t real time, but there was a ticking clock in the background which aided in creating tension.

In The Phantom Pain, this is not the case. There is an episodic nature to the game. Missions are split up into Story and Side Ops. If there is no urgency; there is no drama.

There is no difference between the Story Missions and the Side Ops. The majority of missions are going to this point of the map, rescue/kill someone and then leave.

There are many repetitive missions too. Rescue the child soldiers not once not twice but five times.

Overall they could have all the missions in one menu, but as I have found out, The Phantom Pain loves it’s menus.

4: MB coins

You can feel the rot set in with the MB coins. I’m not sure what they do, but they appear to be connected online. Part of my whole problem with the game is always online.

This was before Konami fired Kojima and they brought out Metal Gear Survive where you had to pay for a save slot. How much of the always online was to do with Konami and how much had to do with Kojima we’ll never know. However, due to my bias towards Kojima, I’m going to say it was all Konami’s idea.

5: What are the rules

In my time playing, I have never been entirely sure about what the rules are in the game. There is a lack of consistency in the AI of the enemy guards. Sometimes you can sneak past them. Sometimes they feel an inconsistency in air pressure and know precisely where you are.

I know you probably think I suck at the game. You’re right I’m not the best at it but I the game acknowledges it’s own shortcomings through the ranking system.

If I suck so much at the game then how am I getting a top rank in missions on the first playthrough? I barely know what I’m doing, but the game says that I am doing it well.

There’s no sense of challenge and no sense of reward if I am muddling through and doing fantastically in the eyes of the game.

6: Open world because why not everything is open world

Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain is open world, and it is not good. What you have is a big beautiful empty world with nothing much to do. There are guard posts, but good lord so much of the game spent with the sprint button held down. You have an option of cars and horses, but it doesn’t make it any more fun. Add to the fact that you can’t climb every rock. It means that there is a strong feeling of bottlenecking when it comes to taking on challenges. You can either approach from the left or the right.

7: The game feels rushed

It is no surprise that like the rest of modern games they always are released before they are ready. The Phantom Pain is no exception. The whole game feels like there was more to come. The way you’re introduced to new elements. There’s no real reason why and the fact that the game has one of the most baffling twists of recent years. There has also been footage released of the alternate ending. With Kojima no longer at Konami and Konami no longer making games it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see a final cut. It’s a shame that the series goes out with a whimper.