Recently my wife picked up dinner for 4 on the way home from work. We had ordered online from Swiss Chalet (Canadian Rotisserie chicken franchise). Swiss Chalet is known for their dipping sauce, which is included with every signature meal.

When she arrived home, we discovered that the “special sauce” was not included in the order.

I called the order desk to report this lapse and the conversation went something like this.

Someone once said…

“99% customer satisfaction is meaningless when your customer is in that lone 1%.”

In my speeches I talk about making NO MISTAKES! But, is that realistic? I don’t think so. “No mistakes” is a goal. Making mistakes is part of life and business. It is how the mistake is handled that makes the difference. Here is the goal. If you have a mistake – and hopefully it isn’t very often – you not only fix it, but give the customer a renewed confidence to continue
to do business with you. It is about “recovery.”

I don’t know many people who enjoy customer complaints. But more of us should because they offer us wonderful opportunities to improve how we do our jobs and keep more customers coming back.

Today’s podcast is all about how to handle customer complaints and turn them into more loyal customers. We talk about 5 steps anyone can use when dealing with complaints. And we review several quick tips to impress our customers.

Enjoy the show!

In the business of customer service training and improvement, we talk about being honest and open with our customers. This is important. It builds trust and improves communications with our customers.

But sometimes  people take honesty too far. Sometimes it does more harm than good. Recently,  Paul Simon (one of my readers) shared some glaring examples of this:

“The customer service rep said she’d left early the day before.” (Explaining why she didn’t call him back sooner.)

Too often when a company (or person) fails at customer service, they run from the failure. They never return to the “scene of the crime”. I understand why. Most of us would rather move on to future successes than be reminded of past failures. But the best customer service companies take their failures head on. They fix them and they learn from them.

Here is your Daily Dose of Amazing Service:

Encourage feedback from your customers

And here are some additional thoughts on this topic…

Direct, honest feedback from our customers is among the most valuable information a business can have. Yet most employees treat feedback like the H1N1 virus. They hope they don’t get it and they’d really like to have a vaccination against it.

Not all feedback is negative. But it’s all

Every now and then you’ll have a customer who disagrees with one of your policies. No matter what the policy is, don’t justify or defend it from your company’s point of view.

For example, maybe your service department has a fee for inspecting the products you sell. And unless it’s covered by warranty, the customer has to pay the inspection fee. If the customer balks at the fee, don’t justify the fee by saying: “Our technician needs to get paid for his time.”

“Every employee who deals with clients must have the authority to handle complaints.”

-Carl Sewell
Author of:  Customers For Life: How To Turn That One-Time Buyer Into a Lifetime Customer

Logically we know when customers complain, they’re giving us useful information. But emotionally we don’t like to hear it. Especially since some customers tend to be a little rough about how they deliver their feedback. And employees get tired of being beat up by customers, all the while knowing nothing will be done to prevent future complaints of the same kind.

But Frank’s boss (above) got it

Here is your Daily Dose of Amazing Service:

Remember and share customer feedback

And here are some additional thoughts on this topic…

Most companies (not all, sadly) have policies and procedures to handle customer feedback. But very few do a good job keeping track of feedback from customers and then doing something useful with it.

Like any information, customer feedback has no value if it’s ignored. I don’t mean

I’m a regular reader of Not Always Right, a blog where employees post funny (and sometimes educational) customer service stories. Recently they posted this: