Baby and the bathwater customer recovery that works for you - Simone Douglas

Simone Douglas - "#SeriouslySocial"

​Introduction

One of the most painful moments is when we lose a customer not only does it impact your topline sales and most likely your bottom line profit but it takes up energy to replace them and often can impact on your mindset for the rest of the day or week depending how big a part of your wallet they were.

IBGR is a global community of commerce committed to your success and our programming is designed to give you the tools and resources as well as the one percenters you might be missing. So settle in because all the best stories are told with the audiences full attention and today is no exception. If you put the learnings into place you will have started your preparation to belt 2021 out of the stratosphere. After all We didn’t wake up this morning and decide to own an averagely successful business now did we?

One of the challenges in an established business as you continue to scale is coming to the understanding that Service failures are inevitable. However, research shows that in many cases it is considerably more profitable for a company to keep customers who have experienced failures than to try to find new customers. 

Regardless of a company’s experience and effort, some service failures are inevitable. Once a service failure has occurred, service recovery consists of anything a company does to restore customer satisfaction and loyalty to the pre-failure level. When customers experience a service failure, the key to customer retention lies in the service recovery effort companies make. 

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​Show Objectives - The Why
"When it comes to service recovery, there are three rules to keep in mind:

1. Do it right the first time.
2. Fix it properly if it ever fails.
3. Remember: There are no third chances."

In today’s show, we review the benefits of effective recovery and share some recent research that uncovers the components of recovery quality. We will also discuss the importance of considering customer expectations and profitability when making service recovery decisions. Finally I will run through a model of service recovery that assists you in designing and implementing cost-effective service recovery systems that lead to long-term profitability. 


​Key Issues - Owner Perspective:

1. How do we identify at risk customers before they cease to be our customers? 
2. What are our service recovery processes and when do we apply them to ensure maximum customer recovery?
3. What are the different levels of recovery within our organisation and who is responsible for them?
4. What is our success rate and how do we improve it?
5. Do we have a triage or direct action approach to our customer retention.

What You Need to Know - The What

1. The difference between triage based and direct action recovery methodologies.
2. The elements of a good service recovery contact
3. The elements of the service recovery task
4. How to use complaint management as an effective service recovery tool.
5. The impact of service recovery programs to your business.

​What You Need to Do​​ - The How

1. Health check your customer journey for customer loss risks
2. Components of Essential and Attractive Service Recovery Quality Elements  and how they apply to your business
3.  Classifying Service Recovery Candidates   
4. An effective service recovery system should classify customers in such a way that firms can recover the customers who merit greater recovery efforts. Executives must collect and analyze data on customer profitability, customer expectations, and quality element levels.
5. Determine and Perform Appropriate Recovery Efforts 
6. Script your recovery procedure -

 • Use the database to retrieve customer classification information. 
 • Make appropriate recovery efforts for each customer. 
• Listen to the customer.

 
Plan to spend time putting lessons learnt and aha moments into practice.  Let me know how it goes.
 
ACT! Nothing changes if you don’t set aside time to make it happen so once you have worked out what you need to do start putting timelines and deliverables on your action plan. Get clear on what you want your customers to feel, what actions you want them to take and what pain points you are here to solve for them.
 
Shows
Previous: Episode C3.09.3 Bright Shiny objects and old favourites when it comes to sales - The difference between Acquisition and Retention within your organisation and what it costs you on both sides of the coin. How to evaluate your processes to ensure you have a balanced book and who contributes to the journey.
Next: Episode Season 3 Episode C3.11.3 The numbers game understanding the metrics that matter when it comes to sales. - How to interrogate your numbers and ratios to ensure that your team is running on all cylinders, whether you are at capacity or there is room to move, where coaching is required and what to look at from a sales coaching perspective
 


Written by Simone Douglas 
The Publican & Licensee of the Duke of Brunswick Hotel, Executive Director for BNI Adelaide North one of the biggest networking organisations in the world, the driving force behind South Australia’s leading social media agency, Social Media AOK and best-selling author with her first book “Seriously Social – turning your online game into real-world gain”. and the recently released Confident Networker

Simone also serves as Deputy President of the State Chapter Committee South Australia for the Franchise Council of Australia and sits on the Franchise Advisory Council for BNI Australia

You can connect with Simone on any of her seriously social platforms
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