The Trailing Edge - classic customer service recovery
February 25th, 2010 | by Shaun |The Trailing Edge, Kanata: A+
I have to say that I genuinely appreciate when someone is truly skilled in customer service. Perhaps even more important, and more rare, is when someone is skilled in the very difficult art of service recovery. I had a textbook experience this morning - I wish I could have recorded it so our trainers could use it as a positive example in our workshops.
Margo in our office was in the sixth day of an excruciatingly painful experience as The Trailing Edge - a well-known local Ottawa computer sales and support company - tried to fix her computer. To make a long story short, they botched the job, and the tech who was working on the project had demonstrated a profound degree of disinterest.
First thing this morning we went (yet again) to their location. I was angry at how Margo had been treated, and was going in with two goals - one was to pick up the (still unfixed) computer so we could take it somewhere else, and the other was to recover the money we had already paid them for the work they had done. I had already decided that we would not do business with them again.
But…
When we got there, we met with the owner, Chris, who did absolutely everything right. Textbook. I actually found myself making a mental checklist of LESTER and the other techniques in my own book, and he didn’t miss one. He listened intently, and was clearly concerned that we weren’t happy. He said and did all the right things, and in short order began the process of winning us back.
And it was more than just him. The rest of the staff, and I mean all of them (the original tech guy wasn’t there), were equally concerned, and managed to convince this bitter guy (me) that our experience was very much an exception. The result? Not only did we leave in a better mood than we came in, but we actually spent a couple of hundred dollars more in the process. Here’s the kicker - the computer still isn’t fixed! But they bent over backwards to help us come up with the best solution for dealing with it.
It was a classic case of The Service Recovery Paradox - the phenomenon where an initially dissatisfied customer can actually become to feel more satisfied than one where everything had gone smoothly in the first place. We will absolutely continue to do business with The Trailing Edge, and we will continue to refer others to them. It is truly wonderful to see world-class customer service in action.
