Every business must prepare for failure.
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Your company will fail customers. Every company does. Nobody and no company is perfect. As optimistic as I am, I’m also a realist. While perfection is a worthy goal, it is impossible to nail every customer interaction every time.
I’ve written about this before, but the outlook of guaranteed failure will give us a fresh approach and creates a different conversation. Just last year, I wrote about the goal of zero complaints, and quoted NFL football coach Vince Lombardi, who said, “Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.”
I also mentioned Bill Price, president of Driva Solutions, who was Amazon’s first vice president of global customer service. When Jeff Bezos interviewed him for the job, he was asked, “What’s your definition of customer service?” Price responded, “The best service is no service,” meaning that Amazon should be so good that nobody would ever have to call customer support in the first place.
That answer was one of the reasons Price landed the job. But, both Bezos and Price recognized that never having a failure was unrealistic thinking.
So, when it comes to customer experience and product quality, while we may strive for perfection, we will occasionally fail, and that is where a huge opportunity is waiting for us. This is where we get to fix whatever is broken. When a customer calls with a complaint of any kind, this is where we step up and not only fix the problem, but also “fix the customer,” restoring their confidence to continue to do business with us.
But this article is not about how to fix a problem due to a service or product failure. It’s about how to prepare for failure.
Do a Failure Audit
This failure audit is similar to the Moment of Misery™ exercise we do for our clients. In a small group setting, front-line employees, managers and leaders determine the top complaints or problems for which customers contact the company. They identify how often issues occur, how long they take to resolve and what can be done to prevent or mitigate them moving forward.
From there, they are listed in order of which ones you would like to see eliminated. What surprises me is how many companies have never gone through this type of exercise. After all, if these problems happen often, why aren’t companies working to eliminate them? Not all problems are 100% preventable, but you’d be surprised as to which ones can be reduced, if not completely eliminated.
And this isn’t a one-and-done exercise. Do this at least every six months to determine if there’s been improvement and to continue to spot trends of the most common complaints.
Some Failures Are Not Preventable
No matter how hard we try, there are some problems we have no control over. For example, we may use a third-party shipper to move product from a warehouse to the customer. If that shipper fails, the customer calls us. There’s no way around it. It happens. By the way, Bezos recognized that even if Amazon was perfect, the shipping company might not be, and its failure resulted in customer service calls to Amazon. Today, Amazon does most of its own shipping. It’s still not perfect, but it’s closer, and customers generally perceive the Amazon experience as “excellent.” This is a perfect time to call back the Lombardi quote about chasing perfection and achieving excellence.
Prepare Your People for Failure
When customers call, your people must be ready. Train your front-liners on how to deal with these more common issues. My annual CX research finds that a top complaint when contacting a company about a problem is that the employee doesn’t have the knowledge or training to resolve the issue. Employees need to be equipped with the right tools, training and technology to succeed. In addition, the recovery process of common issues, regardless of who handles them, must be consistent. There must be a process that is properly followed every time.
Final Words
As hard as we try to eliminate common problems, they will happen. What matters is how companies respond when failure happens. And it’s not just about handling the complaint, even if it ends with the customer being happy. Just as important is finding ways to reduce or completely eliminate the problem from recurring.
The goal isn’t perfection. It is to build a company that responds so well that customers trust you even more after a failure occurs. So, when you do fail, fail right, knowing that you are achieving excellence. The result is that customers keep saying, “I’ll be back!”