When you have a breakdown in service or product delivery, be smart about it - take that as an opportunity to leverage the mistake into a catalyst for looking under your hood, examining the elements of the breakdown and making adjustments.
Let's draw up a short playbook from this episode that you can apply to your own business, no matter what product or service you produce and sell to customers:
-Listen to your customers, hear them out. Then respond quickly to things gone wrong. Customers want to know someone is listening to them.
-Tighten up your internal quality controls. Put the extra effort into ensuring things work as you promised in the first place, just like you advertised in your marketing materials, your website, etc. Your customers deserve something that isn't broken. After all, you're charging them enough for it.
-Have a guest/customer recovery program in place and give it some teeth. Ensure that your people involved in guest recovery have the ability and authority to fix things for your customers – On-the-spot, quickly, properly, completely.
-Have your staff practice empathy and understanding toward your customers. After all, they pay the bills. The Golden Rule works well here.
-Own the problem - accountability is a virtue. Fix the problem. Don't pawn it off on another entity, or person, or on-line resource. That's the coward's way out, and it doesn't help the situation at hand one bit.
When you fix a customer's problem satisfactorily and efficiently, 95% of them will do business with you again.
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