It was Cinco de Mayo 2010. Maya del Sol, the still-new restaurant owned by now Oak Park Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb, had just suffered through a humiliating and frustrating night. It was overwhelmed by 600 celebratory customers and before it was over the restaurant had run out of chips, ice, tamales, waiters and cooks.
It was, he said, a debacle.
Abu-Taleb’s response, though, was telling. First, before the night had even ended, he gathered his weary crew and apologized to them for putting them in a position to utterly fail. He then posted to Facebook and sent an e-mail to the 5,000 customers on his list and offered an abject apology. “We failed you.” “Totally unacceptable.” “I take full responsibility.” And then he called the Journal and asked us to write a story about the wheels coming off and his apology.
It was a far cry from the hunkering down most entrepreneurs practice when they screw up royally. It impressed us then and we heard echoes of it last week when Abu-Taleb called the customer service portion of the latest community survey of residents “unacceptable.”
In rating the service they receive from village hall, 27 percent of residents called it fair to poor. Said Abu-Taleb: “I take that as almost a personal failure on my part.” And, he said, if those numbers don’t turn by the end of this year “by 100 percent, then I know we have failed.”
We’d point out that perceptions often trail reality. And so perhaps a decade or more of universal complaining about disinterested-to-actively-poor service at village hall is going to take some time to turn. The hub of the complaints has been the building, permitting, zoning functions of the hall. A complete reorganization of those functions is now in place and a major investment in overdue software is about to be switched on. There is hope for improved numbers if the fixes made by the village have been the correct ones.
The corollary to the community survey is the employee attitude survey recently completed but not yet released. The numbers on this survey last year were beyond dismal and the village went out of its way to hide results away. Certainly unhappy staffers will share their frustrations with residents. We have yet to see a genuine plan to turn those numbers.
We applaud the mayor’s instinct for customer service. We are hopeful we will see improvement. But attention must be paid to the sour feelings of staff toward their employer.
All in the deta