While companies may not be able to prevent […]. While companies may not be able to prevent all problems, they can learn to recover from them. A good recovery can turn angry, frustrated customers into loyal ones. It can, in fact, create more goodwill than if things had gone smoothly in the first place. The vacationers had nothing but trouble getting from New York to their Mexican destination.
The flight took off 6 hours late, made 2 unexpected stops, and circled for 30 minutes before it could land. Because of all the delays and mishaps, the plane was en route for 10 hours more than planned and ran out of food and drinks.
By the time the plane pulled up to the gate, the soured passengers were faint with hunger and convinced that their vacation was ruined before it had even started. One lawyer on board was already collecting names and addresses for a class-action lawsuit. Silvio de Bortoli, the general manager of the Cancun resort and a legend throughout the organization for his ability to satisfy customers, got word of the horrendous flight and immediately created an antidote.
He took half the staff to the airport, where they laid out a table of snacks and drinks and set up a stereo system to play lively music. As the guests filed through the gate, they received personal greetings, help with their bags, a sympathetic ear, and a chauffeured ride to the resort.
Waiting for them at Club Med was a lavish banquet, complete with mariachi band and champagne. Moreover, the staff had rallied other guests to wait up and greet the newcomers, and the partying continued until sunrise. In the end, the vacationers had a better experience than if their flight from New York had gone like clockwork.
After all, the battle for market share is won not by analyzing demographic trends, ratings points, and other global measures but rather by pleasing customers one at a time. Opportunities for service recovery abound. Any problem that employees who are close to the customer can discover and resolve is a chance to go beyond the call of duty and win a customer for life. The stuff angry letters to the chief executive are made of.
No business can afford to lose customers, if only because it costs much more to replace a customer than it does to retain one—five times more, most industry experts agree. Companies that alienate and frustrate their customers will soon have none left to bother them.
Those that go out of their way to please customers will soon have many more. Companies should not depend on such rare instances of resourcefulness. They should take steps to ensure that everyone in the organization has the skill, motivation, and authority to make service recovery an integral part of operations. Service companies must become gymnasts, able to regain their balance instantly after a slipup and continue their routines. Such grace is earned by focusing on the goal of customer satisfaction, adopting a customer-focused attitude, and cultivating the special skills necessary to recovery.
Ironically, recovery skills come especially hard to companies that joined the quality-control movement and have spent the past decade making their service-delivery systems streamlined and efficient.
They introduced sophisticated technologies and enacted strict policies to control employee behavior. The idea was to ensure that even uneducated, unmotivated workers could consistently deliver high-quality service. By the s, many such systems had been developed—to improve service in everything from scheduling airline departures and posting banking transactions to maintaining hotel rooms.
All of these systems were modeled after assembly-line production systems. These production-oriented service-delivery systems have gone a long way toward achieving consistently high service standards. The fact is that in services, no matter how rigorous the procedures and employee training or how advanced the technology, zero defects is an unattainable goal.
Unlike manufacturers that can ad just the inputs and machinery until products are uniformly perfect, service companies cannot escape variation. When the inevitable problems arise, customers are almost always disappointed. The typical service delivery system is completely unprepared to deal with exceptions. Doing so requires decision making and rule breaking—exactly what employees have been conditioned against.
They should be as comfortable with the exceptions as they are with the rules. Developing the perspective to recognize service-recovery opportunities and the skills to act on them is clearly an effort, but one well worth making. Mistreating customers can have a devastating effect on the business, as this example shows.
John Barrier, a 30—year customer of a bank in Spokane, Washington, parked his car in a lot owned by the bank while he did business across the street. An attendant told him he could get the parking validated if he did business at the bank, which was not his usual branch. Barrier cashed a check, but afterward was refused the validation because he had not made a deposit. She was unmoved. He less patiently explained the situation to the branch manager, to no avail. The customer paid for the parking, but he was so steamed that he drove 40 blocks to his home branch and explained the incident to his usual banker.
Needless to say, the bank executives were embarrassed and worked hard to persuade the customer to give the bank another chance. Companies that want to build the capability of recovering from service problems should do these things: measure the costs of effective service recovery, break customer silence and listen closely for complaints, anticipate needs for recovery, act fast, train employees, empower the front line, and close the customer feedback loop.
Measurement precedes management. This is especially true for service recovery—managers often underestimate the profits lost when a customer departs unhappy, and therefore they undermanage ways of avoiding such losses. They concentrate on attracting new customers that may actually represent unprofitable business and neglect to take steps to retain more valuable existing customers.
What gets measured is truly what gets managed here. Errors have certain costs associated with them. Some take the form of money-back guarantees, warranty work, or replacements, which fall on the company.
But dissatisfied customers almost always get stuck with certain costs—the money they spend for phone calls, the time they spend making their cases, and the aggravation they must endure throughout. The customer left stranded on the highway because her car was not repaired properly might miss an important meeting, have to pay for a tow truck, and spend time waiting for the repair to be made.
A study done for the U. Considering how much it costs to lose a customer, few recovery efforts are too extreme. It also has to replace that customer through expensive marketing efforts. The theatergoer who forgets his ticket will long be grateful if the usher slips him in. The service experiences customers rave about most are those in which they were at fault but the company responded anyway. Service company executives know very well that some customers make a point of being heard.
Listening to these customers is important. Many people would rather "switch than fight," especially in a health care environment, where people fear that complaining could jeopardize the quality of the clinical care they receive. Also, minorities and people from underserved communities tend to avoid complaining, even though they may have significant problems with the delivery of care.
Health care organizations that are truly committed to improving the member's or patient's experience of care can make this commitment obvious to their staff and their members by encouraging complaints and offering members and patients multiple ways to give you feedback and help you improve your service.
If you make it hard for members or patients to complain, you will continue to miss important service failures that shape your reputation in the community and the quality of care. There are many tools for cataloguing patient or member complaints that allow you to track the problems by CAHPS composite or other typologies that support linking the qualitative complaints to improvement activities.
As indicated in the table below about complaint management, good service recovery programs go beyond the "quick fix. Some complaints arise from experiences with a specific person in the service process, which reflects a training problem, while others are the result of system problems that require a totally different process to resolve.
The tactic of assigning complaint letters received by the CEO to middle managers for resolution as if they all reflect a one-time event or an employee that needs disciplinary action is outdated, and will never result in permanent solutions to long-term problems. Many staff know immediately which situations or patients will end up in the CEO's office.
Organizations with good customer service and service recovery programs are proactive and let the CEO, clinic manager, or chief medical officer know about these situations right away so that the person can be contacted before they have the time to file a formal complaint. Table 6P The role of complaint management in the service recovery process. Studies indicate that when customers' problems have been satisfactorily handled and resolved, their loyalty and plans to use the services again were within a few percentage points of those who had not experienced a problem.
In other service industries, service recovery has proven to be cost-effective. Also, retention benefits the bottom line: Because of their word-of-mouth referrals and willingness to purchase ongoing services and premium products, customers retained over five years can be up to more profitable than a "revolving door" customer who uses your services once.
Content last reviewed March Browse Topics. Topics A-Z. Quality and Disparities Report Latest available findings on quality of and access to health care. Notice of Funding Opportunities. The Problem No matter how well you manage the customer service at your organization, problems are inevitable. Fix it properly if it ever fails. Remember: There are no third chances.
Guidelines for Staff and Latitude To Act and Atone Staff need to have the authority to make decisions about handling complaints autonomously so they can act quickly.
Specifically, they need: Clarity about the extent of their authority to act on complaints without getting approval from managers. Defined courses of actions for most frequent complaints.
Minimal red tape. A clear system of resource people, clear authority lines, and backup systems for dealing with difficult situations or those with financial, legal, or ethical implications. The Axioms of Service Recovery When problems with service do occur—and they will—your organization has to be prepared with a service recovery program that is designed to turn a disgruntled patient or member into a happy, loyal one.
Axiom 1: All customers have basic expectations. It is the most important of the five. Tangibles are the visible, concrete signs that influence the other expectations. When the furnace repair person shows up with dirty hands, no one is surprised.
When the doctor walks in the room with a filthy white coat and dirty hands, something else is communicated quickly and convincingly to the patient. Old magazines in the waiting room, dirty bathrooms, and chaotic registration areas all suggest that an organization is not under control. Empathy conveys that you are listening and concerned about the experiences and care of your members and patients. When something happens to disrupt trust, reconnecting with the patient or member in a personal way that conveys you understand is critical to the service recovery process.
Responsiveness refers to the expectation that things should happen in a timely fashion and that people should be kept informed about where they are in the process. The opposite of responsiveness is indifference and lack of communication. Solutions to problems need to be timely and responsive to the person's need. Axiom 2: Successful recovery is psychological as well as physical.
Axiom 3: Work in a spirit of partnership. Axiom 4: Customers react more strongly to "fairness mistakes" than "honest mistakes. Axiom 5: Effective recovery is a planned process. Knock your socks off service recovery. There is also a better chance you become their loyal customer because of this experience.
Service recovery, in essence, is turning a bad experience into a good one by surpassing customer expectations and making customers go from a state of dissatisfaction to one leaning towards loyalty.
Having an effective service recovery plan adds to the comprehensiveness of your customer experience. Service recovery paradox is a phenomenon where you feel a higher level of satisfaction towards a company after a successful service recovery, as compared to the level of satisfaction you would have felt if you never faced any problem, to begin with. For example, suppose you order food online, but because of bad weather, there is a huge delay.
So to compensate, the food aggregator refunds the amount for that meal and gives you half off on your next 3 orders. The service recovery paradox is a helpful indicator to guide you in the right direction when faced with customer situations where service recovery is a possibility.
With that in mind here are two things you can do to get a clearer picture of your next steps in service recovery:. Using these metrics, you can narrow your list down to a set of customers where there is a genuinely high possibility of performing service recovery.
For example, when the issue is very serious and has caused major disruption for the customer, service recovery strategies will probably not work. In this case, you can only fix the problem and hope the relationship goes back to normal. Issues that are minor indiscretions and only cause a low level of discomfort are easier to turn around.
So pick and choose wisely which customer issues to target when planning your recovery strategy. Adam Toporek, a thought leader in customer experience, detailed an incident that happened to him when flying on Southwest Airlines.
Other passengers were facing the same issue so he raised it to the flight attendant. The modern marketplace is very competitive and keeping your customer base from switching loyalties has become harder than ever before.
So scenarios where you have the opportunity to convert customers into loyal champions become very valuable to you as a company. This is where service recovery can play a big role. This satisfaction is usually higher and achieved much faster when compared to a regular customer. Service recovery becomes a great tool to help create loyalty and satisfaction in a short period of time. There are a lot of learnings to take away from a service recovery. Regardless of whether it succeeds or not, you can use the information you gain from the experience to improve your already existing practices in customer service.
If a service recovery succeeds then you have a great platform to build future such plans from. Another critical benefit of building a loyal customer base is the chance to gain a larger share of their wallet.
Loyal customers are more likely to repurchase or explore other offerings from the same company because they trust the brand. This is why Lifetime Value is so important. The customers you manage to convert into advocates because of a successful service recovery carry much higher Lifetime Value. Loyal customers also make for great brand ambassadors. Best practices give you a great starting point for your service recovery plans. Here are three approaches you should take when implementing a service recovery:.
Before performing any sort of service recovery, your support team should carefully try and piece together the complete picture of the customer problem.
Ask the right questions so you can get to the crux of the issue faster, but allow customers to take their time when it comes to answering. A rule of thumb when it comes to service recovery is always going the extra mile for the customer. A Service Recovery scenario requires you to put the need of the customer first.
0コメント