Service Recovery Excellence. Are You Doing It?

In every business, no matter how good, no matter how top end, there will always be days when things will go wrong.

There will always be days when things do not go as they are meant to.

And when those days, or moments arise, the things that really make your business WORLD CLASS and stand out amongst others is the way that your business manages its service recovery processes.

What Are Service Defects?

Service Defects are defined as any obstacles and challenges that can occur at any stage of the Customer Experience Cycle that can ruin the customer’s experience.

What is Service Recovery?

Service Recovery is the processes that our business initiates when a service defect is recognised to have occurred.

Our dental office’s service recovery systems and the way we seamlessly swing them into action are what defines us as a business that cares unconditionally about our customers.

While these customers may complain about the service defect that just happened, they will be in awe at the way our business handles that defect through its service recovery processes….

Is it a Double Edged Sword?

If our business offers great customer service, doesn’t that mean that whenever we have a failure or a defect in that service that it is far more noticeable because of the difference between our service and the failure?

I mean, wouldn’t it be better just to give poor or minimal service to our customers, so that whenever there is a service defect, the difference between our stock standard level of poor service and the defect is not that big?

After all, a patient who receives poor service most of the time is far less likely to be bothered by poor service than a patient who receives World Class Customer Service and then experiences a World Class Service defect?

Is that right?

The Problem with Basic Levels of Service…..

The problems that businesses that offer only basic levels of service have is that they simply are not operating in the ideal pond when it comes to “fishing” for business.

Factually, customers who expect and receive World Class Customer Service do spend more and buy more than customers who accept baseline service.

Twenty to twenty-five percent of the population will not care what your competitors are charging and will happily pay your prices if they feel that the service you offer is World Class and represents good value to them.

These really are two completely different worlds to be operating in.

Returning To Service Recovery….

Yesterday my wife and I celebrated my birthday with a lunch at our favourite restaurant.

We eat there three times each year to celebrate our individual birthdays and our wedding anniversary, which fortunately for us are fairly evenly spaced throughout the year.

The food is exemplary and the service is always World Class.

It’s the reason why we keep going back there, year after year after year.

And we have been going back there, on this basis, for maybe ten or fifteen years.

In March this year, when we last ate there, there were a couple of small things that we felt were overlooked in our service that made our visit slightly less than perfect that time.

And we did raise these at the time, mainly to make sure that the restaurant was aware of our disappointment so that they could be more attentive to their other customers in the future.

When we raised these questions in March we received instant apologies from several people involved in the restaurant service processes.

And that was all we wanted.

But interestingly, when we arrived for lunch yesterday, we were greeted by the floor manager who apologised again for the disappointments in March and then presented my wife with a beautiful bunch of fresh lilies that he had purchased at the local market that morning and that his six year old daughter had personally chosen.

He also offered to us a complimentary bottle of Eden Valley Shiraz that he had personally been working on with a well-known Australian Wine Maker exclusively for the restaurant.

He made us feel like royalty.

And although there was no need for these extra acts of Service Recovery, we graciously thanked him for his noble efforts and we felt so honoured at those efforts to make small past wrongs right.

In your Dental Practice….

What are you doing in your dental practice to WOW your patients when small things go wrong in your Customer Experience processes?

What are the Service Recovery processes that your team instantly swing into action to not only make wrongs right again, but to make your customers forget those wrongs because your Service Recovery processes scream WOW out loud to them?

Our Service Recovery processes should be the tales told across the land in our suburbs and our towns.

It is our ability to create these World Class Experiences that lets our valued patients really know that they are indeed valued and respected by our business, and our people on our team.

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The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.