I like to think of myself as easy going, sometimes even described as a nice person. There are few things that really bother me, apart from … dishonesty and laziness. I can forgive some degree of incompetence, a bad day, minor rudeness but never something that is done to brush away or trivialise a situation. If the dressing is wrong on the salad, the steak not cooked the right way, beer too warm, not a problem if it is fixed correctly. Now tell me it’s nothing, you will fix and don’t or say that’s the way it’s supposed to be and the level of challenge starts to escalate. All customer dis-service hurts the dis-service provider, that is a guarantee, I may even go as far as saying it’s an unbreakable rule of the universe.

A genuine mistake that is dealt with in the proper manner can often be a better confidence booster for the guest than getting the job right first time. Hang on, say again? OK, if a customer is going to be a regular customer they need a safety net. The service they receive after a complaint is often their image of your worst level. Perform well and they will know they can trust you.

I had an example of this a year ago, from a major UK utility company. One day on my holiday, I was phoned up by a debt collector for a rather large domestic electricity bill. I asked them for a copy of the bill as I had not seen such an amount and nothing came. A couple of weeks later, another phone call, but no bill. This went on for months, till they discovered it didn’t belong to my household. Safety net? Bye.

The overall aim is to build trust with your customer, which involves 4 basic steps:

A – Ask. What is the complaint
A – Acknowledge. Feedback the Ask bit to the customer, to check if you understand what they are not happy about
A – Apologise. Don’t defend the situation if you are at fault. This is the most important A
A – Act. Work out how you are going to makes amend, tell the customer and then do it

If you Assume, Avoid, Argue or Accuse … Adios !!!