Thank You for the Opportunity to Correct the Problem

Understanding the basic rules of customer service can build customer loyalty and offer competitive advantage.
Aug 12, 2008

By Richard Lebovitz

In case you haven’t noticed, customer service isn’t what it used to be. Enter a department store and you’ll be hard pressed to find someone to serve you — sometimes even to take your money — much less someone who’s knowledgeable enough about the product to be of genuine help.

Try to contact a service provider in almost any field — healthcare, financial, insurance, cable television — and you have to navigate through a maze of sometimes irrelevant commands before you reach someone who can actually answer your question or help solve your problem, if you reach a real person at all.

So, it was with great surprise that my wife and I recently enjoyed a genuinely good customer service experience. After searching long and hard for a new carpet for the upstairs of our small home, my wife finally made up her mind and arranged for the installation, which for her involved missing a day of work to be present while the installers did their job. Only the job they did wasn’t at all satisfactory.

Do It Right the First Time
At this point, I should note that, to my way of thinking, the No. 1 rule of customer service is to do it right the first time. But when that doesn’t happen, for whatever reason, and you know from your years in business that many factors can affect the satisfactory completion of a job or delivery of a product, rule No. 2 goes into effect, and that is, fix the problem. Better yet, fix it promptly.

I won’t bore you with the gory details of our particular situation, but the installers hurried to their next job, leaving my wife to discover problem after problem, her distress growing after each new find. Of course, my wife called the person who sold us the carpet, not knowing what his response would be.

Well, he told her he would come out to inspect the work as soon as he closed his store that evening. Not only did he show up but also agreed with us that there were some serious problems and that he would discuss the fixes with his father-in-law, who was more experienced in carpet laying than he was. We didn’t know when we would hear back, but to our surprise, he called us that very evening, saying that his father-in-law would come by at 7:30 the next morning.

Fix It Promptly
True to his word, the father-in-law showed up — along with the installers! He immediately saw the problems, instructed the installers on how to fix them, made sure that we understood the nature of the problems and the fixes to resolve any questions we might have, and then reassured us that everything would be resolved to our satisfaction.

Whereas the day before we were fit to be tied, we were so overwhelmed by this effort to make us happy that I made a point of thanking this gentleman before he left. He smiled, extended his hand, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Thank you for giving us the opportunity to correct the problem!” As if that wasn’t enough, the installers made a point of apologizing several times for their work and the inconvenience it had caused us.

100% Guarantee
Which leads to customer service rule No. 3: Always stand behind or guarantee your service, work or product. Our carpet company apparently understood this aspect of customer service, but the best statement of this concept is probably that expressed by the original L.L. Bean and still in use today. The same week we dealt with the carpet problem, I celebrated my birthday, and enclosed in the package my wife gave me was a card with the following statement:

Our products are guaranteed to give 100% satisfaction in every way. Return anything purchased from us at any time if it proves otherwise. We do not want you to have anything from L.L. Bean that is not completely satisfactory.

Do it right the first time. Fix mistakes promptly. Guarantee your work. The key ingredients of customer service, satisfaction and loyalty are so simple, yet so few companies seem to appreciate the potential benefit to their business or the competitive advantage they offer. Do you?

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