If your company doesn’t yet have a customer service recovery framework (a system for dealing with upset customers), then let the current crises spur you to put one in place, sooner rather than later. With external stressors abounding and tempers fraying left and right, these times provide particularly fertile ground for customer complaints and misunderstandings.
Once there’s an upset customer in front of you, wagging their finger in your face via video chat or shouting at you on the phone, it’s not a good time to be improvising from scratch. And, indeed, all great customer-centric organizations recognize the inevitability of such situations and adopt or develop a customer service recovery framework that can be used for those times when the situation hits the fan, and the customer hits the roof. (For example, Marriott uses its own sequence, which spells LEARN, and Starbucks uses own that, adorably, spells LATTE).
If your organization hasn’t already committed to a different service recovery system, allow me offer you my own four-step MAMA service recovery framework, which was recently rolled out in my new book from HarperCollins Leadership, Ignore Your Customers (And They’ll Go Away): The Simple Playbook for Delivering the Ultimate Customer Service Experience.