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Unhappy customers are a challenge for any company. If your customer leaves unsatisfied, they are unlikely to give you any repeat business. The customer relationship you have established goes out the window, and you’ll have to start building customer loyalty with someone else. But what if you could turn that unhappy customer into a happy one instead? That’s what service recovery is all about. Service recovery, sometimes also called customer service recovery, is the process of problem-solving to satisfy your customer.
Service recovery strategies aim to measure the quality of services that an organization offers against its customer expectations across five metrics – Empathy, Reliability, Assurance, Responsiveness, and Tangibles.
Can you distill service recovery into just a few simple steps? There are several different approaches to achieving service recovery. Some techniques like Micah Solomon’s “MAMA” framework, or the LEAD framework used in healthcare, simplify it into four steps. Other common methods suggest 5 or 6 different steps.
The service recovery process is used to help companies to recover unsatisfied customers and turn them into promoters of the company, This is done by determining and solving the problem while apologizing for the customer service failure. A strong service recovery program is able to turn frustrated and resentful, customers into satisfied, loyal ones.
Customer recovery is a strategy that companies use in response to service failures. The purpose of these actions is to turn disgruntled customers into satisfied ones. Companies that do this well have a procedure that helps them process unresolved customer complaints, while also making the customer feel positive about the support experience.
Listen to the customer’s complaint and identify the service failure. Repeat the issue to the customer to make sure that you understand their expectations and why they weren’t met. Flag the issue in a database if it reoccurs with other customers.
Show empathy to clients by apologizing for the problem. Customers want to be heard and want their issues to be acknowledged. Effective complaint handling means allowing the customer to vent their criticism, even if they are impolite. If the customer is still unhappy, offer the dissatisfied customer something to compensate for the trouble if possible.
The goal of service recovery is to achieve customer satisfaction. Find a solution to the issue that is satisfactory for both you and the customer. Once you identify it, take steps to implement this solution. When possible, help guide the customer through the problem resolution processes, so they can be autonomous in the future. Prepare a list of suitable solutions for recurring problems ahead of time.
Follow-up with the customer to ensure their satisfaction with the solution. Look into past customer interactions and see if you can identify a pattern with the same issue. Update your processes to avoid this problem if possible. Have a system in place to record feedback every time customers complain. Create training programs built around this feedback.
Once the situation has been diffused and the issue resolved, encourage the customer to continue to provide feedback directly. When companies show that they value customer opinions and needs, people feel respected. As a result, customers will feel more positive towards a company.
Customer service employees are your front line workers. They are the most involved in your customer interactions and understand the customer expectations and most frequent complaints. So how should you elaborate a service recovery strategy?
Take some first steps to intervene by creating a service recovery strategy:
• Assemble your customer service representatives with their managers.
• Distribute a survey to customer-facing employees and accumulate data on common issues they encounter daily.
• Ask them if there have been any specific calls that come to mind.
• Have the manager go through past interactions, find out what went wrong, and use it as an example.
• Set up new procedures and a knowledge base to pre-empt these issues going forward.
Training centered around the four steps mentioned earlier is key to achieving effective service recovery. Create a program based on customer feedback to train employees using the collected examples. You may want to use customer service training videos or create your own to help prepare your employees for commonly recurring issues.
Knowledge management is central to the prevention component of your service recovery strategy. Use a centralized knowledge base to organize training-related information. This way, your employees can access information at any time to refresh their minds on procedures. You can include any training videos or examples. Integrate any flagged issues into this database.
Try as we might to provide perfect service, problems will arise. We’re only human, after all. You can try and pre-empt service recovery by avoiding conflicts, but ultimately it will happen. Any time you have customer complaints, it is time to implement service recovery. If you embrace it, this process will help you retain customers and leave them happier than customers who never experienced a problem. That’s called the service recovery paradox. Don’t go out of your way to create problems, but realize that each case of dissatisfaction is an opportunity.
Service recovery is an important part of improving the customer experience for those who didn’t have a positive interaction. Integrating service recovery into your customer service strategy can boost customer retention. Building a positive customer relationship is one of the most critical things a company must do. Through personalized experiences and empathetic support agents, customers will feel loyalty and a connection to your business.
In healthcare, service recovery is just as important as any other industry. Patients with ill health need special care paid to their concerns. In “Best Practices for Basic and Advanced Skills in Health Care Service Recovery: A Case study of a Re-Admitted Patient,” a team of researchers investigates the case of a patient re-admitted to a hospital. The study identifies the importance of patients as “the eyes and ears” to identify problems. The researchers suggest creating a system to implement changes based on patient feedback. While healthcare is an industry with its unique issues, the approach to customer service and service recovery remains the same.
Customer retention is critical to your bottom line. Repeat customers bring in more business over time. A 2017 Microsoft survey showed that most customers worldwide ranked customer service as very important to brand loyalty. Making small concessions to fix customer issues is worth the cost in the long run. A bad customer experience can spread by word of mouth, costing you potential customers! The service recovery paradox is another strong argument for improving the service experience for your customers.
There are several benefits to integrating service recovery into your customer experience strategy. Some advantages include the following:
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Reduce customer churn
• Create brand ambassadors
• Developing a knowledge base
• Improving agent and customer self-service
• Troubleshoot service failures
Now that you’ve understood the benefits of service recovery, why not take your customer service a step further? ViiBE offers multiple solutions that prioritize your customer’s time while empowering your employees with a variety of powerful tools. ViiBE’s expertise call routing will put customers in touch with the right person from the start. ViiBE’s video chat puts the customer face to face with a representative and facilitates communicating empathy. The ticketing solution organizes past customer interactions under one ticket. It integrates into ViiBE’s knowledge management system to ensure your employees are always up to date and fully prepared to tackle any service recovery challenges.
Customer service is a crucial part of business. When a service failure happens, service recovery is just as important. Ignoring the customer’s needs has serious consequences. On the other hand, investments in effective service recovery have significant benefits for both you and your customers. ViiBE’s solutions will complement your service recovery operations and improve your customer relations.
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