Customer Service Recovery:
You're Doing it Wrong
It seems that a lot of companies are still fixated on doing Service Recovery wrong.
Barriers to Exit Are Trust-Breakers
Back in 2012, Justin Fox (Harvard Business Review Group), wrote about a horrible experience he had with the company e-Fax. It was a story of a company that wouldn’t allow you to cancel an account until you’d run an unpleasant gauntlet of high-pressure tactics to get you to stay on with them. If you refused to play this game with them, they refused to cancel your account, and just kept billing you. It was a tactic called “Barriers to Exit,” and it spoke volumes about the companies that use them.Â
The good news is that it is no longer widely practiced.
Barriers to Service Are Even Bigger Trust-Breakers
The bad news is that many, if not most, large organizations have adopted an equally horrible tactic for dealing with frustrated customers. I call it: “Barriers to Service.”
We’ve all experienced it. Want to talk with someone at large organization about a non-standard customer service issue? It’s a unicorn-hunt of the highest order. (A great example is the software behemoth, Adobe – and it’s just one of many.)
Having a problem with a product or service? You will be funnelled through clunky A.I., narrow-focused chatbots and other hurdles, then often directed to crowd-sourced forums — in which you’ll get a dozen conflicting and inaccurate answers from people who may even know less than you.Â
And, all of a sudden, you find any loyalty you had with this company begin to slip.
These Games Violate All 3 Principles of Trust
Loyalty is created by trust, and trust is created by three things: Caring, Competency & Integrity.Â
These cost-saving games violate all three of these principles. By building a customer avoidance obstacle course, you send the clear message that your don’t want to talk with people, and don’t care. By directing customers to sketchy resources, your competence comes into question, and by wasting so much of your customers time, your integrity goes out the window.
Lousy service = customer defection
Customers defect from companies for a number of reasons – Pricing, Convenience, Quality, etc — but study after study tells us that the dominant cause of lost customer loyalty is lousy customer experience. In its simplest terms, customers leave you because at some level, they stopped trusting you.
That perception is not as far from reality as those companies might claim. The reason that so many organizations do nothing to remove their Barriers to Service is because they see real customer service simply as an expense. They are incapable of connecting the dots between high levels of customer experience and sustainable profitability. They don’t acknowledge that skilled employees are the cornerstone of service recovery. They aren’t seeing the perfect storm that’s impacting their customer experience.
Service recovery has lasting effects
The philosophy of doing as little as possible after a customer has made a purchase is profoundly short-sighted. It impacts trust, loyalty, word-of-mouth and future purchases. We know, for example, that service recovery is a common denominator in over 70% of WOW customer experiences. We know that service recovery is the last defense against loss of trust. We know that it is the critical opportunity to reinforce to customers that they made a good decision in doing business with us.
Why on earth would we want to create barriers to those outcomes?
