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When it comes to customers, don’t make the same mistake twice!
By Lauren | November 7, 2008
My friend Amy was very frustrated this week when she got her daughter’s birthday cake for free. Sounds crazy? Read on.
Amy works a demanding job and only gets a half-hour lunch break. At the end of every workday she fights through traffic to collect her kids from daycare, so she can’t run errands on the way home. (This is not a woman with a lot of free time on her hands.) Amy works near an upscale supermarket and her daughter asked for one of their fabulous birthday cakes. Not wanting to disappoint her daughter, Amy ordered the cake well in advance and received a firm promise from the bakery that it would be ready by 1 PM on the appointed day.
You can see where this is going, right?
Amy arrived at the supermarket at 1:15 PM, reasoning that if she allowed a little extra time her cake would surely be ready. After Amy had waited for about five minutes to get the attention of anyone behind the bakery counter, a staffer finally took her order form and disappeared. Five minutes later, a different staffer told her that the cake would be “ready in ten minutes.” Amy used the ten minutes to collect a few extra groceries, then came back and waited yet another ten minutes before she finally got the hastily decorated, none-too-gorgeous cake, which the bakery gave her free of charge with an apology for the inconvenience. Amy paid for her other purchases, grabbed the cake, and rushed back to work … twenty minutes late, and in trouble with her boss.
What really angered Amy was that she’d had almost identical problems the year before. This was the second time the supermarket ended up giving her a free cake because the cake decorators didn’t have their act together. Although she appreciated the apology, Amy no longer trusts the supermarket to meet its promised deadlines. She probably won’t buy another cake there no matter how hard her daughter begs.
If someone on your staff makes this kind of mistake with a customer, it’s good to apologize and make amends. But one of the most essential elements of an effective apology is to avoid repeating mistakes. Use errors as clues to where your business processes need improvement, so your employees don’t end up having to offer customers the same stale apologies over and over again.
Topics: Apologies, business communications, customer relations, ethics |
December 1st, 2008 at 12:06 am
[...] presents When it comes to customers, don’t make the same mistake twice! posted at The Business Ethics Blog, saying, “Even apologies to customers lose all meaning [...]