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Pro-active Apologies

3 July, 2007 - General Business - 5 Comments

When you’re dealing with customers in a progressive environment, things are going to go wrong. Whether your name is Smith or Sugar, Thompson or Trump, there will be problems and your customers will make you well aware of them. With those problems comes responsibility. A responsibility to recognise and fix any issues that arise. A responsibility to communicate with your customers, and a responsibility to apologise!

Think back to the last time something went belly up which affected your customers and which wasn’t their fault. Did you fix the problem and get on with business, or did you apologise, fix the problem, and apologise again?

I’m seeing an ever growing trend of businesses doing the former. Sure, fixing the problem is what I really want, but to be a great business you need to far exceed your customers expectations. To do that, you need to learn how to turn a negative in to a positive. The first step is to apologise!

Here are my steps for turning a negative in to a positive.

1. Apologise to your customer - Customers appreciate honesty. Accept your mistake and give them a firm apology.
2. Fix the problem - If it’s going to take a while to fix, keep your customer up to date
3. The Future - Your customer will be pleased to see you have made changes to make sure the same problem doesn’t occur in future. Tell them what you have done to prevent future problems
4. Apologise… again - Yes, it was your fault. Apologise… again

Do that and you’re customer is likely to go away as happy as they were before the problem occurred or if you really handled it well, they will go away even happier.

Of course, if you can work a problem (your fault or not) so your customer goes away even happier than they were previously, then they are going to truly appreciate the effort you went to. Take a recent support ticket that came in to our helpdesk. We (my Web hosting company) had a slight server glitch on Sunday night. As a result, one of our customers databases stopped working. He requested a restore from our latest backup (we keep daily backups of his account). Of course, I knew that would mean he would lose some of the data that was created between the time the backup was created and the time the database problem arose. So, we manually fixed the database problem rather than restoring his account. My customers response?

“You just made my day. No loss was more than I hoped for.”

While I was doing my research for this blog entry, I came across a few examples of companies who are trying their best to keep their customers happy in the inevitable problematic times. Southwest Airlines, for example, now have a dedicated department that monitors flight delays and sends a printed apology to the customers caught in the delays, sometimes including flight vouchers…. before the customer even has a chance to write a complaint. Now that’s service!

Accept your mistakes. Apologise for your mistakes. Go above and beyond the call of duty to far exceed your customers expectations!

Have you ever been impressed with an attempt to far exceed your expectations? What was the response from your own customers when you made the extra effort?

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Posted on 3 July, 2007 by Jamie Harrop
Filed Under General Business |

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