Mistakes are to be expected, but knowing how to recover an angry or frustrated customer into a loyal customer is a learned art. A Customer Focused Attitude is critical for successful service recovery. Employees need to be trained to anticipate and identify potential problems, as well as have the experience to make decisions and to deliver skillful solutions to customer problems. 

All customer problems are opportunities to win over their loyalty. This weekend I was in a large home improvement store looking for a certain product. When I went to checkout, I asked the associate who was scanning my purchases if they carried this particular product. There were two additional associates standing around as I asked my question. Two of the associates told me what isle to look on to see "if" they had the product at all. I then asked if they could look in their system and verify whether or not the store carried this item. The same two associates quickly said no, they couldn't do that, and I would need to go look down the isle. The 3rd associate interrupted them both and said that she could check the system and let me know if they had the product. She left the register, took both of the associates with her, looked up the product and came back to me and told me they did not carry what I was looking for. She apologized and thanked me for waiting. I sure hope the two associates with her learned something about customer focused service. Attention and awareness can eliminate most issues. 

I believe management has to fight to maintain standards every day.  If a standard is not qualifiable (what you are supposed to do), quantifiable (when or how often you are supposed to do it), and verifiable (management can check to make sure it was done), it is not a standard.  What are yours?  And how are you communicating them?  If employees don't know what you want and expect, they aren't going to deliver.  I say it again: If standards are not being met, do not blame your employees or the economy.  Blame management.

- Jon Taffer, Raise the Bar

Do you use proper email etiquette?  Knowing and using proper etiquette is imperative since it is, more than likely, your most used platform for communicating with your customers.  How you "show up" via email is a direct reflection of how you do business and greatly impacts your customers' ongoing perception and trust in you.  Let's make sure that your largest area of exposure to your customers (emailing) is something that you and the rest of your company do better than the rest.  

Without factual information and timely, candid feedback, teams quickly dissolve into weak, dependent groups, shifting responsibility and ownership for problems to those who are informed.  In many organizations, this results in a crippling "dependency syndrome," an upward delegation of problem-solving and conflict resolution.  Got a problem?  Give it to the boss to solve!

- John J. Murphy, Pulling Together

“Customer Service is not a department…it’s an attitude.”  How true is this phrase? As much as we try to complicate what great service is…it can be pretty simple. Customer Love, by Mac Anderson, is a great book that highlights unforgettable true stories about individuals and companies who have created extraordinary service experiences for their customers. WOW's! Companies like Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, and others. What makes this little book so good is that the stories collectively inspire and remind us of what great service can look like and that it doesn't have to be complicated. 

Saying many things usually communicates nothing.  Horace Schwerin and Henry Newell, in their helpful book Persuasion, described their test of two commercials for the same car.  Commercial one was single minded: It talked only about performance.  Commercial two went further.  It pointed out that in addition to exceptional performance, the car offered outstanding styling, a choice of several models, and excellent economy.  

After showing subjects the two commercials, the testers asked viewers if either commercial might make them switch to that brand of car.  Six percent answered yes, the performance spot would make them consider switching.  But what about the second commercial, with all that valuable added information-how many were affected by it?  Not one.  Zero percent.

-Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible