Service Failures
A service failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing to happen. In fact, it has at least two benefits- firstly, as a manager you now know one more potential area of failure and can take steps to minimize recurrences. Secondly and more importantly, what did you do when you failed to exceed your Customer’s expectations? A Customer who knows that she was adequately compensated when a Service failure occurs is likely to feel more trustful of you. And a Customer who complaint never got acknowledged feels belittled. This fact is lost upon so many Businesses that they fail to realize the potential of such opportunities. They mostly hide behind fine print of the Contract or deny or simply fail to acknowledge that something has gone wrong.
To quote a couple of examples of fine recovery- my mother received an offer of apology and a free air ticket when an airline messed up her tickets in the first place; the manager at a restaurant graciously waived the price of an entrée off the check when the food served was a little different from our expectation. Now, my mother and I did not stop buying those services because we had a less than satisfactory experience or we did not continue buying because of the freebies. We continued buying because we felt we could trust them to do the right thing when called upon.
There are several more examples from the professional world too. In all the cases we came on top, because once the unforeseen circumstance had already occurred we did everything right in terms of quickly dedicating resources round the clock to fix it while communicating updates that reflected the true statuses and finally working to ensure procedures to prevent such recurrences.
The points to note for CRM Managers are:
- Are all the failures that have occurred in the previous year, captured for further analysis?
- Are the failures one off cases or are there patterns (like lost baggage in different Airports)?
- Was a genuine apology offered and steps taken to exceed the Customer’s expectation in each of the cases?
- What can be done to fix the problem so the chances of recurrence are minimal?
- Have the customers been thanked for bring this to notice? And have they been informed of the changes made since?
So, is an occasional service failure desirable? Depends on what you do with it.
