Be Different or be dead

August 18, 2010

12 proven ways to fix a colossal service mistake

Source: Unsplash

12 proven ways to fix a colossal service mistake.

Mistakes are a way of life in every organization notwithstanding the attempts to achieve an error-free working environment. Mistakes, however, can be a source of opportunity — enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty — if the right steps are taken when a screwup is made.

Dazzling service recovery = (Fix the OOPS! within 24 hours) + (Surprise the customer with something they don’t expect)

It’s a leader’s responsibility to put in place these 11 elements necessary to execute an effective recovery system and make it a way of life in their organization.

1. Service strategy — amazing service recovery doesn’t happen through serendipity. It requires a comprehensive strategy defining the outcomes expected and the way to achieve them. Focus on execution;

2. Togetherness — the relationship between the customer, the breakdown event and the organization must be tight. Seamless recovery demands all teams in the organization working unbelievably well together;

3. Connectivity — hyper-communications is essential to enable the recovery process: customer contact when the disaster event happens, follow up, status reports and final resolution;

4. Secrets — you need to know the secrets of the person being screwed over if you want a recovery that will blow the customer’s mind;

Find out what would the customer would NOT expect. Remember, a Dazzling Recovery = Fixing the mistake + Doing the Unexpected: the surprise factor;

5. Problem solving — service recovery isn’t about applying the rules and policies of the organization to make things right for the customer; rather it’s about solving the problem that the mistake has created. Make sure your recruitment process looks for proven problem solvers;

6. Celebration —to reinforce the behaviours expected of people in recovery, make sure that you recognize and reward service recovery ‘heroes’ consistently and that you make a big deal of what they do to recover from a blunder and and how they do it;

7. Story telling — further to #6, use storytelling as a way of making explicit the actions that employees must take to affect a successful recovery. Storytelling is an effective way of ‘painting a picture’ of what an expected recovery process looks like. Establish a recovery storytelling channel in your organization and make it a big deal;

8. Training — give employees the skills to execute dazzling recovery as a high priority;

9. The right to act — empower people responsibly to ensure that the earth is moved to enact the recovery process. This is a critical point. Recovery is successful and customer loyalty enhanced only I’d the process is completed within 24 hours of the mistake. Speed is required which means that traditional approval processes must be circumvented by allowing people involved in the recovery to make decisions to get it done. Waiting for a manager’s approval to proceed will not only render the recovery useless, it will also demotivate the employee and the overall strategy will be compromised;

Empower people to act and trust they will do the right thing

10. Measurement — service recovery must be seen as business as usual throughout the organization and in order to support this objective, recovery objectives must be set, monitored and displayed throughout the workplace. For objective setting, set a target for the % of mistakes recovered in 24 hours or less and over time move the target close to 100%.
For the surprise factor, ask your victims if they were blown away by something an employee did that they didn’t expect; move this target to 100% as well;

11. Accountability — to make service recovery matter to the entire organization, put recovery expectations into every leader’s performance plan and make it equally important as other balanced scorecard categories such as financial performance and Human Resources;

12. Recruitment — Finally, make sure you have people in the recovery process that ‘like humans’. Employees who innately care about others and who are passionate about rectifying the breakdown event and going the extra mile to blow the customer away are needed to make your recovery strategy come to life.

These 12 steps are not only essential in building a successful service recovery process, they are also instrumental in creating a service culture that really does exist to serve customers.

Cheers,
Roy
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• Posted 8.18.10 at 10:36 am by Roy Osing
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