OFFER A FAIR RESOLUTION  TO THE PROBLEM THEN AT ONE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE

While apologizing and showing empathy are crucial to fixing customers emotions, they are only the opening salvos in a magical recovery effort. Plenty of organizations think their recovery work is done with an act of contrition—when the damage inflicted actually requires some further atonement or compensation to the customer. Understanding that need separates magical recovery efforts from those that leave customers with a lingering sense of being coerced or marginalized. In short, it pays to remember that for many customers, a brusque refund beats a smiling rebuff any time.

To wit: A colleague rented the hit movie Lord of the Rings from a local video store for his family’s Friday night entertainment. After fighting traffic to and from the store, he arrived home only to open the box and find the wrong DVD had been inserted—and the R-rated movie inside hardly seemed a suitable replacement.

Steamed, he drove 30 minutes back to the store through the stilllingering gridlock, while his family put its plans on hold—and an accompanying meal back in the microwave. The store clerk offered an appropriate but rote-sounding apology—“We’re sorry about that” but the recovery effort ended there. No waiving of the rental fee, no coupon for a free rental—nothing to compensate the customer for the hassle of having to drive back to the store and disrupt his Friday night plans. The seeming indifference suggested such foul-ups were status quo around there—and the customer better get used to it. Our colleague vowed not to darken the store’s door again—and warned any in his large circle from doing the same. Contrary to popular belief, most customers bring a sense of fair play to the table when the situation calls for atonement. Our aforementioned colleague didn’t expect the video store to offer a roundtrip to Orlando and a pass to Universal Studios for his inconvenience, or to force the offending clerk to sit through repeated showings of the movie Glitter—only some form of “symbolic” atonement like waiving a $4 fee or providing a coupon for a free rental. These are the small, reasonable gestures that say “We understand your frustration or disappointment, and want to do something to make up for it.”
The good news is that research shows, in the majority of cases, what customers expect by way of atonement costs less and is easier to deliver
than you might guess.

Consider Domino’s Pizza and its original service guarantee of “delivery in 30 minutes or your pizza is free.” Although the pledge more than achieved the company’s marketing goals, Domino’s discovered the number of customers taking it up on the guarantee was far less than the number of “more than 30 minute” deliveries. Follow-up focus groups unearthed the reason. Most customers thought a free pizza was excessive atonement for pizza arriving only five or ten minutes late. When Domino’s shifted its guarantee to $3 off the pizza price for missing the 30-minute window, a far greater number accepted the offer. When and how to offer atonement can be one of the hardest things for budding service magicians to learn. We’ve found the best approach to sorting it out is to draft a series of recovery cases—real ones from the organization’s own files—and hold a number of short, one- to threehour training meetings to discuss the handling of the cases. By proposing and discussing solutions, participants in the discussions develop the skill of looking at both the nuances of a problem and the ramifications of possible solutions.