Service Recovery: Earning that Elusive Fifth Star

I wrote the following as an article for this month's edition of "The Retailer's Edge," the newsletter of the Minnesota Retailers Association (http://www.mnretail.org/). There's a lot of other great articles in there as well - I recommend you check it out.


Here’s a little-known secret that, used wisely, will catapult your business into a customer service icon. Please, don’t abuse what I’m about to tell you. It’s that powerful.

No company has ever reached that top one percent, the five-star level of customer service, without first dropping the ball for at least a few of its customers. Only by fixing an error, by soothing deeply ruffled feathers, can you really prove your stuff and build a legendary reputation.

I know it sounds odd, perhaps counter-intuitive. It’s probably irresponsible of an evangelist of customer delight such as me to share this with you. But this one fact can transform your company from a ho-hum, “me-too” brand into something phenomenal: a Wegmans, a Nordstrom; dare I say it? A Zappos.

Here’s the mechanism at work. Let’s assume your company is just terrific with customers, that things rarely go wrong because your leadership gets it, your culture is right, your systems and procedures, your products and policies are already geared toward spoiling the customer rotten.

This is rare – you’re a customer as well as a service provider, so I don’t have to tell you: this is almost unheard of already!

But it still isn’t enough. This virtual Nirvana of customer-centricity puts you at the four-star level: awesome, terrific, beyond rare. Your customers are routinely satisfied, they’re happy to come back, and a few may even bring you their friends. Four-star status is nothing to be ashamed of.

But who wants customers who are just “satisfied?” The customers who will truly build your empire for you have experienced that moment of truth with your company, and have come out simply blown away. Because somewhere something went wrong, and your company fixed it better than new, your customer is now lifelong loyal. And they will forever-more brag about how well you treated them. Over the course of her lifetime, one such customer will be worth a hundred merely “satisfied” customers.

There’s a whole art to the handling of complaints, the mending of broken expectations that is covered in detail in my first book, Five-Star Customer Service. Here is the Readers’ Digest Version:

Handling Complaints

1. Listen – then listen some more.
2. Say, “I’m sorry” – and mean it.
3. Say, “What can I do to make it right?” Do it.
4. Follow up.

Those first two steps – really listening, convincingly apologizing – are rare enough, and hard enough to pull off. The second two, though, are where the payoff is.

“What can I do to make it right?” will actually save you money – you’ll see. Remember, customer service is a profit generator for a business, not a drain. After all, great customer service is all about making you money.

That last one, follow up? It is the cherry on the sundae – and if you fail to perform this simple step properly, you’ve blown the whole thing. A personal phone call the next day from the big boss, the store manager or the owner, will absolutely shock and delight your customer. Anything less, and you’re lucky just to hit four stars after all.

So if you want to provide the kind of legendary service that inspires your customers to bring you their friends by the busload, take a look at how you’re handling complaints. Only by getting this right will you become a customer service icon.