Making up & Making Right
Things go wrong. It’s a fact of life, particularly where humans or human interaction are involved. When something goes wrong for customers in our business, our job is to make it right and to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Making things right after we make a mistake is just as (some might say more) important as getting it right first time. Every time we do right by our customers, we make a deposit into their ‘emotional bank account’. Every time we make a mistaken, it means a withdrawal from the same ’emotional bank account’.
Now for the problem: withdrawals tend to be larger than deposits. Our customers ‘expect’ us to get it right (that’s what they pay for, after all). As many Customer Service Reps have told me, ‘They never notice all the things you get right, but the tiniest little mistake sets them off.’ That’s the emotional withdrawal at play.
People don’t come to work wondering how they can mess up a customer’s day. It happens all too easily: a reply that a customer perceives as rude/abrupt, a ‘clerical error’, the last in a ‘series of unfortunate events’ that has happened to this customer over a period of time, a ‘cultural misunderstanding’ – anything can act as a ‘trigger.
How we make up is more important than getting it right sometimes. How do we:
- Say “sorry”?
- Make it up?
- Keep them loyal?
It’s difficult sometimes - we may not WANT/LIKE the customer (particularly if they’re always rude, demanding, time-consuming).
Social media & reviews from users only add to the mix. One unhappy reviewer can undo all the good work of the other 99 happy ones. For someone looking from the ‘emotional deposit’ point of view, that can be bad for business.
Making up (correcting the error quickly) is easy. Recognising and then resolving the error or problem quickly goes a long way to helping. ‘Making right’ is an art and not always easy. Regaining a customer’s trust takes longer. If, however, we’ve made enough emotional deposits in the past, they’ll be more forgiving. If not, we’ll have a much harder road to travel.
‘Making up’ is keeping business by ensuring the mistake doesn’t happen again.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.
Labels: Crisis Management, Customer Care, Leadership, Selling
Lining up Our Ducks
I’ve experienced a number of occasions where “someone” (a company, a government, an individual) announced some marvellous breakthrough, development, product or service only to see themselves let down by something in “the system” not working or happening when it should have happened.
On many occasions, the sad truth is that something goes wrong – the “one thing” we fail to consider.
Announcing is one thing, making good is another. The more complex or involved the product, innovation, service or other we’re bringing into the world, the more likely something can go wrong. Our ‘advanced’ technology only makes things worse when the internet fails at the critical moment, a virus hits our systems, the programme crashes or some vital worker isn’t available due to illness or accident.
I learnt a highly useful set of questions from one of the world’s oil giants which it asks itself (and trains its employees to ask) to maintain the highest standards of safety it can. These are:
- What could go wrong?
- What could cause it to go wrong?
- What can be done to prevent it?
We could apply this to any announcement that we make. For example, if we’re:
- Relying on customers to register on a website using a QR code, have we checked that the link from code to website and listing all work?
- Telling customers to call a hotline, are there sufficient lines in and enough trained operators to answer calls?
- Announcing a price drop, do all our sales staff know about the drop, ho long it lasts and any impact on warranty?
Every project should have a checklist of what could go wrong and who is accountable for making sure that particular item is checked. It doesn’t stop that “one-thing-we-didn’t-consider” happening.
The widespread use of social media means that, if we do get things wrong, the market will know in a very short space of time. If we’ve made a genuine effort to identify what could reasonably go wrong (and just missed a thousand-to-one item), we can at least avoid accusations of negligence. The solution then is to have a team in place to sort the problem as quickly as possible.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.
Labels: Crisis Management, Customer Care, Selling, Teamwork
Ignoring Problems Doesn’t (Always) Work
Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like people didn’t care, or where you decided yourself that you just ‘couldn’t handle’ yet another problem people came to you with? I have.
My job as a leader is twofold:
- Help my team be all they can be
- Create the conditions for them to succeed in this
Life doesn’t always cooperate - I get it - but leaders are there to support. This doesn’t mean always handing the answer to team members on a plate, as I’ve written previously.
The skill, I find, is striking the ‘right’ balance between coaching and spoon-feeding. Take Napoleon Bonaparte: when his generals wrote to him about a problem with which they needed help, he used to ignore the letter for six months. If he heard no more, they had clearly solved the problem. If they wrote again, perhaps it was serious.
Communications in Napoleon’s time meant that letters could take a long time to reach their recipient. Today, communications technology means we can reach out to someone halfway round the world and talk to them in real time. People now set aside “disconnect time” when they turn off (or at least remove from sight and hearing) all mobile phones and their computers so that they can ‘decompress’. 24/7 technology and ‘working from home’ during the COVID pandemic mean that the boundaries between ‘personal’ and ‘work’ time have more or less merged.
Back to Napoleon; ignoring genuine problems isn’t good strategy. It doesn’t make them go away; it creates others - maybe worse – and frustration amongst team members. Ignoring that our job as leaders is to develop our team to become leaders themselves means we will continue to foster a cohort of ‘needy’ teams who can’t live without us. Whilst it may appeal to certain egos to think they are ‘indispensable’ to their team, it means more trouble in the long run.
So, my problem is the balance between keeping things going, and coaching others to take more decisions themselves. It’s an art we never cease to learn as we progress as leaders.
I try to divide problems into:
- What they should be able to solve (or at least provide recommendations to solve);
- What could turn into a disaster if I don’t intervene.
If it’s the former, I use the ‘What Else?’ approach. If the latter, we work together to develop a solution.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.
Labels: Crisis Management, Leadership, Productivity, Strategy, Teamwork
