Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (6 page)

‘‘Are you sure you typed your password correctly?’’ We refer to these as DYPII (‘‘Did You Plug It In?’’) questions. DYPII questions are likely to get customer hackles up. If you raise DYPII questions
before
you’ve finished Step 1, they’ll often be considered offensive. But
after
you’ve developed collaborative feelings in Step 1, the same questions are generally tolerated well.

Just hold off with all the DYPIIness for now. Don’t leap straight into problem solving.

You and your customer will get there eventually, together.

The Language of Service Recovery

Language, as mentioned in Chapter 3, is crucial in service recovery and needs to be addressed in a lexicon you create for your business. Little matters more when making a recovery: You’ll never successfully get through it without the right words and phrasing. ‘‘I’m sorry, I apologize’’ are the words, delivered sincerely, that your customer wants to hear. Phrases like ‘‘It’s our policy’’ and any synonyms for ‘‘You’re wrong’’ must be banished.

If, in fact, the customer is wrong and there is a bona fide
(
e.g., safety-related or legally required) reason to point this out, you need words that express this obliquely—such as ‘‘Our records seem to indicate’’ and ‘‘Perhaps

’ so that she can realize her

error but also save face.

In fact, the classically infuriating DYPII question, ‘‘Did you plug it in?’’ can be rendered as
‘‘Maybe the wall connection is loose.

Can you do me a favor and check where it plugs into the socket?’’

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Step 3: Fix the Problem and Then Follow Up.
So you’ve decided to replace a substandard service or product. That’s a step in the right direction—but it’s only a first step. Remember that the customer has been stressed, inconvenienced, and slowed down by your company. Merely giving her back what she expected to receive is not going to restore satisfaction.

A key principle in fixing a problem is to resolve the customer’s sense of injustice—of having been wronged or let down. You do this by providing something
extra
.

You can find a way to restore the smile to almost any customer’s face, whether it’s a free upgrade or a more creative offering, like one-on-one consultation time with an expert on your staff. Collaborate with your wronged customer to figure out what would feel like valuable compensation to her, or use your initiative to get going in the right direction.

Ideally, your ‘‘something extra’’ will change the nature of the event for her: your special and creative efforts on her behalf will come to the foreground in the picture of the event she paints for herself and others, online or off, and the initial problem will move to the background.

For some customers the most valuable compensation isn’t
material
.

Some customers respond most positively to a chance to help improve your company. These customers want most of all to help make your service better, protect future customers from any similar wrongs, or feel assured that their advice is important to you. More often than not they do have insightful ideas about how to improve your business. So when a customer even hints at this motive, listen particularly closely and appreciatively to the suggestions you receive and make it clear that you will be passing the ideas along.

Customers who express critiques or suggestions are often expressing a desire to be involved in your company. In a way, they are offering themselves as unpaid volunteers. This sense of connection goes a long way toward helping them to become loyal to you. Don’t squander the opportunity to connect with them during a service failure.

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

The Elements of Follow-Up

Various approaches to the follow-up are appropriate in different service settings, but they all should include
immediate, internal
, and
wrap-up
components. Together, the goal of these components is to ensure that the recovery goes correctly, that your customer feels appropriately taken care of, and that your organization gets the full benefit of customer loyalty from your recovery efforts.

Immediate Follow-Up
If you’ve handled the problem yourself, check in promptly with the customer after the intended resolution. This under-scores your concern. It also lets you catch lingering unresolved issues.

Immediate follow-up is also important when you have
reassigned
the customer’s problem to somebody else. For example: Suppose that you work in sales. A customer calls you (because you’re the person she knows) to report being inconvenienced by a glitch on your website.

Naturally, you hand off the technical resolution of the problem to your IT department. But will you ever know if IT actually ends up implementing a workable solution for your customer? Whether she ends up feeling taken care of by the technician?
You’ll only find out if you check
back in.
Customers want
you
, their original ally, to follow up on such questions, not just somebody over in IT, not even if you know for a fact that the IT person is best equipped to help.

Internal Follow-up
Others in your organization need to be alerted
immediately
to the service failure a customer experienced. Here’s why such service failure alerts are a hallmark of exceptional businesses:

? Your staff will know that any further interactions with this customer should be rechecked
beyond
the usual quality control.

? Your staff is cued to interact with the customer appropriately after the failure. It is not the customer’s responsibility to explain his troubles once again—unless he wants to. Nor should he be forced to ‘‘act happy’’ to match your staff ’s incorrect expectations. They should al-

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ready be aware of what he’s been through. For example: A restaurant can grace the departures of such customers with relevant words of thanks from the manager or maitre d’: ‘‘Your business means a lot to us, and we appreciate your patience this evening: I’m so sorry about the mix-up with your entreés and look forward to doing a better job for you next time.’’ That beats an off-puttingly cheery ‘‘How was everything this evening?’’ that makes it sound like the left hand doesn’t know that the right hand dropped the souffle´.)

? You can flag the unfortunate customer’s file for special treatment during her next visit or transaction—even if that special treatment is just the ability to return a knowing look or to share a laugh at your own expense.

Wrap-Up:
Solidify your relationship with the customer by following up again with a handwritten note or phone call when the episode is over: ‘‘I’m sorry you experienced this problem. I’m so pleased to have you as a customer, and I am looking forward to welcoming you back.’’

Doing this by email is all right if you’re solely an online business, but it won’t have the same impact.

Step 4: Document the Problem in Detail.
It’s natural to want to give yourself a breather after solving a customer’s problem. Still, make sure your staff is trained to record, every single time, the details of what went wrong—promptly, before the memory can fade or distort. We call this the
deposition
. Be scrupulous: The only way to prevent serious problems from recurring is to document the problem for careful analysis later.

Depending on your business, depositions can be high-tech or low-tech. The information can initially go into an incidents box, a problem log, or a verbal report, or it can be entered directly into its final software destination. In all cases, the documentation should include fairly detailed information. The particular details will depend on your business, but they usually include such notes as the time of day, the type of prod-

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

uct or service, how busy your business was at the time, and the details of the customer’s circumstances.

Your goal in using this documentation is to identify trends or patterns that hint at underlying causes. For example, you might notice that a problem tends to happen around 3:30 p.m. on Wednesdays when Billy is on the job. This could lead you to consider whether Billy may have missed a particular training module. Or it happens only between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m., which leads you to notice that a freight elevator is always under maintenance at that time, creating unacceptably slow service. Or the complaints are always about rear wiper blades you sell, but only in your Eastern and Midwest franchises, leading you to discover an interaction between salted roads and the particular rear blades you stock. Or the complaints occur only when you are above 90 percent of your customer capacity, leading you to study whether your business can learn to run effectively at 90 percent-plus capacity (as a Disney theme park can manage to do), or if you need to build additional capacity or limit your clientele.

How Should You Compensate a Customer

for a Service or Product Failure?

It depends.
And that variability, in fact, is what’s most important.

Customers have diverse values and preferences—so your people who placate disgruntled customers need to be given enormous discretion. Still, there are principles that apply:

?
Most customers understand that things can and will go
wrong.
What they do not understand, accept, or find interesting are excuses. For example, they don’t care about your org chart: Your mentioning that a problem originated in a different department is of no interest to them.

?
Don’t panic.
Customers’ sense of trust and camaraderie
increases
after a problem is successfully resolved, compared to if you had never had the problem in the first place. This makes Recovery

35

sense, since you now have a shared experience: You have solved something by working closely together.

?
Avoid assuming you know what solution a customer wants
or ‘‘should’’ want.
Ask. And if a customer makes a request that sounds extreme or absurd, don’t rush to dismiss it. Even if it seems on its face impossible, there may be a creative way to make the requested solution, or something a lot like it, happen.

?
Don’t strive for ‘‘fairness’’ or ‘‘justice.’’
Our archetypal doting Italian mama doesn’t investigate whether her bambino obeyed the sidewalk speed limit before comforting him, and a customer’s warm feelings for a company aren’t about fairness. They’re about being treated especially well.

?
Learn from customer issues, but don’t use them as an opportunity to discipline or train your staff
in front of
your customer.
This may sound obvious, but it happens quite often. Watch out for this flaw, especially when you’re under stress.

?
Don’t imagine you’re doing something special for a customer
by making things how they should have been in the first place.
Time cannot be given back—it’s gone. The chance to get it right the first time? It’s gone. So re-creating how things should have been is just a first step. You need to then give the customer something extra. Mama bandages a knee
and
offers a lollipop. If you aren’t sure which ‘‘extra’’ to offer a particular customer, just make it clear you want to offer something. If the customer doesn’t like red lollipops or doesn’t eat sugar, she’ll let you know. Then you can decide together on a different treat.

?
Keep in mind the lifetime value of a loyal customer.
A loyal customer is likely worth a small fortune to your company when considered over a decade or two of regular purchases. We have done lifetime customer value studies in our own companies and client companies, and frequently found the lifetime value of a loyal customer to be
up to $100,000
—and occasionally even more. Perhaps in your business this number is a few thousand 36

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

dollars, or possibly it is half a million. It is well worth figuring out that number and keeping it in mind if you ever feel that temptation to quarrel with a customer over, say, an overnight shipping bill.

Use Your Own Experience to Prepare You

Disastrous handling of service breakdowns assault us everywhere in our daily lives. Our suggestion: Begin to use the world as your private research laboratory. Whenever poor problem resolution intrudes on you as a consumer, think about what was done wrong and how you as a provider could have resolved the failure better. That way, you’re less likely to go ballistic from all the abuses you suffer as a consumer. (Hey, now you’re
using
your frustrating experiences for your own company’s benefit.)

Here’s an example from Leonardo’s daily life. A few years ago, he decided to redo his basement. Like other parents before him, he felt safer imagining his kids entertaining their friends at home where he could keep tabs on them. He decided to really do things up in a big way:

So I ask my two boys, ‘‘What would you like in the basement?’’

‘‘I want a foosball.’’ Easy enough.

‘‘I want a basketball court.’’ Not so easy, that one.

Both boys agree they want a big-screen TV. Doting father that I am, I
go to one of those stores and buy a big-screen TV. The price, to be honest,
was a shocker. And what a beast to lug home.

Now, while everyone else sees my warts life-size, my kids are still at
an age where they see me a bit like a medieval knight with a beautiful horse
and shining armor with the feathers and the sword and the cape.

So I—I mean Sir Leonardo—and my boys take the TV out of the
box. We’re all excited. I plug it in. Nothing happens. Ding: the first ding
in my armor.

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‘‘Daddy, what’s wrong? What’s wrong with the TV?’’

I say: ‘‘I don’t know. The TV’s not working.’’

‘‘You mean you don’t know how to make it work?’’

‘‘Son, I know exactly how to make it work, but this thing is not
working. Go check the breakers in the meantime.’’