That defining moment when you have seconds to turn a situation around…...I’m talking customer experience
As a consumer, I feel somewhat obliged to make the first move to rectify a horrible customer experience which usually entails a call to the manager or a long descriptive email about every inch of my negative experience with the hope that I'll get some form of sympathy & reimbursement back.
However, I was pleasantly surprised last week with an incident I had at a yoga class hosted by the V&A Waterfront & Virgin Active (South Africa). For a few weeks the V&A Waterfront has opened its facilities to both exercise novices & enthusiasts to attend wide range of free classes. This particular class was set to take place at 6 a.m. on a chilly autumn Friday morning, only to realise upon arrival that the yoga instructor had not pitched. There were a few of us who hung around in hope that she would pitch but no luck.
It was at this moment where we could have simply be sent home empty handed, irritated and put off committing to doing any form of exercise with either of these institutions.....But this was not the case, the Virgin Active representative immediately took down our details and promised to make it up to us in some way, apologising profusely as we left the venue. Within 1 hour, I received an email from Virgin Active, apologising again for the inconvenience caused.
“Hello Ros,
Just wanted to apologize once again for the cancelled class this morning. Please can you let me know which club you normally train at and I will send a gift pack there for you.
Hope you have a fantastic day!” Regards Kate Linder, Events Manager Virgin Active South Africa
After responding, my gift pack was ready for collection on Monday at my preferred gym.
When people are faced with a bad customer experience, naturally their expectations of you are lowered. Admittingly, my expectations were lowered but heightened immediately with this swift response and follow through from Virgin Active.
I happily tweeted my gift pack, thanking them for their great service, quickly forgetting the early Friday a.m. wake up call for a yoga class that was cancelled.
I believe that Virgin Active understands the power of word of mouth, especially when it comes to testing the success of a new initiative such as the outdoor active classes, which in their case could have turned horribly sour.
We often highlight the power of word of mouth and in this instance it is no different.
Key lessons:
* The most powerful tool you can have is the ability to spot & adapt to your customer’s attitudes to an experience they have had with your business (both positive & negative).
* No company is perfect; negative customer experiences are inevitable. You cannot pretend they won’t happen, and you cannot wait for them to happen before having a plan in place to combat them. So plan ahead for them. Align your employees to combat these situations the same way you would.
* When things turn south, you only have a few seconds to react. The quicker and more efficiently you respond the less damage there is to your brand.
* Don’t be afraid to communicate openly where you went wrong and let your customers know that you have done what you can to fix the problem.
The beauty and the beast social media comes into play here where you are able to react to a customer’s bad experience in real time to an audience who will see your solution focused strategy solving the problem.
Happy customers will happily spread the bad-turned-good experience with their social networks just like I did.
Ros Siddle, Marketing & Loyalty Research Manager, Truth
No comments:
Post a Comment