If you're like me, you make a study out of the customer service you receive on a daily basis. You study it, analyze what's happening, and try and learn from the good, and especially the bad. You see, poor service allows us to say to ourselves, "Wow! I'll never do that with my business." The best part is that sometimes that statement turns out to be true. What about customer service recovery procedures? Here's what I've found in studying the literature on Customer Service. Plenty of material published on Best Practices and companies who excel in doing things right—doing a little extra, bonuses for loyalty, it runs the gauntlet. What I don't see are customer service recovery practices to bounce back my own mistakes. How should I behave when my company hasn't delivered, when I have dropped the ball? Painful experience tells me that this stuff isn't common knowledge. Many companies simply walk away, effectively firing the customer, when a recovery strategy could earn their loyalty for years. They simply don't have any customer service quality practices to follow. Well I've developed three tips so that when your company finds itself in the position of having egg on its face, you wipe it off and dab with a napkin instead of adding ketchup and salt and making an ugly situation even uglier. 1. OWN THE MISTAKE One thing that drives customer's nuts and totally discredits you is to get defensive and blame everybody but your company. You spilled the milk, and you're not only crying over it, your blaming the cow. Put yourself in the customer's shoes. She hired or contracted with you and doesn't want to hear about your problems with suppliers, delivery trucks, or acts of God. When you took her money you became responsible for the total solution, so behave like it. This is basic to customer service procedures to resolve customer complaints. I had a 1993 Ford Explorer back in the late 90s, and if you remember the consumer news in that period of time, you know that this model was one of the vehicles with the notorious Firestone ATX tire stock from the factory. I picked up the car used and have Goodyear tires on it, so I was in the clear. Well, regardless of what you think of either Ford or Firestone as companies and irrespective of the purity of their motives, I was pleased to get a warning/recall notice from both Ford and Firestone. The Ford letter did not blame Firestone and make an excuse and then tell me to contact Firestone. Ford told me if I had those tires on my car to bring it in and they'd replace them. Firestone said something similar, and even though I wasn't Firestone's direct customer, I was an end user and they stepped up and took ownership of the problem. Contrast this to the compan who was responsible for the high speed DSL line installation at my offices. I was told I'd have the connections in four weeks; it took in excess of six. I had to send new employees home to telecommute off their AOL connections because I couldn't provide Internet access—not really what you want. This same company demonstrated the same chaos on the phone line cutover. No hesitation to enroll me in the plan and contract for my business' money, but ask these jokers about the problem and the answers were astounding. It's Verizon's fault, they didn't cut over the lines, or they didn't bring them inside. We had a snowstorm last week. My dog ate my homework. This company seemed bent on convincing me it's "out of their control." Did I give a rip? If you're the one getting paid for the product, it is ALL in your control. Don't make excuses, provide solutions. Most of the time you can do this right over the phone. 2. SOLICIT THE CUSTOMER'S RECOMMENDED ACTION This is incredibly simple but ignored so often. Ask the customer what they would like you to do to make them whole again. Empower the customer with part of the solution. Make him part of the team, not an adversary. Remember, this guy is torqued off and he has definite ideas on what you should do as a remedy. Customer recommendations are great for two reasons; first, making the customer part of the solution takes the edge off complaints, and second, you just may discover that are less painful to your company than the solution. Businesses that excel in customer service solicit these opinions and try to implement them. They listen. Worst-practice companies reach for the rulebook and break out the magnifying glass, then call the soon-to-be-ex-customer to the fine print that exonerates their company in the unlikely event that they fail to deliver. Lawyers tell the company that this is great protection from the downside. Well, lawyers are usually called in when a situation is spiraling out of control, not during the building stages of your business. I'm dealing with a software vendor right now who has not delivered on the promise. Oh, they've tactically done most of the steps I suppose, but the perceived value for the money is not there, and they know I feel this way. Instead of asking me how to provide a remedy, they point me out to their contract, 1-2 pages of which talks about the deliverables for the project and 4-5 pages of legal, fine-print boilerplate that tells me stuff like how any hours spent past 30 minutes roll to another full hour. Ain't that just peachy. They're so worried about being compensated for every last minute that they don't even see me pulling up my roots and taking the long-term business to another company, blocking these guys from thousands in future revenue. A better example is my friend Tom at T&F Tire Co. He verbally quoted me an hour's work to fix an electrical problem on my watercraft trailer lights a couple of years back. Three hours later it still wasn't fixed. He apologized and asked me what to do, to which I responded that I'd like not to have to pay for 3 hours of labor on an unsolved problem. No hesitation, I was charged for ½ hour of time. Now it cost Tom real time and money to diagnose this problem, but he didn't pass it along to me because I didn't think it was fair. Tom's business made about one-thousand dollars annually from me, yet he was willing to part with a few hundred bucks easier than a software company that made 100 times that amount off me in six months. I don't know how much money Tom has earned from my referrals and articles that talk about him positively. I can tell you how many referrals the software company will get. Would you like to hazard a guess? 3. MAKE IT RIGHT—AND THEN SOME At some point, you eventually have to deliver. You might be late or over budget, but the bottom line is that you'd better ultimately make it right. This is where most businesses stop. They promise X but X was tougher to deliver than expected, so after a while the customer gets poor X—tired, disheveled, and late. The savvy business owner knows that for whatever he has been inconvenienced in trying to bring about the elusive X, the customer has been moreso. This best customer service practice company delivers X+ something else. When the mower breaks and the customer returns it under warranty, you of course give her a new one. How about adding a coupon for gas or oil for the mower? The blouse stitching came apart? Try giving the person who returns it two blouses. Giving the lady one blouse and she says thanks and probably doesn't shop at the store anymore. After all, they sell defective blouses. Giving her two means the company forks over an extra twenty samolians, yet earns customer loyalty. She'll not only shop there again, she'll tell five people, three of whom will shop there too. The important thing is that you provide the bonus for her trouble voluntarily. As a business owner, get your head out of you're a…ccounting balance sheet and trust your gut. How do you behave when someone you do business with turns a problem into an unexpected, pleasant surprise? So do others. Author Tim Ferris of "The Four Hour Workweek" talks about this very thing in terms of what he calls a Lose-Win Warranty for your products, where the customer gets more than his money back if things go bad. So there are my three simple rules for turning a fumble into a touchdown, customer service recovery procedures that work. Take ownership, solicit the customer's remedy, and over-deliver on the results, and you'll almost look forward to dropping the ball so you can be a service hero.
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