Imagine visiting a particular restaurant once a month. One fine day, you are denied entry despite having made a reservation. The staff informs you that the restaurant is booked out and they are unable to find your reservation. This experience is likely to change your perception of this place and you might reconsider your next visit. But as you make your way out, the manager walks up to you and offers you their best table. He also lets you know that your dinner is on the house, and that you can redeem a loyalty discount on your next visit. Impressed by this gesture, you forgive them for the negative experience you had a short while ago.
That is service recovery in action.
You went from frustration to delight because the restaurant went above and beyond to right a wrong. You may even become their loyal customer due to their effective service recovery program.
Note: Just after a customer has had a bad experience, the moment thereafter is your best opportunity to win back their loyalty. This is only possible if you implement the right service recovery strategy. This guide will answer all your questions about service recovery and more:
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- What is service recovery?
- Why is service recovery important?
- What is the service recovery paradox?
- What are the service recovery steps?
- What are the customer service recovery examples?
- What are the best practices in service recovery?
- How can Freshdesk make service recovery easy for your team?
What is Service Recovery?
Service recovery is a strategy adopted by service providers to appease customers who have had a bad service experience with your company, and help them recover from these service breakdowns. Service recovery efforts help dissatisfied customers overcome the hassle caused due to service failure by not just fixing the service problem, but exceeding customer expectations.
Having an effective service recovery plan adds to the robustness of your customer experience strategy. With approximately 31% of global consumers willing to pay more for a great customer service experience, you can carefully chart out a plan of action to overcome service failure scenarios and ensure flawless service delivery.
Why is service recovery important?
The modern marketplace is very competitive and about 56% of global consumers stop doing business with a brand or switch to a competitor due to a single bad customer service experience. [1] A service recovery program plays an integral role in converting customers into loyal champions.
When you are faced with unhappy customers because of a service failure, it’s better to have a good service recovery plan in place rather than just reacting to these situations on the go.
Here are a few benefits to creating and implementing a successful service recovery program:
#1 High and instant customer satisfaction
For a customer who’s just had a bad experience, if you can turn things around with wonderfully crafted service recovery, you can prevent a potential churn and offer instantaneous customer satisfaction. This satisfaction is usually higher and achieved much faster when compared to a regular customer. Not only this, service recovery becomes a great tool to create customer loyalty in a short period of time.
#2 Improved customer service experience
While you create your service recovery program, you can get hold of customer data to improve your existing customer experience strategy. A holistic service recovery program will help increase customer retention by appeasing unhappy customers. You’ll also be able to understand how your customer feels and the existing gaps in your customer service strategy, allowing you to improve your processes and quality of service delivery.
#3 Higher customer lifetime value
You can gain a larger share of wallet from loyal customers as they are more likely to repurchase or explore other offerings from the same company because they trust the brand. Loyal customers who turn into brand advocates because of a successful service recovery carry much higher lifetime value and become excellent brand ambassadors through word of mouth and social media mentions. This increases the market value significantly for customer-centric brands.
Now that you understand the benefits of service recovery, let’s learn more about the service recovery paradox and what it means for your team.
What is the Service Recovery Paradox?
Service recovery paradox is a phenomenon where you feel a higher level of satisfaction towards a company after a successful service recovery, compared to the level of satisfaction you would have felt if you never faced any problem in the first place.
Source
For example, you order food online, but delivery delays due to bad weather. To compensate for this service failure, the food aggregator refunds the amount for that meal and offers you a 50% discount on your next three orders. You’d be more inclined to become a loyal customer now than if your order had arrived on time.
What does this mean for your customer service team?
The service recovery paradox is a helpful indicator to guide you in the right direction when facing customer situations where service recovery is possible. With that in mind here are two things you can do to get a clearer picture of your next steps in service recovery:
#1 Figure out how your customer feels
To identify service recovery opportunities, it’s important to understand which of your customers are happy and which aren’t. Keeping track of metrics like CSAT and CES(Customer effort Score) can help you with that. These metrics will help you narrow down your list to a set of customers who can be won over through service recovery efforts.
#2 Prioritize issues for service recovery
It’s important to note that service recovery does not work for all types of customer issues. When an issue is critical and has caused major disruption for the customer, service recovery strategies will probably not work. In this case, you can only fix the problem and hope the relationship returns to normal. Issues that are minor indiscretions and cause low discomfort are easier to turn around. So prioritize your customer issues when planning your service recovery strategy.
Now that you know what Service Recovery is all about, why it’s important and how it can impact customer service, how do you make it a part of your service recovery strategy? While service recovery plans can vary based on the situation and type of customer, here are 3 steps you can take to prepare for those situations:
Service Recovery Steps
#1 Context setting and service recovery planning
Customers hate to explain themselves whenever they talk to an agent. When the customer has a problem and calls your support team, the agent receiving the complaint should have complete context of the issue, even if it’s the first time they are interacting with the customer.
Context setting speeds up your service recovery process. You can quickly and efficiently take action when every support agent has a complete context of customer problems. This information will also help you better plan your service recovery the next time you encounter similar customer problems. You can even follow up with your customers who weren’t satisfied with the solution provided to rectify the situation.
#2 Proactive customer support and anticipating customer issues
Based on the context gathered from customer issues, you can identify your customer needs and the patterns in your customer complaints. Use this information to try and anticipate any issues that could happen in the future. Proactively reach out and inform the customer of the problem and the solution, before they come to you.
For example, if you are an internet service provider and a customer complains of slow speed, you are bound to get similar complaints from other customers in the same area code. Delight your customers by proactively sending a message to each customer, telling them that you are working on the issue. If you want to go one step further, let them know when they can expect the services to be restored for their area or offer your dissatisfied customers some form of compensation like a free upgrade.
#3 Agent training and solution readiness
Service recovery plans are only as good as your best frontline employees. Train your agents on the steps they need to take to identify and address customer problems. It’s important to be empathetic to handle complex customer issues. Empower your agents to decide what’s right and do what’s necessary to make the customer happy.
It is also important to have your service recovery plans ready for execution. When you are able to anticipate problems and understand the range of customer issues, you should have the right fixes for those problems at your fingertips. If you train your agents well, they will know exactly what to do and would be equipped with the right solutions that contribute to effective service recovery efforts.
Once you ascertain how to create a service recovery plan and train your agents to follow through, you should also consider the customer service recovery examples to launch your service recovery program successfully.
Customer Service Recovery Examples
Here are 2 customer service recovery examples you can draw inspiration from:
#1 Southwest Airlines comes through for Adam Toporek
Adam Toporek, a thought leader in customer experience, shared an incident that he happened to be a part of, when flying on Southwest Airlines.[2] Even after paying $8 for in-flight Wi-Fi, he was unable to connect to the internet. Other passengers were facing the same issue so he raised the same to the flight attendant. After investigating the cause of this service failure, she regrettably announced that the Wi-Fi couldn’t be fixed. Since there was no access to email, there was no way of knowing if the $8 charge had gone through.
A few days later, he received an email from Southwest Airlines with an apology for the inconvenience caused and intimation of the refund of the $8 fee. This was a great example of the company extending proactive customer service after a bad experience, and doing what’s necessary to retain the customer as well.
#2 Zingerman’s on-point letter hits the sweet spot
Zingerman’s is a specialty deli in St. Ann Arbor, Detroit USA. [3] They are known for their signature baked delicacies. A customer who was organizing her parents’ anniversary celebration ordered a box of their cookies and brownies. Unfortunately, the big cookies and brownies were slightly crumbled when the package arrived.. They still tasted good, so the customer didn’t mind. Zingerman’s has a good customer feedback practice and duly sent a letter asking about the pastries to the customer. The customer replied that the cookies were tasty but they had crumbled when they arrived. They also added that they would try out another bakery that would be closer to their home the next time.
On receiving this feedback, Zingerman’s immediate response was to apologize for the damaged baked goods and offer a replacement sent directly to their address, even offering to have a personalized message given it was a special occasion. They also collect customer feedback on how they can improve this situation while sharing the feedback with upper management. Such service recovery efforts are appreciated by customers and reflect how much the company cares about its customers.
Best Practices in Service Recovery
Best practices give you a great starting point for your service recovery plans. Let’s dive deeper into the 4 best practices in service recovery that you can use to appease angry customers and manage service breakdowns efficiently.
#1 Be patient
Before you cater to a service failure, your support team should carefully try to understand what went wrong. It would help if you asked the right questions to get to the crux of the customer issue faster, but allow customers to take their time when it comes to answering. If you don’t take your time to understand the problem, it may lead to the wrong course of action.
#2 Go the extra mile
When it comes to service recovery, you’re always supposed to go the extra mile for the customer.. Service Recovery plans require you to put your customers and their needs first. This may even require you to deviate from your usual way of dealing with issues. The objective of a service recovery plan is to exceed customer expectations, especially after a service failure, even if it requires you to compensate for their inconvenience.
#3 Keep a recovery mindset
Service recovery requires a certain flexibility in mindset when it comes to problem-solving. Empathy and understanding is an important part of this mindset. It’s not enough to just fix a customer issue. Service recovery requires support teams to approach every customer problem as an opportunity to win them over.
#4 Prioritize speed of recovery
The distress customers go through when things aren’t working for them can quickly turn into frustration. To avoid these situations, your support team needs to act quickly when working on service recovery. Speed in initiating the service recovery process and completing it is essential to taking advantage of that window of opportunity.
Execute your service recovery plan with Freshdesk
Having a customer support software like Freshdesk makes it much easier for your customer service teams to do their job. With that in mind, let’s look at a few features that will come in handy when you want to execute your customer service strategy:
#1 Contextual conversations
Context is everything when it comes to service recovery. When the customer is dissatisfied because of an issue, you have to act fast, which means you don’t have much time to collect information on the issue.
Freshdesk allows you access to ticket history through an activity log that instantly gives you all the customer data you need. It includes all previous conversations your support team has had with the customer, the details of the agents who have worked on the ticket, status changes, etc. This helps you stay on top of any questions the customer throws at you and is a good starting point for your service recovery.
#2 Collaboration
During a service recovery process, there will be situations where you’ll need help from other internal teams. Sometimes it might even require the involvement of multiple agents.
To make the transfer of information easier in these situations, the Freshdesk ‘Shared Ownership’ feature allows the agent to give ‘Ticket View Access’ to whichever team or individual requires it. This simple yet effective collaboration can really help speed up service recovery and enable agents to share real-time updates with your customers.
#3 Predictive engagement
Prediction and pattern identification is where customer service is heading towards. But these practices become critical to ensure effective service recovery. Proactively identifying customer pain points is part of executing the perfect service recovery scenario.
In Freshdesk, you can set up custom proactive support emails that will be triggered whenever your agent anticipates an issue. You can personalize and save your message and tag all recipients that will be affected by the issue. You can also use predictive support to detect and reach out to frustrated customers by monitoring their behaviour like abandoned carts, rage clicks, etc.
Conclusion
One of the biggest learnings in customer service is understanding the value of your customer’s time. While some issues may take longer to fix, being empathetic is important but equally challenging. However, this mindset is required to be successful at service recovery.
Remember, not all situations can be salvaged through service recovery. In situations where service recovery is possible, timing becomes crucial. And to get the timing of service recovery right, it becomes important to gauge how unhappy a customer is after an issue. If you wait too long the opportunity will pass you by, but if you can respond proactively and offer an effective solution, you win a customer for life.
We hope the guide above helped you find answers to all your questions around service recovery. Is there a best practice you follow? Please let us know in the comments below.
Originally published on Oct 17, 2019. Updated on Jun 16, 2022.
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