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    Service Recovery Skills: Customer Service Training Series, #7
    Service Recovery Skills: Customer Service Training Series, #7
    Service Recovery Skills: Customer Service Training Series, #7
    Ebook132 pages1 hour

    Service Recovery Skills: Customer Service Training Series, #7

    By Kimberly Peters

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    About this ebook

    What do you do when problems occur? How do you respond to difficult or negative situations?

    The way we respond to problems or negative situations can mean the difference between losing a valuable customer or creating a customer for life!

    Smart businesses look at customer service problems as opportunities. Opportunities to show the customer just how good you are and how important the customer is. This is the perfect way to show your customers that you care and value them.

    But it is surprising how many people and businesses make simple mistakes that cost them customers and dollars. Mistakes they make without even realizing it. Mistakes that cause customers to walk out the door and possibly never return.

    But the great news is that you can easily correct those mistakes and create the very best response to any kind of problem. Service Recovery Skills takes you every step of the way and will help you show your customers just how much you care.

    Service Recovery Skills is an easy to read manual which requires no special education or knowledge. Anyone can read and understand the content. It is designed to get results fast!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Customer Service Training Institute
    Release dateJul 23, 2015
    ISBN9781516353101
    Service Recovery Skills: Customer Service Training Series, #7

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      Service Recovery Skills - Kimberly Peters

      What is Service Recovery?

      Service Recovery is the procedure you use to recover from a situation where things went wrong and the customer has suffered. It could be due to a defective product, a missed appointment, or even an honest misunderstanding. Whatever the reason behind the problem, your relationship with the customer, or other party, has changed for the worse. Service Recovery is the efforts expended to repair and rebuild that relationship.

      We have all experienced some form of service recovery in our own lives. Remember the time the bakery threw in a few extra pastries because you said the last cake you bought wasn't very good? That's one form of service recovery. We have all been given something off our next purchase because of a problem or inconvenience we just experienced. That's service recovery. Anything that is done to placate the customer after a problem is a form of service recovery.

      As you will soon see, service recovery can take many forms. It can be something as simple as a follow-up phone call or as complicated as renegotiation of contract! Whatever form it takes, it is service recovery!

      Why is Service Recovery Important?

      In some cases, problems drive customers away. If we don't take steps to minimize or prevent customers from leaving, we run the risk of losing so many customers that our businesses will ultimately fail!

      Service recovery techniques help heal the wound to the customer - business relationship. Since it is impossible to eliminate the causes for all troubles, we must respond quickly and efficiently when trouble does strike it's ugly head.

      Time is of the essence in service recovery. For efforts to be effective, they must begin as soon after the problem is uncovered as possible. Waiting days, weeks, or months later greatly reduces your effectiveness. Service recovery skills must be implemented quickly.

      Service recovery is also has an important financial benefit also. Since it can cost five to ten times more to get a new customer than it does to keep an existing one, service recovery skills do not cost money; they make money for the company!

      Another important reason for quality service recovery skills is that you have the opportunity to turn a bad situation into an opportunity. An opportunity to show your customers just how good you are. Those opportunities don't come along that often. If handled correctly, a problem can be turned into a positive experience that can give you a customer for life! That alone is reason enough to implement service recovery techniques!

      Stealth Service Recovery

      In order to be effective, service recovery must be invisible. Just like the Stealth Bomber, which can't be seen by radar, stealth service recovery cannot be obviously noticed by the customer. For example, if you missed an appointment, you would not tell your customer; I'm sorry we missed our appointment. In order to keep you from going to our competition we will give you a discount off our regular rate for service.

      That would seem crass to the customer. You would be much better off phrasing your comments like this: I'm sorry we missed our appointment. We realize you were inconvenienced and would like to extend a 50% discount to you to show our sincere apologies. This sounds much better doesn't it?

      Your service recovery techniques should be presented in such a way that the customer comes away from the experience appreciating the efforts made by your company to resolve the problem. If the experience is positive enough, you may gain a customer that will produce more positive word of mouth advertising than you could ever imagine!

      Example: My wife and I take our children to Walt Disney World every other year. We usually spend about ten days on the premises and have a wonderful time. One year, we booked a plan including admission tickets and hotel accommodations. We arrived late afternoon and wanted t see the last performance of the Electrical Parade before the parade went to Europe. Much to our dismay, no one had our tickets and the ticket offices were closed for the day. We were told to go to the park and explain our situation and see what could be worked out.

      We went to the park, explained our situation to the Customer Service person and he offered us 4 free passes for that night! Needless to say, we were very happy. Good customer service so far, right?

      When we returned home I wrote a letter stating how pleased we were with the way the incident was handled. I also stated that keeping ticket counters open in the hotel would have eliminated the frustration that we felt when we arrived. I did thank them again and mailed the letter.

      A couple of weeks later a letter arrived from the company. It contained a letter of apology and 4 seven day admission tickets worth approx. $750.00!! The note of explanation stated that they did not want any visitor to experience frustration when they came to their parks. The hoped we would use these tickets and come back to give them another chance! Needless to say, we were thrilled.

      A couple of weeks later we received another letter containing a check for the tickets that we purchased for our trip. I thought that there must have been a mistake and called their offices. I was told that there was no mistake. They had made an error that resulted in us having less than a wonderful experience and they wanted to refund our money!

      Needless to say, we were extremely impressed with the treatment we were given. It far exceeded anything we expected! We were so impressed that we went again the next year instead of waiting the extra year!

      This is a perfect example of excellent service recovery. For those of you that think this cost the company a lot of money, let's look at it from the company point of view:

      The largest expense was the cash refund. That came to about $750.00. That's a bottom line figure. The actual cost of the 4 free tickets? Since the parks would be open anyway and all the rides operating, the only actual cost of the tickets was the few pennies it cost to print them! Add a couple of dollars for postage and that's about it! With that in mind, let's take a look at what the company gained from their actions:

      We used the free tickets and went the next year. We probably spent $2,000.00 during our time there! That's income to the company they would not have had if we did not get the free tickets. I figure that we are about even now. Here's where the company really gets the benefit of their actions.

      Over the course of the last few years I have told countless family and friends about this story. I have used this example in seminars and printed material such as this publication. All this free publicity has been achieved by a simple, yet presented in an extremely effective manner, gesture of good faith by the company. It is impossible to figure the value of that kind of word of mouth advertising!

      The unique thing about the above example is that the service recovery was presented in such a way that we were drawn to return and give them a second chance. Not because we really deserved all we were given, but rather because we were made to feel that we really were appreciated by the company involved. We were being asked to give them another chance to let them shine. The best part of it all was that it was all wrapped up in a package that generated some

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