We all make mistakes, but how do you put it right?

Week 5 of kitchen chaos and I still don't have lights or a cutlery drawer but we're finally getting there. Read my Twitter feed if you want the full story (I'm boring myself now) but my kitchen woes were down to an approved kitchen installer not communicating with management, stretching himself too thinly and buggering off onto another job, not answering the phone, then going on holiday whilst leaving everyone else wondering what was going on... Thankfully, my tweets for help finally got the desired response and good management support but not before we'd gone round the houses trying to get the various customer services teams to sort the mess out with no success. It's clear that as soon as you bring other intermediaries into your supply chain, the risk of things going wrong increases. And the first rule of theory in managing your distribution correctly is communication and adhering to quality standards / processes. 

My second customer service grips this week is with Ryanair. I appreciate there has been a baggage handlers strike in Spain and external environmental forces are issues that are hard to predict too far in advance and are out of your control but it's how you deal with them that matters. On Sunday, my flight back from Madrid was delayed 10 minutes before the gate opened by 6 hours! There was no clear information and not a sniff of a Ryanair member of staff - believe me, we all looked for someone. It was only through speaking to the general airline information desk that we found out that our plane was doing a quick return trip to the UK and would be back later - something they would have known about at 6am when the issue first arose. Some passengers got food vouchers, but  most of us didn't. Delays happen, but a little bit of information and a standardised process of supporting customers would have gone a long way to assist the matter... I got a text that arrived after the flight would have boarded! I also didn't appreciate taking a transfer bus in the dark to a lonely car park at 11pm either, something I had no plans to do with my original booking getting me home by 5pm. And of course, amidst the varying excuses of why the plane was late, it turned how to be conveniently 'out of their control' so we are not entitled to compensation. I don't think anyone on that flight would choose Ryanair as their first choice airline next time.

How do you fix customer service gripes?

So the lesson of my customer service gripes are that most customers are pretty reasonable. They will accept that things happen, unplanned events that do cause disruption, but it's how you respond that is important. A human face. Clear information. A plan to fix things. And some form of recompense. Wriggling out of your responsibilities just leads to post-purchase dissonance and a lot of angry tweeting...

If you want to establish what level of service you should be providing and how well you are meeting those expectations, the SERVqual methodology is a great place to start. It adapts very well to use in an online survey and our customers have found it very helpful in identifying elements that need to be improved. Contact us for more help with applying this framework to your customer research.