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If someone is your customer for the first time and everything goes right, their loyalty to you goes up a little bit. And then if they’re a customer again, nothing goes wrong, their loyalty may go up a little bit. And if they come for a third time and it all is satisfactory, their loyalty goes up a little bit. They may not tell people because they just had three interactions and everything went the way it was supposed to go.

But let’s say the next time something goes wrong, the loyalty to you is going to drop like a rock. And they’re going to tell a lot of other people. Okay, that’s a service recovery situation. Yikes! The first step is to fix the problem. I mean, like, you know, do whatever you need to do as quickly as possible. It doesn’t matter what the cause is; fix the customer’s problem.

Now, let me ask you, from the customer’s point of view, if there was a problem and you fixed the problem, are they supposed to be delighted about that? No, because from their point of view, the problem shouldn’t have never happened anyway. So when you fix the problem, that’s just a little bit. I mean, it’s a bare minimum, and the loyalty may come up a little bit.

If you fix the problem and you show that you’re concerned and you care, you say, “Hey, I just want to let you know, I’m genuinely sorry about this.” Sincerely apologize, understand the inconvenience. You know, recognize that this was unexpected. In other words, like you’re asking people about humans. This is a human to human part. You’ve got to demonstrate. You really do give a darn, right? There’s empathy there. You realize the other person, in a sense, you know, suffered a difficult situation. So if you fix the problem and you show that you care, you could get the loyalty back to where it was before. Like, you know, you just bounce up a bit.

But if you do something extra, if you do a little bit more, you could get what I call the bounce, where the loyalty goes even higher than if the problem had never happened. And by something more, I don’t mean a cheaper price. And, you know, like it’s a restaurant, they give you the free dessert. You know, I mean, it’s that kind of thing. Or the manager comes around and he says, “You know, I’d love to see you back again. Give us another chance to make this right. Let me take my business card right here on the back.” You know, you know, all food at their next visit. Sign and give it over. “We’d love to see you again.” “We didn’t expect it.” Oh, and by the way, you’re pretty sure that person’s going to be coming back.

It could be even something just like a follow-up phone call. “Hi. This is the department head. Yeah, I understand that last week… I’m just calling personally to check. Is everything okay? Did we do a good job on that?” Okay. “You know, we recognize that we’ve improved our process, our procedure,” blah, blah, blah, whatever. Whatever that something extra is. It was unexpected by the customer. It was after the problem was solved. You already demonstrated that you were concerned and you care. And that’s something extra can produce what I call the loyalty bounce. And that’s what you’re after. And that’s why service recovery situations are huge opportunities to generate loyal advocacy and ambassadors amongst your customers.