The Big Fix
Bad things happen in good organisations. Here’s how to get it right when it all goes wrong.
By Philip Stanley MIH, General Manager, Hospitality Assured at the Institute of Hospitality
Contrary to popular opinion customers do not expect you, as a hospitality provider, to get everything right every time they come into contact with you. What customers do want is to know that you genuinely care about them. It’s a pity really because customers have, in many cases, a much clearer idea of the definition of what hospitality is than those who work in the industry.
The result of customer service, good or bad, is always emotionally felt by the recipient, which lends a clue to why it is so important to train frontline team members to have emotional intelligence. This emotional intelligence becomes absolutely critical when attempting service recovery.
I have trained many customer service courses and when I ask delegates what they want to get out of the course, invariably “dealing with conflict” is somewhere near the top of the list. A cursory Google search will throw up a myriad of hints, tips, courses and seminars for dealing with angry, hostile and or abusive customers. However, I would earnestly contend that giving solutions on how to calm angry customers to frontline staff is a tiny part of the remedy.
Offering an apology and some compensation, and assuming all is well, is particularly damaging if nothing is done to address the underlying problem which virtually guarantees similar complaint in the future. The solution lies in the recognition that there are three key stakeholders: customers, managers in charge of the process, and frontline staff who deal with complaints.
Customers
The customer must feel that the organisation has a procedure that deals promptly with failure to deliver the promised service. A promise you have made (whether explicitly or not) has been broken; it’s not enough to know that the problem has been resolved. The customer needs to know how the failure occurred and what you are going to do to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Managers
The key for managers is how they learn from service failures. Without processes and procedures in place this learning will simply not happen – processes for taking early action, recording complaints and keeping customers regularly informed of progress relating to their complaints, all need to be in place. Service recovery cannot be left to the emotional intelligence of the frontline employee who happens to be dealing with that complaint! Most managers will concur that customer feedback is important and that negative feedback provides one with a fantastic opportunity to turn a customer around. So, how can it be that many organisations impede service recovery by rewarding low complaint rates, and then assuming that a decline in the number of reports indicates customer satisfaction is improving?!
The Employee
How many times was I, as a junior receptionist, left on the desk at 10:30pm to deal with customers who we had overbooked and had to send to some far-flung hotel, offering them free breakfast and a bottle of wine with their meal! Compare that with my recent experience flying back from the Caribbean with Virgin – the flight was delayed by a day and so, of course, I was given a hotel for the night with free food, taxi fare and phone calls. What I also received on check-in the next day was sincere apologies from all the Virgin team members I came into contact with and 12, 500 complimentary air miles. Now I admit, spending an extra night in St Lucia does not constitute a holiday disaster but, even so, it was the reassurance that there was a process in place accompanied by sincere employees that won me over.
The simple fact is that if you don’t support your frontline staff and give them the tools and empowerment to solve customers’ problems, then they won’t! In extreme cases an employee will unwittingly sabotage your organisation, complaining to customers about the fact that once more they have been put in a position where they have to deal with upset customers.
Fixing breakdowns in service has an enormous impact on customer satisfaction, repeat business, and, ultimately, profits and growth. Customers judge companies on how they deal with the inevitable service breakdowns. We need to look at these as an opportunity and not, as is so often the case, a disaster. Indeed a customer can be more delighted by a skillful service recovery than by service that was failure-free to start with.
Philip has over 20 years of experience in the hospitality industry occupying a variety of senior sales roles, more recently as Head of Sales and Business Development for Travelodge. Philip has developed and delivered numerous training courses on customer service and sales to clients in and out of the hospitality industry including KPMG, Shell UK and British Airways.
For more information on the Hospitality Assured Service Standard contact Philip on 020 8661 4916 or e-mail Philip.stanley@instituteofhospitality.org.
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