The Apology and Forgiveness:
Regaining Customer Trust When Things Go Wrong
It is undeniable that at some point, your business will suffer a failure that disappoints customers.
The measure of a company is defined in these moments.
Customers see your true color at these times more than any others. How you explain, react, remove the pain, and take accountability for your actions signals loud and clear – your sentiment toward customers, and the collective ‘heart’ of your organization.
These are emotional situations. For customers, you are either sincere in your efforts, or you’re not. And they can immediately sniff out the difference.
Follow these seven points for how to prepare, react and recover from the inevitable. Three high-profile customer experiences illustrate their importance and how to execute on them.
- Menu Foods - the manufacturer of wet dog and cat food sold by the millions under private label brands at major stores such as Petco and Walmart. They have been trying to recover with customers since March 2007 when it was discovered that some of their wet cat and dog food was produced with adulterated wheat gluten. Beloved family pet deaths and multitudes of sick dogs and cats are being attributed to this situation.
- Jet Blue - their customer experience meltdown began with a winter 2007 snowstorm and ended up canceling 1,096 flights, and stranding thousands of passengers, flight attendants and pilots.
- Con Edison’s New York City customers experienced a 10-day power outage in the summer of 2006.
If I had the ear of these company executives; here are the tips for recovery I’d pass along:
- Put as much forethought into planning customer experience recovery as you do planning IT and natural disaster recovery. Inventory the potential scenarios. Determine how your organization will engage across the silos or operating areas to swiftly spring into action. What are the early warning signals to tip off a potential crisis? Who are the cross-company members of a “customer recovery” unit to brainstorm solutions? Are you nimble enough to spring into action, identify the issue, plan a recovery and implement within a day? How about within hours? You should be. That’s what your customers expect, and deserve.
One of the most widely criticized elements of the Menu Foods situation was that it took them so long to acknowledge and respond. The first precautionary recall announcement was made on March 16. It wasn’t until March 23rd that they got their call centers in gear and began contacting customers. Likewise, when the New York City utility Con Edison experienced a 10-day power outage last summer, CEO Kevin Burke didn’t emerge with either explanation, apology or plan for the first few days of the outage.
The better you are in your customers’ eyes, the more swiftly they expect you to respond. Jet Blue missed an opportunity to immediately get back on track to deliver the service their customers had come to expect because there was not a robust operational contingency plan to address the challenges created with that storm. - A-p-o-l-o-g-i-z-e. Be humble. Jet Blue had the advantage in their situation because of their service record and history; they began in good emotional stead with their customers. David Neeleman, Jet Blue’s CEO said he felt "mortified" and "humiliated and began to take action immediately. Neeleman exercised even greater recently when he stepped aside as CEO to hand the operations leadership over to Dave Barger, who he said was greater prepared to lead that side of the business.
- Work from a position of "humanity" to connect with customers. Empathize, put yourself in their shoes, and make sure they know you care. Menu foods missed a great opportunity here. People want to see a dog and cat food company show great empathy for the pet-ownership emotional connection. This is an opportunity to embrace and guide their customers through this tough time with action and humanity. Customers, however, appear to be experiencing an orchestrated set of actions that seem to have gone through extensive legal reviews before being released for public consumption.
- Turn "recovery" into an opportunity that says to your customers "who else" would respond this way? For example; why don’t airlines have a contingency plan to transform delays during spring and winter break (when families are forced to spend long periods of time waiting in airports) into unexpected experiences? Imagine families’ reactions when they experience airline employees giving activities and snacks to the kids? Imagine the number of people who would recommend the company based on this investment low on cash commitment but high on the empathy meter?
What about changing the approach to the service desk in these emergencies? Get rid of the queue that angry and disgruntled customers have to stand in. Have roaming agents with laptops helping. Make it simpler and easier - don't make customers beg to get rebooked.
In these circumstances, there is nothing that takes the place of a voice on the other end of the line. This is not the time to cut back on staff. Menu Foods’ website directs customers to the standard FAQ's section in the recall part of the Web site. And when high call volumes meant many customers didn’t get through on phone lines, customers were told what times were best to call -- when the volumes were lower.
Proactively reach out to customers. Contact customers actively, and have executives be a part of this process. They need to have the voice of the customer in their ear to inspire the right next steps.
Quickly - and I mean very quickly - give customers an apology gesture. This can vary anywhere from a free ticket to a list of options that your frontline have available to give during these times - but don't make customers beg for this. - Know which customers have been affected by the situation by customer segment. This is important to understand the potential impact on your business and to gauge your recovery effort. If your best customers are affected, you can bet they’re waiting for an acknowledgement from you. They’ll want to know what extra steps you’re taking to make sure they remain your customer. This is a seemingly simple action, but most companies don’t think to segment and reach out to customers by segment. Make everyone 'whole' - but use this information to inform how much additional outreach should be done to retain the most important asset of your business: your loyal and profitable customers.
- Communicate frequently, actively and passionately. Find an active way in the media to be out there and communicate directly to customers about what is happening, where they can get help, and most importantly, what is being done to fix the situation.
- Aggressively make the changes necessary to ensure that this does not happen again. Think Tylenol. Their response was immediate, impassioned, active, extensive and appropriate. They experienced a horrible situation for their brand, but because of their response have made an indelible mark on the hearts and minds of consumers throughout the world.
Making the Sincere Apology Part of Your Company DNA
At Southwest Airlines, Fred Taylor Jr. has the formal title of Senior Manager of Proactive Customer Communications. His informal title? Chief Forgiveness Officer. He spends his 12-hour workdays finding out how Southwest disappointed its customers. He then fires off homespun letters of apology and "touches" to ease the situation. Bully for Southwest for doing this because, well, it's the right thing to do. Our moms told us when you hurt someone, intentionally or not, you apologize.
When I was at Lands' End, just like any other company, we had mishaps from time to time. These became the times that the culture shined through even more. For example; once we shipped thousands of towels to customers then found later in the quality review process that they might have been faulty. Without waiting for the customers to contact us, we sent every single one of those customers a new towel. And a letter that said something like: “The towel we originally sent you may have been faulty. We’re not sure, but we just inspected some that were and wanted to make sure that you’ve got a good towel. So here’s another one from us to you. Don’t bother returning the first one we sent – we just want you to be happy with us.”
Another time, we hand-wrote notes that said we were sorry, why the issue occurred and how we had fixed the situation. We wanted to have a bit of fun with this -- so we actually put in crushed egg shells in the envelope. You know, egg on our face and all of that. It was funny -- it was, well, very Lands' End at that time. We did all of this because it was true to our nature. And we apologized because we cared -- truly. And this is why Southwest Airlines does what they do - their actions are informed from the right place.
Other airlines are realizing that culpability is important and recently they are saying they’re sorry in great numbers. Great, that's step one. But anyone who says they are sorry has got to mean it. Step two is taking action to make the pain stop.
Don’t jump on the apology bandwagon if you can’t do it right.
Start with sincerely caring, communicate what happened, explain how you will help customers and do it swiftly. Begin with engaging the right group of people to create a contingency plan so things just click into place when the inevitable occurs.
Remember when you were a kid and your brother or sister punched you or pinched you? Sure they apologized. But it didn’t mean much because a) your parent was usually prompting the words, and b) you’d been apologized to many times before just to be punched again another day. This is what we put our customers through when we deliver a hollow apology and then don’t fix the problem causing the issue. You’ll likely get credit when you apologize once for a problem. But when it repeats, another letter for the same problem won’t cut it. Your currency with customers and their trust in you will dwindle.
Take apologizing to your customers seriously and do it right. Don’t put your customers through the emotional roller-coaster of having a bad experience and then receiving a hollow apology. The measure of your company is determined in these moments. And your customers are keeping score.
About the Author
Jeanne Bliss is the founder of CustomerBLISS (www.customerbliss.com ); a consulting and coaching company helping corporations connect their efforts to yield improved customer growth. She is a world-wide speaker on the subject. Jeanne spent twenty-five years at Lands’ End, Microsoft, Allstate, Coldwell Banker, and Mazda corporations as the leader for driving customer focus and customer growth. Her best-selling books are; Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action, and I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions for Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad. Go to www.customerbliss.com to get a reality check audit on your customer commitment and ability to make customers an asset of your business.
References:
http://www.Forbes.com
Crisis Management: JetBlue's Survival School Tara Weiss, 02.20.07, 4:45 PM ET
First appeared in Chief Executive Magazine:
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