My third retrospective installment comes from my book The New Gold Standard and looks at Service Recovery at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company:
Customers are all too often surprised when businesses accept responsibility for breakdowns, thus providing a strategic advantage for those businesses that their admit faults. John Fleming, Ph.D., Principal and Chief Scientist for Gallup and coauthor of the book Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter, says, “Taking responsibility for customer problems is a huge area of opportunity, because most companies don’t do a good job of it. It’s a low-hanging fruit in building strong relationships.”
The steps involved in salvaging a bad experience (whether it is caused by your business or not) are fairly simple; yet all too often these steps are not followed:
1) Share a genuine and compassionate reaction to the person’s distress
2) offer appropriate apologies
3) assure the person you will take care of the issue
4) individually, and through the resources of your team, see that the problem is taken care of in a way that meets the satisfaction of the customer and does not reoccur, and
5) go one step further to demonstrate that you want to try to compensate for the person’s loss or frustration.
How effectively and consistently are you practicing these 5 steps of service recovery?
