There are times when - despite the best planning, processes, training and intent - things go wrong. From your customer’s point of view, it’s a nightmare. From your organisation’s point of view, it can seem like a disaster. However, when things go wrong, if your teams are equipped to enact a gold standard service recovery, you can avoid creating a dissatisfied customer, or worse, a brand terrorist, and instead create an advocate. Here’s how.
Acknowledging service failure
Every organisation has encountered what we call ‘service failure’. This is when something goes wrong that upsets, annoys, frustrates or otherwise inconveniences customers to the point where there is the potential to turn someone into a detractor. All the work, time and resources that have gone into engaging a valuable customer can disappear. They may never use your firm again. Even worse, they may tell others how awful you are. In CX terms, this is a value destroying event. In an ideal world, service failures wouldn’t happen. But quite frankly, this world doesn’t exist. It is almost impossible to avoid service failures because our systems include unpredictable things like people, weather, or reliable internet. But we don’t have to live in a perfect world with perfect systems. What really matters is what happens when service failures happen. Some organisations have built a their reputation on being great at recovery. Yet so many organisations are still woefully under-prepared for the day something goes wrong.
So, what do organisations who are great at service recovery do? Well, let’s first hear this story from Jon Picoult about his experience with the Ritz Carlton Hotel.
Jon Picoult shares his experience with the Ritz Carlton Hotel.
Here is the summary:
Jon and his wife flew to a city to attend a black tie event. In transit, her evening dress was soiled. Upon arriving at the Ritz Carlton she sent the dress to be dry cleaned. It was returned badly shrunken.
Highly stressed and very upset, her problem was solved when the Ritz Carlton manager took ownership of the problem. “I’ll handle it”, he said. He arranged a limousine and a personal shopper so that Jon’s wife could replace her dress, and choose shoes and accessories to complete the new outfit. The Ritz Carlton paid for everything!
An hour before the black tie dinner, and now fully dressed in her new outfit, she realised the ink-staining security tag was still attached to the dress. With rising panic, they called the hotel manager who again took ownership of their problem and simply said “I’ll handle it”. Soon after, the manager appeared at their room with a Nordstrom employee from the store where she had bought her dress. The Nordstrom employee knelt down and removed the device. Situation saved.
But that’s not all. Lastly, with a focus on how to make the evening truly special for his guest, the hotel manager had his team stand together and applaud his guest as she left for the event. It was a Pretty Woman moment that made her feel absolutely fabulous.
The Gold Standard in Customer Experience
You’d have to agree - that’s an outstanding service recovery story, and definitely an example of an organisation going ‘above and beyond’ the call of duty. How does this happen, you might be wondering? Well, it’s straight forward, but not easy!
At the Ritz Carlton, the mechanics of service recovery are relatively straight forward. They have worked hard to ensure their teams have the right tools, permissions, support, knowledge and references to enact exceptional service recoveries. Author Joseph Michelli’s book ‘The New Gold Standard’ describes in detail how the Ritz Carlton Hotel Group did this, including taking hundreds of processes and rules and distilling those into a handful of universal standards, with an ongoing process of education and examples of how these standards are to be enacted.
But is it just high end, high margin businesses who can take this approach? No. Any organisation can do this. Here’s a very different example.
A communications company that listens
Macquarie Telecom made a name for themselves by providing a level of service recovery other telecommunications companies couldn’t, or wouldn’t, deliver. One great example I recall is a business customer calling Macquarie Telecom (from a landline) to get a new mobile because he’d lost his. Many providers would torture their customers through a series of questions, lengthy processes and often penalty payments for replacing a phone on contract. That is of course once the customer had managed to get through to someone to ask for help.
Macquarie Telecom, where the action happens.
Macquarie Telecom really valued their business customers and did things differently. In this case, the team member who picked up the call leveraged Macquarie Telecom’s well designed service recovery mechanics and added a touch of magic. She firstly said “don’t worry, I’ll help you with that”, assuming full responsibility for solving her customer’s immediate problem - the lost phone. Then, sensing her customer was also quite stressed about being without his phone and was concerned about the time wasted in having to go and collect it, she added: “I’ll bring the new phone down to you right now!” Her customer felt both relieved at the replacement process being so easy and incredibly grateful to be able to get straight back to work.
So how did Macquarie Telecom do this?
Firstly, they have their service recovery mechanics sorted. They have processes and training on how to handle an incoming problem, systems to make new handset provision really fast, and delegations of authority that provide their service agents with the ability to fix a problem in the moment without needing to double-check or escalate to a supervisor.
Secondly - and this is the magic bit - Macquarie Telecom empowered their people to do whatever they thought was right to delight their customers. They did this through role-modelling, stories (case studies) and ensuring staff felt they had agency in ensuring their customer issue was resolved. In this case, the team member knew it was okay to stop taking customer calls, to get the newly provisioned phone, jump in a taxi and take it down personally to her customer. Macquarie Telecom didn’t look at call management metrics. They looked to the greater customer metric of advocacy and life time value.
You will see a common pattern emerging here. Organisations that are great at service recovery and use those service failures to create advocates have nailed two key things:
Service recovery mechanics: They have the processes, systems, permissions and stories in place to encourage and support service recovery actions. Though it sounds simple enough, there is a lot of work here to get this right in your organisation. It requires time, attention and serious senior level support to get it working.
Touches of magic: Staff are enabled to move from the mechanics of the service recovery to working out how to make the customer feel special. Here’s where good organisations can find greatness. The added sprinkles of magic in an interaction, like leaving the call centre to personally deliver the replacement phone, or arranging a standing ovation to make someone feel great. These magical touches require degrees of freedom in a culture where people have the permission, encouragement and exemplars to be truly creative. Staff know that they can improvise and use company resources in a way that builds true loyalty.
Set your own Gold Standard
The gold standard set by the Ritz Carlton was founded on a deep focus and investment in both the mechanics and the human magic required to be great at service recovery. How does your organisation compare? Do you know what your Gold Standard is and are you known for it? Make sure you have your service recovery mechanics in place, and empower your staff to add that ‘touch of magic’, and you are well on your way to setting your own Gold Standard.
Cyrus Allen is a Founder and Managing Partner at CapFeather Global with more than 25 years of corporate experience and senior advisory across Customer Strategy and Customer Experience. He continues to be an advocate of the Ritz Carlton after experiencing their Gold Standard service many years ago.