No matter how committed your organization is to service excellence and the customer experience, you will miss the mark on occasion.  I remember many a heated conversation between the executive team of a former employer over the notion of a 100% customer satisfaction performance goal.  Not even the greatest individual performers will get it right every time, every day; let alone an entire organization.  While making every customer’s experience spectacular is a worthy goal, training people on how to recover from the inevitable misstep is even more important.  I would argue that an organization’s ability with service recovery is the most impressive measure of their commitment to the customer experience.  To this end, I train people on a LAST model of service recovery (Listen, Apologize, Solve, Thank).  I touched on that in a previous blog post. In addition to understanding and correctly executing that model, here are four things that are often overlooked when training customer service:

Train your customer contact staff to solve problems and give them clear guidance on their authority to do so. Empower them with as much responsibility as possible so they can take care of the customer and not have to get approval from a manager.  When possible, allow your team to give the customer what they want and teach them how to effectively negotiate and resolve conflict with customers.  In short, make service recovery the responsibility of every employee, not leadership.

If the customer’s demands are beyond the authority of the customer contact staff, train them to offer three other options that they can authorize that do not require management involvement. Often, when a customer demands solutions that are a bit unreasonable, this is done out of anger.  Once they calm down and are given options to make them happy, they most often choose one.

Forbid your employees to tell the customer “No.” When we tell a customer “no”, we leave them with only two options:  find someone with more authority or go to a competitor.  If the customer chooses the former, the manager will now be dealing with someone even angrier.  Moreover, if the manager decides to overrule the employee, they will lose that employee’s respect.   If the customer chooses the latter option, well, then we have lost the customer.  Years ago, when I worked in training and development at Marshall Field’s in Chicago, we had a “never say no” policy.  Saying “no” to a customer was actually considered gross misconduct and could result in immediate termination.  That doesn’t mean that the employee must always give the disgruntled customer what they want, however (see the previous bullet point).  By training your team on their level of authority, going over all the options that can be offered to unhappy customers, and instructing them to come to you if the customer demands more, you avoid creating a worse customer problem.

Let your team be the heroes. One of my pet peeves is when a manager instructs their team on how to handle a customer scenario in no uncertain terms.  Then, the first time a customer demands to speak to the manager because the employee is following these instructions, the manager folds like cheap lawn furniture.  If the manager plans to approve a customer request, let the employee deliver that information.  If the manager plans to deny the customer request, the manager should deliver that information.  The front line staff should always be placed in a favorable situation with the customer; customer contact employees, not management, represent the face and personality of your organization.

Organizations that create exceptional customer experiences also empower their customer contact people to solve problems without requiring excessive oversight by management.  To practice service excellence, be sure your training program prepares front line employees to authorize solutions when the organization’s execution gets clunky.