Service Recovery In Opportunity

Is there Opportunity in America? I found out their was working with a World Class Sales Representative the week of October 1, 2007. Jesse Achenbach and I were going over his territory and making a game plan for the next quarter at a Starbucks in Opportunity, Washington, a Spokane suburb. I placed my order as I do most everyday at Starbucks in Somecity, USA. Business was brisk and horror of horrors the barrista forgot to make my order. After about 10 minutes I went to check on it and my person who happened to be one of Starbucks highly trained Coffee Masters, fell on the sword, apologized profusely, and told me she would have it right out…. Which she did.

Then she bought my loyalty forever. With my drink she presented me a coupon specifically designed for moments like this. It was a promise of a free cup of anything, anywhere I can find a Starbucks. If your town is like mine, that won’t be hard. Starbucks has always given me such wonderful service, it never much occurred to me that they would need to be prepared for service recovery, but world class organization that they are, service recovery is in their playbook.

Breaking it down, the barrista did 4 things brilliantly:

1. She took responsibility and told me it was her fault. I’m not sure that it was because she took my order and rarely does the order taker actually make the order in a busy Starbucks location. So she not only took responsibility but more than likely took it when someone else was actually at fault. Much harder to do in my opinion.

2. Then she apologized. It was a genuine apology that showed true embarrassment for the service glitch.

3. She fast-tracked my order and got it out quickly.

4. She made amends. She presented me with the coupon in recognition that my time is valuable and so is my patronage.

Now back to the opportunity tie-in. I honestly never knew before this day that there was a city named Opportunity. But here is my point. Every day in business we have an opportunity to serve our customers in ways that will create future business opportunities, not only with them, but also with their friends and acquaintances. Starbucks depends on this almost completely as they really have almost no formal advertising budget. They rely on word of mouth and customer experience almost exclusively.

Hopefully most days our service level is world class. But even in the best companies with the best employees, the wheels will occasionally come off. The point is that this is another opportunity. In some ways it is even a bigger opportunity. I dare say I am more committed to Starbucks after this mishap because of the way they took care of me. Starbucks offers a pretty consistent world class product in my opinion. They also offer pretty consistent world class service. Now I know they offer world class service recovery. How about you?

I hope this is a part of your companies culture. But if it’s not, you can do it on your own. I have dug in my own pocket on more than one occasion to make service recovery happen. Sometimes I was recovering from my own mistake. Other times I was recovering from the mistake of an associate. The bottom line is that every day we all have the opportunity to offer world class service… and when we don’t… we can offer world class service recovery.

Joe Gandolpho is known as the World's Greatest Car Salesman. His philosophy was this: I hope I sell you a lemon... then I'll show you how well I can produce with the service department. For Joe, selling a lemon was an opportunity.