What do you do when your customer service delivery somehow goes wrong, and you need to gain customer loyalty as fast as possible?
Let’s face it. No matter how exceptional you think your services are, you can’t rule out the chances of your customers getting a negative experience.
However, your response to this is what makes a massive difference, and that’s where service recovery comes in.
So, what exactly is service recovery, and why do you need it for your business? You’ll have the answers to these questions and more by the time you’re done reading this.
What service recovery entails
According to the Zendesk CX Trends report, 80% of customers will leave after a bad customer service experience from a company.
Many companies have lost huge clients because they were poor in handling a crisis that involved the satisfaction of their client base. Service recovery is necessary to ensure that you’re not on this list.
It’s all about spotting those lapses in your customer management and implementing a process that helps your brand recover from a poor customer service experience.
With this, the goal is to get your customer’s loyalty once again and increase the chances of sticking by you through thick and thin.
The best customer service recovery example in any industry, including hotel and restaurant services, is in responding as fast as possible to fix the errors.
The more you delay, the higher the chances of a further breakdown in communication that could eventually result in the loss of both current and potential new clients.
However, the truth is you the fastest reaction times to a customer’s negative experience occurs when you have prepared beforehand for such an event.
So, how do you know your service recovery has been successful? Well, a successful service recovery plan:
- Increases positive customer attention and patronage because customers buy from brands that they can count on
- Restores customer loyalty and trust because they trust that your business will address their needs
- Drives more brand awareness because repeat customers serve as your brand advocate
This is possible when you have mastered the art of softening the blow of a disaster by equipping your frontline with informed employees trained to assist customers.
Over the years, several researchers have launched investigations into the world of service recovery and how businesses can benefit from this.
The results of these researches have always been the same: service recovery can improve client retention.
What is the service recovery paradox?
When your service recovery strategies are carried out effectively, a direct result is the service recovery paradox, where your customers regard your business in high esteem after rectifying their problems.
According to several marketing studies, customers are more likely to be loyal and plan to use a business’ services again after the satisfactory handling of their problems than those who haven’t experienced any problem.
Therefore, you can take advantage of a bad situation to improve your customer service and build more customer loyalty, even better than before the problem ensued.
However, you should note that customers are more willing to forgive and forget smaller issues like an overcharge than bigger issues like a major security breach.
One of the best examples of a service recovery paradox is offering a discount after a poor shopping experience, and the customer becomes more loyal to your brand.
Best customer service recovery examples
So, how do you know exactly where you need to implement a customer service recovery plan?
Well, these examples of service failure and recovery will give you a clear idea.
It’s no secret that social media has become the perfect platform to call out brands and have millions of people sharing their opinions all at once.
It’s so easy to get lost in a sea of complaints as it keeps getting shared with many others. One moment you’re responding to a few messages, and the next moment, you’re sitting right at the center of a trending conversation and drowning in negative responses.
This can be prevented effectively when a brand is already prepared with a working customer service recovery plan or implementing one of the many service recovery examples via an empathetic email and you can find a simple but effective crisis management guide here that can help in this regard.
One of the best service recovery examples for a restaurant is to implement proactive service recovery when a customer leaves poor feedback on a form to indicate dissatisfaction.
This is common when you don’t meet the expectation of a customer, such as a tasteless meal on the menu or having them wait for a long time before someone attends to their order.
Your brand implicate this with a digital or manual form on tables that can easily be filled in less than a minute so customers don’t feel like it is a burden and ensure that each poor review is addressed from the customer’s perspective because it is easy to get defensive when a bad review is viewed from a brand’s perspective.
Negative reviews on third-party websites
You can’t have as much control as you want over the reviews that customers share online, especially on third-party websites like Trustpilot or Yelp.
Therefore, negative customer service can lead to a client leaving a really low score on these websites and increase the risk of running your brand down.
A great example of service recovery is to follow up on the customers in cases where they have filed a complaint to resolve the issues that may lead to a poor review and a simple rating card both on and offline can also nip any issue in the bud.
Importance of service recovery
Better customer retention
Most businesses can’t thrive or have a long lifespan when they don’t build solid customer relationships.
This is backed up by Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report which states that as much as 50% of customers have cut off business ties with companies due to poor customer service experiences.
Knowing this, you can encourage a culture of transparency in your company which ensures that all your customer’s needs are met even after a drop in the standard of your services as this will result in accountability on the part of the staff at your brand or company.
Reduced business costs
Since your customer service recovery plan would involve offering assistance to customers as early as possible, and mostly virtually, this would reduce business costs significantly as you won’t have to spend or allocate any budget to deal with bad press when a customer complaint goes viral.
Reduced negative reputation
Your brand’s Reputation is incredibly important because it gives your business the credibility that it needs even before a customer walks in the door.
Therefore, implementing some of the service recovery examples mentioned earlier would get you in the right direction towards improving customer satisfaction and getting positive reviews.
While it’s hard to get a perfect online reputation regardless of how great your services are, you need to put mechanisms in place to reduce negative reviews to the barest minimum (through great service delivery) as it can help you attract customers and also carry out effective service recovery strategies as this will help in addressing cases of bad services before they escalate.
One of the best service recovery strategies involves linking up with a wifi marketing platform like Beambox, which ensures that your guests enjoy a seamless internet connection, gives you access to important marketing data and nurtures loyal customers because our All-in-One guest wifi tool is specifically designed to deliver on this and ensure that your business thrives in more ways than one.
