My comments on Service Recovery as Your Superpower. So often I hear having a service and doing a great service recovery is good for you. Is an unnecessary service because of a defect good for a customer? Get rid of these to increase value.
As soon as you believe this, you are a loser. If you need service recovery it means you are already losing customers for not being effective and for not doing the right things in the first place. If you reach this point, you do need service recovery. But why reach this point? How can you prevent reaching this point?
Have a policy of zero defects. This means we try our best that the customer does not require service other than routine maintenance. This should become your motto. If this happens, your market share will rise, and if you are looking to service recovery, then your market share is by definition lower and you are trying to get out of this problem by super recovery.
Imagine a car manufacturer knowing fully well there will be a defect and his attitude is if the defect surfaces, we will service the car, and give super service. This is a loser’s way of thinking. He should be avoiding defects.
Reach the point where your products do not need service other than routine maintenance.
We know this is a difficult plateau to reach, but it is a worthwhile goal. How can you achieve zero defects and zero complaints? If you have zero defects, then there should be no complaints on the product and the system. If there are problems with the system, with your information, ease of using your product, ease of getting information, ease of building a relationship, then you are close to reaching a point of no need for service,
What does this imply:
- A change of mindset: This includes a change of thinking we can solve problems if they occur. The mind set of creating customer value is to have no problems whatsoever.
- Get a chief problem solver who understands what customers want, collates customer complaints and comments, and then sets a course of action to make this happen
- Make service a profit centre. It will become one when you are not fighting fires and doing service recovery
- Measure customer value and see where you are worse than competition on important items that customers consider create value for them. You want to be better than competition. Do a root cause analysis and eradicate issues that are irritating or troublesome.
- Make it easy for the customer to contact you, solve problems and even build a relationship. Many companies such as Ecovacs have this policy and when I first needed help, the person who took care of me said, here is my mobile number, call me whenever you need help. How comfortable for me.
Service recovery is like reworking items that did not pass QC and reworking them to bring them up to snuff (instead of making them right in the first instance). Customers do not have the time or energy for this. Fix problems so that the customer is really happy. He does not want unnecessary experiences. No experience is a good experience. This is what most customers want.
Fundamentally learn where to place your energies to create value and think differently to create no problems for the customer that you may need to rectify.
