How to make your customers love you by screwing up

As I am hard at work writing the third title in the Bare Knuckle seriesof books -  "Bare Knuckle Customer Service" - the whole area of customer service is very much front of mind.

I was talking to a client recently and they had recently experienced a complete and total systems crash.  And I do mean complete and total! Their entire customer order system failed. They lost all the existing order information and could not accept any new orders.

The system that ran their entire business went down for over a week. Tens of thousands of customer orders were lost, and it took them over a week to get the system back on line.

They effectively screwed up their business with every single one of their customers. Ouch! Their customers were, to say the least, not happy.

While their IT people battled to get the system back on line, the rest of the company was mobilised to recover from the disaster.  Every single customer was contacted personally, they explained what had happened and re-took the customers orders, the salesforce helped the logistics department with emergency deliveries. They did everything they could to sort the problem.

The result? They have not lost a single customer. Not one. Indeed they have gained new customers as their existing customers are saying what a great job they did of sorting the problem!  Amazing isn't it?

Customers are not happy when things go wrong. However they do understand that mistakes happen from time to time. If you really over-achieve on recovering from the mistakes then you may just find they value you even more!

If you screw up, admit it, explain what happened, apologise and then tell the customer what you are going to do to put it right.  Research shows that you end up with an even more satisfied customer then before.

Bare Knuckle Selling: Knockout Sales Tactics They Won't Teach You at Business School author: Simon Hazeldine asin: 1905430051