It doesn’t happen every day, most days are just regular taking care of your regular issues: can’t log in, need helping finding this, this isn’t working, help me do that, etc. But sprinkled on those typical customer experiences are the gems of crazy, hilarious and memorable customer stories that make it all worth it. Here a few from the treasure chest of these memories of our customer care team — we promise to be back with more!

As Big B quips in Baghban, “Tum ho toh hum hai, Tum nahi toh kuch bhi nahi”.

Cheesy we-love-our-customers line from the marketing team. Check.

The Hustler

No one wants free advice. Cross that, no one wants unsolicited free advice. But there was a point where free advice got us a new category. And new fans. We had an angel of a customer who would send us an email every alternate day with some suggestion on improving our business. Literally. Suggestions such as selling jilebis and fafdas during Holi / Dussehra at Ghatkopar Railway station or getting into marriage catering.

One day, he mailed in a suggestion on serving food without oil since he was going on a weight loss regime. The apple had fallen on our head and we gave this a thought. And lo, an entire range of our popular “Zero Oil” or “No added oil” came out of this!

The Insistent Lover

Promises that one cannot keep, can always be managed. This customer had promised his girlfriend that he will order her favourite dish from Holachef. When he remembered his promise and checked out the app, well, the dish was already out of stock. He called us and started mentioning how he had forgotten to order in time and that he had been forgetful on other things in the recent past too which could lead to his relationship breaking up. So we did our bit — for his insistence and his loyalty and his determination — we finally arranged the platter 20 kms away from his location. Happily ever after ending? Err…..not really. There was a problem — he ordered the wrong dish (Pfft!). Thankfully, she didn’t think he was the wrong one for her. *Sniffs* So, who is nominating us for the humanitarian award here?

The Relentless Dude

Once a customer complained that his bill was wrong. We explained that our brownie points (Holachef store credits) had been applied, and hence the lower than expected bill. The customer would not accept this and insisted on speaking to the manager. Despite further explanation, the customer could not be appeased until it was accepted that he was right and “allowed” to pay the higher total. We promptly transferred back brownie points to his account after the payment.

The Kid who knew Better

Well, if you’re our youngest fan, you get our attention and our food even if you don’t have a credit card. Want to know how we met up with a cute voice of a 11-year old who wanted a snack? This young lady called us and placed an order. The deal was simple that she wanted a burger and she could give us the details of her parents credit card to pay for it. Now, how cute is that!!!

The Budget Boy

EMIs are to Indians, the way cheese is to Parisians. We had a customer who had ordered a dish that was around Rs 180 and he did not have the money to pay the full amount. But he found his way out of it — he insisted that we give him EMI option of paying 10/- per day (we are not even kidding!).

The One who made a Sweet Mistake

What does one do when sugary cravings hit you at 3 pm? Order Moong dal halwa. Express delivery. He called us after an hour of waiting insisting he hadn’t gotten his sugar fix yet. Through tracking the order, we found out that it was already delivered to the customer 30 minutes back. .The delivery boy confirmed that he had handed over the parcel to the correct address. We had no clue for almost 20 mins and just as we were giving up, we found out that customer’s maid had collected the dessert and had kept it in the fridge and he had no clue!

The Nails Dude

Sometimes, just sometimes, we have drama and melodrama unfolding in front of our eyes. A customer called in stating that he was shocked to see chef’s nails (yep, an entire nail) in his order of gajar ka halwa. He wanted his dish compensated for — nails OMG. Now with our processes, we felt the likelihood this occurring was rare! Nevertheless, we went into immediate stress and did a thorough investigation and well, it turns out that the nails were actually the inner covering of pistachios. Sigh! We needed him to compensate for our time this time!

So there you go. As a company, we are grateful that we get to be a part of so many people’s lives, albeit in a small way. And while we don’t claim to be perfect all the time, we live for these experiences and hope for more coming our way.

Senti line from marketing to reinforce we-love-our-customers. Check.

Why not take this dialogue further? Tweet us with “Dear Hola_Chef,….” and add in your most memorable experience while dealing with any customer service to date and who knows, you could get surprised?

Thank you for the memories. Here’s to many more!

Till next time. Cheers.

Memorable Customer Stories 101 was originally published in Holachef on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Folks at Holachef take this craziness to the next level. Most of the time, I am forced to play the shepherd gathering all of ’em scattering sheep! But, let’s admit it — it is these very eccentricities that truly make the place. Here are some of our #WeAreCrazy moments.

The Ketchup Stash

We discovered that our CEO drops all the ketchup packets from his orders in his executive drawers. This discovery, makes us sneak into his cabin whenever we fall short of ketchup.

Tasting Sessions or Buffet?

Our Tasting sessions are scheduled almost every time our food team decides to feel hungry and adds in a new dish! The tasting sessions starts with — “Chammach kyun nahi hai?!” (We are always short of spoons. Always!) and ends with ‘Ab bas karo yaar, aur nahi kha sakta’

The Anti-Eskimos

We have some rare species in office who feel cold while they sit in our central air-conditioned office space. We don’t know which switch is mapped onto which vent and to solve this problem our product team came up with this jugaad. They decided to make their own wind socks out of a print paper!

All of us are human

Our investors ask for discounts too! (Ssssshhh..don’t tell them we told you!)

“The food was deliciously delectable until…….”

We may not know to cook, but we surely have our opinion on every morsel which comes for tasting! It’s salty, it’s spicy & chef be like WTFFFF. After all we just pretend to be Einstein of every foodie conversation.

CAT problems (literally)

Quite a few times, one or another naughty cat gets stuck in the vacuum space between our ceiling and the floor above, and the whole office stops working until the cat mania stops. What an excuse, I say! BUT, YES THIS IS TRUE.

Market Research

My sales team has a cupboard full of empty and used boxes of other companies, and they claim to keep these for analyzing the “market” but the truth is more often than not, they are used to take away our own tasting desserts home!!!

You ate my sandwich?

Frustrated by fridge thieves who continually ignore the polite or not-so-polite requests to keep their hands to themselves, this is how some of us label their food while keeping it in the refrigerator.

The inhouse DJs (or not)

Our Engineering team likes to play songs the entire day and they try to create a happening atmosphere, BUT on somedays their choice of songs makes us say

The case of missing Cutting Chai glasses

Our marketing team once introduced a month-long campaign of memorabilia with every order! Thanks to all the (insider) info, we knew that the next day’s surprise gift was a cutting chai glass! All the employees ordered in next day just so we can stock our pantry with the cutting chai glasses.

Now you know what I was talking about!

What about you though? We’d love to know your #WeAreCrazy moments at work or in life. Do comment! Alternately, share them in a tweet “Dear @Hola_Chef, Here is my #WeAreCrazy moment: ____________________________” and get a bonus coupon code as we celebrate this craziness together.

Cheers! Until next time.

PS: this is the crazy bunch

#WeAreCrazy was originally published in Holachef on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

But then, we have decided to come out of the coma (millennia later!). You mean, closet? If the closet is made of our favourite dosa, then yeah. But no guys, we’re talking about the kind of coma we all get into all the time after that heavy Butter Chicken and Paratha meal. Not one, multiple times. The food coma.

Who are we? Lovers of delivery food, try-ers of every millennial flavoured coffee, serial right swipers, warriors of fire-breathing chutneys, future bitcoin billionaires, purveyors of unicorn toast and homegrown experts on Netflix and chill.

Our sales warlords decided to stay in their own coma made of tighter budgets ignoring the angels of content. Sure, you need crazy discounts, marketing cliches and new menus to revv up the customer’s imagination. But they don’t seem to know that our conversations might just be the beginning of a whole new relationship. Silly fellows. Their wholesome plans on making campaigns work got them sitting on FB like a beached whale — doing nothing.

So much has happened since our last chit-chat. A certain narcissistic orange-haired dude (whose name rhymes with Drumpf) has been making everyone’s life miserable and we got him chained to our whatsapp in multiple memes. Our blog needed his jokes but we’re tongue-tied just like the Americans this fall. Gujarat elections made us go all “Holy cow!” Virushka made us all nostalgic about old-fashioned romance and yummy pasta while GST (should we call it the Gobi Swag Tax) and Demonetization saw a collection yawn from everyone - economic prosperity is a time-consuming, soul-sucking process, innit? But puhleeze, we’re now officially paying to eat, drink and breathe (hello, Delhi smog!).

Folks here at Holachef didn’t sit back either. They went ahead and literally reinvented the wheel by spinning it (apparently, you guys got our accounting team raises by using a gazillion coupons). The over-excited bunch decided they couldn’t wait for 45 minutes to serve you food and went ahead and opened a full-fledged café called the Pizza Cube Café. Been there? No? You should! And there’s so much more that they want to share.

End of mandatory Holachef marketing paragraph (talk about subtle brand integration)

Anyways, we have decided that the blog is our whatsapp, our Insta-stories and snapchat all rolled into one now onwards. Let’s keep this dialogue on. That is our new year resolution for 2018 (ask us again when we have forgotten all about it on January 1st 11:59 PM).

Why don’t you tell us what your new year resolution is? Tweet back with “Hey @Hola_Chef, My new year’s resolution is to stop hanging out with people who ask me about my New Year resolutions!” and we’ll know you are sorted in life. Oh and as a high five, we will throw in a surprise.

Post-Blog Credits (We swear Marvel snatched our ideas diary from the hospital)

Vijay from Accounting is not happy. You have heard from him right? After buying himself a Vada Pav through the bonus earned by saving 0.01% of costs through the inactive blog, he is now onto something else.

His cost-saving sense has been itching again. And his sights are on two foodie friends whose bills keep him busy. The ones we can’t live without — the layered Aloo and nifty Paneer. *shudders* Are they next? Epic food wars might just be around the corner. Difficult choices will have to be made. Who will you choose? Until next time.

WELCOME 2017… Oops was originally published in Holachef on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.