Moses the Israeli cab driver

In today’s soft economy, customer service is more paramount than ever, and your approach to your job can often signal the difference between personal success and failure. During the recent ASHFSA Conference in Clearwater Beach, Fla., a group of us received an enjoyable reminder of that from taxi driver named Moses.

There were six of us, piling into a minivan for a four-mile trip to a Polish restaurant called Pierogi Grill. The driver, who had gotten out of the cab in order to turn down the middle seat to enable three of us to climb into the back, was a tall, lanky, tattooed man in his late 20s with long dark hair. He spoke English well enough, but with an accent. As we left the Hilton, one of the group asked the driver where he was from. His answer surprised and, ultimately, amused us.

“I’m not going to tell you,” he replied. “We’re going to play cash cab,” referring to the unique game show on The Discovery Channel in which New York City cabbie/stand-up comedian Ben Bailey engages riders in a chance to win money by answering general knowledge questions. “I will give you clues about my home country and we’ll see if you can guess it.” He added that he wouldn’t even tell us his name; “that would be a dead giveaway,” he said.

So, for the next 10 minutes or so we got an education about his homeland, Israel. For example, according to Moses it is the home of the first named city (Jericho), and of the lowest point below sea level in the world (the Dead Sea).

I figured it out just as we were pulling into the restaurant parking lot. (The clue was “we are touched by the most beautiful sea, the most mysterious sea and the most deadly sea”—Mediterranean, Dead and Red, respectively.)

There was no penalty for wrong answers, and no prize for being correct, just the most enjoyable cab ride I think I’ve ever taken. We were so pleased that we got Moses’s card and called him at the end of our dinner to take us back to the hotel. When he arrived, his cab was equipped with a disco ball on the dashboard.

The people in my dinner party all saw in Moses an excellent reminder that, no matter the state of the economy, the trick to ensuring happy customers and repeat business remains ever so simple: Engage your customers as people, not as a commodity, and give them a memorable experience. It worked for Moses and it will work in your operations as well.