Episode 43 In today’s world, a trillion brands are offering the same product or service. With a rapidly increasing supply of identical offers, how does a customer decide which brand to choose? Customers are incredibly picky and hold high expectations. As a response to that, most business leaders agree that customer experience is becoming the key differentiator. However, the cost of failing to deliver great CX can sometimes be fatal. In fact, 1 in 3 customers would switch to a different brand after one bad experience. How can you then mitigate the impact of a bad experience? At the end of the day, things can always go wrong no matter how hard you try. Luckily, if you are prepared to take action, customers are more than forgiving. Unless the customer is a Hollywood celebrity with 100 million followers on Instagram, those can be ruthless. In one of our CX Insider podcast episode, Katie Stabler, a customer service recovery specialist, explains why companies should normalise failure and plan to fail in order to succeed. She also introduces her six-step service recovery framework and elaborates on how CX recovery can help turn customers into advocates.
Episode 43
Episode Summary
6-step service recovery framework
Although systems and processes can sometimes fail us, organisations are in a place where they can be reactive and manage those unfortunate situations. According to Katie, every company should have their service recovery strategy to mitigate the risk of losing a customer.
- The first step to start any recovery process is to identify the issue. The best-case scenario is to find the problem before the customer does or before they know the issue has impacted them.
- Assess the problem. At this stage, it is crucial to understand the root of the failure, how it has impacted the customer and conduct a detailed examination.
- Collaborate with your colleagues. The more people you can get involved in customer experience initiatives, the better the solution will be and the faster an organisation develops a customer-centric culture.
- Provide a remedy. Sometimes it can be as simple as calling a customer to tell them what has happened and apologise.
- Fix the issue. Once the customer is confronted, the organisation has to fix it internally. Managers need to use the necessary means to prevent the situation from repeating.
- Apart from learning what has gone wrong and what could be done better next time, the more interesting part is to analyse the costs and benefits. The customer service process is not a cheap strategy. Therefore, it is essential to calculate how much it would cost to lose the customer and how much you gain from keeping them.
Should organisations with captive customers be customer-centric?
From the opposite perspective, Katie discussed why customer experience matters to captive customers based on her work experience in the debt collection industry. A captive customer is someone who does not choose to be your customer. There can be numerous reasons for being a captive customer, such as location, price sensitivity or simply a monopoly. However, if most of the organisation’s customers are captive, why should the company be bothered by delivering better customer experience? These customers will not leave anyway. According to Katie, improving your CX makes the customers more collaborative and the entire transaction easier. As an example, she used her experience in a debt collection company where customers were often referred to as debtors. In most cases, managing relationships with this customer segment can sometimes be frustrating. However, if the company applies CX practices, the response rate increases rapidly.
This article summarises podcast episode 43 " Why Planning to Fail Really Means Planning to Win" recorded by CX Insider. For more information, listen to the episode or contact Katie on her LinkedIn profile.
Written by Valentina Svobodova
Full episode transcript
Katie: It was a few days ago, Lloyds, the bank was in the media quite heavily for their online banking services going down, it wasn't really the fact that it went down, but it was the fact that their communication was so terrible. And then there was there was nothing on the back of it. But if they've had been more prepared, if they'd have had the the proactive ability to get in touch with people and say, hey, you know, online service is going to be down for a little while, we're really, really sorry. We'll be back up shortly. Then they could have remediated a significant amount of the bad press that they got. But they were in the news for days and days because of this issue. And that's just one example of many.
Valentina: Today, Greg and I are speaking with Katie Stabler, recently voted one of the top 50 global influencers, we're talking about captive customers, customer service recovery and why it is important to plan to fail. I hope you enjoy this episode. Don't forget to subscribe and follow us on LinkedIn. And with his introduction already long enough, let's get to this episode. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another CX Insider podcast episode. This is Valentina speaking, joined by Greg, and today I invited Katie Stabler, director of customer experience at Cultivate Customer Experience, also known as the Queen of Customer Service, Recovery and Customer Experience Provocateur. So let's discuss some thought-provoking CX ideas today. That was a lot of customer experience in the last 10 seconds. Hello, Greg and Katie, thank you for coming on our broadcast. How are you?
Katie: I am great, thank you, very happy to be here today.
Greg: Yeah, great to be here
Valentina: So, Katie, you got into CX when you were working in the non-profit non for profit sector, a sector in which I would normally guess organizations focus on customer experience because as blunt as it may sound, but I say it for the sake of the argument, I think that quite a few nonprofit businesses actually ask themselves, why should we focus on customer experience? So how did you actually end up within the customer experience when you were working for a nonprofit?
Katie: Yeah, you're totally right. I mean, I am too many years ago to mention now straight out of uni went straight into the not for profit sector, starting in disability organizations and then moving predominantly into debt management. And, you know, I always say that you can't get much more of an organically customer centric organization than a not for profit organization or a charity, because the very premise of them is that they are there to serve their customers or the clients or the service users. So there's a really natural instinct to be customer centric. And you also tend to find that the people who work within these organizations are typically blunt, low paid, but they're there for a reason that they're because they really have a passion and a care for the organization. So they're really in a skin deep. So naturally, they're incredibly customer centric and a metrics measurement and they don't typically come into play that much. You don't really ask how happy were you with our service? Because generally speaking, they do leave the service until there's an end result. So I would say all my roles within the kind of decade that I spend in the not for profit sector, what informally customer experience related that didn't necessarily have a customer experience title, but it was all very much around service design based around uses and providing excellent service throughout the service users need. It wasn't until I moved out of the not for profit sector, still staying in the debt management sector, but moving from gamekeeper to poacher, as it were, and I moved into the corporate world of debt collection that I took on my first explicit customer experience title
Greg: Fascinating. What an interesting career that you've had so far. Really is interesting. What a fascinating way to to look at customer experience and in those particular, well, contrasting industries. Let's say, Katie, one question I had was when we spoke briefly previously, you talked about your approach when working with organizations to improve their customer experience. And I understand the part of your approach or central to your approach is really making sure you speak to many departments and and management versus the service staff. But it'd be great to maybe start with what was some of the challenges that you came across within organizations where you were looking at how they adopt perhaps a new customer experience strategy? You know, what were those challenges that you identified maybe across those different departments and different roles?
Katie: Yeah, so, I mean, if we if we go back to that example of moving into the corporate sector of debt collection, the reason I did that is because it was a fantastic opportunity to really be a voice for the customer and advocate for the customer in an industry which had had historically very little of that. And I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that customer experience, debt collection doesn't necessarily go hand in hand. You wouldn't hear them together. So I guess it also inspires you to find that when I stepped into that organization, despite the fact that they hired me, they were looking for that role and they wanted to start to embed more of a customer centric culture. There were a lot of hurdles within the organization to jump because it was just the very nature of the industry is not facing. So the barriers, where do I start? I mean, to be honest, I think the the the strongest thing really and the first thing to start with is that it's an organization that has got heritage. So, you know, it's over 10 years of age. Given the industry that it was in. It had a lot of historical attitudes and historical-cultural values which don't particularly pay very well with a customer-facing culture. So right from the beginning, the biggest thing and the biggest barrier that faced that, it was really just trying to work with departments across the organization to get a sense of what they felt the customer experience was and what that meant to them, and then how we could convert that really into a language which makes sense to them.
Katie: I mean, going back to the really basics, just so you can really get a picture of what I mean when I'm talking about like old cultural attitudes is when I started the organization that was still people who worked there, who didn't refer to the customer as a customer, but referred to them as a debtor. And that was also part and parcel of the regulation that we were in. So it was a highly regulated industry and it's a highly legally regulated industry. So there's a lot of legal terminology that comes with with that kind of regulation. And all of that just build a sense that the customer was a very, very distant from the organization. They would do almost not considered the the bread and butter of the organization, which most organizations would absolutely consider the customer, the bread and butter. So the biggest challenge to start with was absolutely just trying to get a sense of where were they at culturally and how do we start to progress that.
Valentina: And so what did you do or how did you change the mindset of this corporate culture? Did you face any resistance when you first came into that company?
Katie: Yeah, absolutely, I think one of the one of the things that we recognized quite early days is that if you look across the organization, it's a very large organization, you know, 50, 100 employees, 500 front line contact center staff, big departments with big budgets. And then if you looked at the customer experience department is just initially two people, small budget, and that speaks volumes. So we already showed you that, you know, they're on an early journey. They wanted to develop the customer experience strategy, but very, very early days. So the first thing to do really was, as I mentioned before, you know, get out and speak to those departments and get an understanding of weather where they want to be and then start to work on that customer experience strategy, which very closely ties in to the operational strategy of making sure that absolutely, as far as possible, as many people from different departments were engaged in that strategy design. So making sure that right from the outset at the highest level. The people who needed to be engaged were engaged and they were both in from the beginning, and I'm not saying that different department leads were 100 percent even from the beginning. I certainly wasn't the case. It took time and it took real demonstration of the benefit of customer experience initiatives to really start to change that culture. And that absolutely took a couple of years to get to a position where you really start to recognize that.
Katie: But absolutely having their buying right from day one or starting to get their buy in from day one was absolutely crucial. And the other thing that was we recognized is a problem with our department was that there was a bit of a sense of customer experience being fluffy. And you see this across industries. And I think unless you are really strongly invested in customer experience, this is still a common misconception that it is the fluffy, nice thing that you have in the corner. And it certainly isn't that, you know, customer experience management is often the negative. It's often people pointing out the things that we're doing wrong and working to improve them. But to try and alleviate that philosophy, understanding of customer perception, of customer experience. One of the first things that the senior people in our team went and did was got accredited. So we worked with the Customer Experience Professional Association, went through the CXPA exam. And that was really with an ambition to try and demonstrate across the organization that actually, you know, this isn't a fluffy side that were just ticking a box so that actually there were serious people here to make a difference. And I think trying to change the minds and the perceptions towards customer experience was one of the first steps in our agenda.
Greg: Fantastic. And I guess, Katie, a question I would have from going on some of the things you just said there. One thing that fascinates me always has done is dynamic's for organizations where you have captive customers and how you've touched them. There are a number of examples how people just do not see customer experience as a form of priority in a large number of those dynamics. And I'd say the debt collection size is probably one of those where you've seen it. I'd say you could argue that you also see that across many other very core services to our society, such as government, local government, potentially health care as well in terms of patient experience, not to say all of those are necessarily bad customer experiences, but more often than not, customer experience is not always well and truly at the heart of what they're trying to achieve just because of the dynamic of the business anyway. I guess my question would be, is the what are the obvious benefits to those types of organizations, the ones that do have captive customers? What are the benefits that they can gain by actually really turning that approach on its head and looking at customer experience and trying to achieve a level of excellence in that space?
Katie: I absolutely love the topic of captive customers because it's not something that is really very well discussed. I mean, they exist and we'd like they're out there, but it's not really a well-discussed topic in the industry. And essentially a captive customer is anybody who doesn't really choose to be your customer. So when I worked in the debt collection sector, that was really obvious. Of course, these customers didn't want to be in debt and of course, they didn't want to have a debt collector being somebody who's engaging with them. So that's a really easy way of identifying captive customer. But just like you said, you know, NHS captive customer, utility companies. But you can also think of it in a sense of circumstances. So cost captives, you might not want to fly with Ryanair, for example, but they're the cheapest option. And that's the option that you've got available to you. So in a sense, you're captive by your cost. And the same with locality. You know, to think of your local shop, you might live in a city where you've got an abundance of things on your doorstep and you've got so much choice. Or you may live in more of a rural village. And unless you're going to travel 15 miles out of the way, you're stuck with your local corner shop. And to a degree, that's captive customer. So it's really easy, as you say, to kind of fall into a bit of a sense of comfort, really, that, you know, these customers are probably going to stick with you through thick and thin because they don't really have much choice.
Katie: But the benefits can be just absolutely tenfold in so many ways. So in the debt collection industry, for example, a really key benefit is that I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that people in debt often bury their head in the sand and don't want to deal with it because it's got a misconception of being scared. You know, these big, scary people knocking on the door don't want to deal with that, can't deal with it. If you're providing an excellent customer experience to people who are experiencing debt and they're not frightened to pick up the phone and they know that this flexible solutions, then you're already seeing the benefits because you're actually having engaged customers, which otherwise would be those customers that you may be having to call however many times and may never get to speak to. So just offering a good service and knowing that you're there and there is options, there is flexibility. You straightaway bill of engagement. And the same goes for things like utility companies. You know, if you've got a customer who is suffering with a problem and you've absolutely delivered rubbish customer service over the last few times have called them, what's the likelihood that they're going to call and maybe they'll just continue to suffer and then maybe, I don't know, they'll miss a payment and then maybe the arrears will build again if you can offer a good customer experience and make sure that if a customer does experience a problem and they know they can call you right from the offset, then brilliant. And I mean, I could go on, but just to build on that mix, do you take reputation and regulation so, you know, it doesn't matter what industry really you want positive reputation.
Katie: And let's face it, as customers of any service, we are always so quick now to jump on social media and to leave reviews. And, you know, whether or not you're a debt collection company, utility company, a local corner store or the NHS, you want positive news stories floating around. You don't want horrible news stories of bad experience and bad service. And then I think the biggest thing as well is employee satisfaction. So if you're working in an industry where customers don't have too much of a choice to be your customer. I mean, it's not a great position for an employee to be in if that customer's always an unhappy customer and they're stuck with you and they're just putting up with you over having to deal with you. So from an employee perspective, having a great customer experience means that you're going to have happier employees, more satisfied employees, longer retain staff. The benefits are tenfold. So if you are in an industry for any of those reasons I mentioned, where there's a potential of captivity of your customer, don't take that for granted because there is often choice. Either that customer doesn't pick up the phone, they don't pay you, they save more money and they don't go with Ryanair and they go with someone else. Nothing against Ryanair, by the way. But, you know, there's always options. So you should never rest on your laurels if you've got a captive customer base because there's so many benefits to making sure you've got a good experience and engaged.
Greg: Sure. And I guess the one thing that maybe I could even add to that is just simply that wherever we go now with our business as such, in terms of a customer, we really I think we do have a very similar expectation of customer service, even more so maybe now than ever before, because, you know, whether you're using that, you say a service that you don't have a choice about in the sense of you are a captive customer or not, I think just people's expectations as they expect service to be much higher than it's ever been as well. So, yeah, just absolutely. From that perspective to maybe.
Katie: Yet we've got so much choice now as customers and going back to the example of the local corner store previously, that really may have been your only option and now it still might be convenient, but we have more convenience available to us from the likes of online delivery. So those sectors specifically, they're the ones who really need to watch out with regards to captive customers because the customer experience matters now more than ever.
Valentina: That's great. Katie, by the way, about a thing that you said before a bit earlier about people calling customer experience. Is this like a fluffy thing in their organization? It's so accurate. And it's funny because I see it daily on social media, like in the conversations and the discussions on LinkedIn, like there are some people saying, like, yeah, because my experience is that kind of size thing that marketers put in company branding or let's just put it in our value proposition. You know, let's say we're customer-centric because who is nowadays? And but it's actually a business strategy. And if it was that easy or as easy as people say, well, we wouldn't have a podcast about it
Katie: Lately, and I know it is so true. You know, there is still this huge perception and it's unbelievable almost because you only need to type into Google, you know, return on investment, on customer experience, and you will find like a gazillion examples of great return on investment. But that, I think, is one of the most exciting challenges, I think, for our customer experience, practitioner or leader is that the ability to prove that. So to perhaps go into an organization which is maybe never done it before, maybe does have a misconceived perception around activating customer experience strategy and actually putting resource into it to begin to be able to go through that journey with them and customer experience. It absolutely is a marathon, not a sprint. You know, you can see quick wins and you can show quick benefits. But the reality is it's a long term game, so you've got to be in it for the long run. But when you can start to actually demonstrate the return on the investment and you can start to show how your customer experience strategies are positively impacting the benefit of the organization in so many ways, not just from a customer perspective, but your bottom line, your operational perspective, happier employees, really, the benefits just never stop. But being able to prove that with numbers is often what the organization wants to see. And historically, return on investment has been tricky to share in customer experience because again, it is that long game. So sometimes it takes a little while to be able to prove it. And then there's that whole causation correlation argument, which comes up a lot. But the reality is it's getting easier. And with all of the tech that's out there that enables us to be able to assign monetary value to improvements, it is becoming easier to demonstrate that. And that's the real magic. When you can sit in a boardroom and demonstrate the huge benefits that everybody is partaking in these customer experience initiatives having, then, you know, you can sit there with real pride and come away knowing that you've succeeded.
Valentina: Yeah, you're absolutely right and, you know, there are so many customer experience misconceptions that the other day I was actually thinking about starting to create a memes about customer experience and maybe even creating a different like a separate Instagram account posting this, Memes, because I think it would be quite popular. OK, but moving on, there is the one thing that I really like about your approach is that you have a very stoic mindset. It's this kind of philosophy that I myself have been trying to adopt. And I found that about you in in your book Customer experience, too. And you tell the readers to always have in the back of their minds that things can go wrong no matter how hard you try. And so could you. Could you tell the audience why should why do you think the companies should plan to fail?
Katie: Yeah, I mean, you've basically just said it for me. So you're exactly right. Things can always go wrong. We all aspire for perfection. You know, we have processes in place of supporters. We have quality assurance. We have risk tolerance. All of these things are aimed to make us the best that we can be. But at the end of the day, people can fail us systems can fail us. And we've seen very clearly over the past year and a half that external environments can impactors, i.e. covid. So anything can go wrong at any time. And often organizations are in a place where they can deal with it so they can be reactive, they can manage that. And, you know, typically speaking, historically speaking, that speed in the form of dealing with complaints. But those organizations that I believe really have a strong advantage with customer experience are those who proactively recover the experience. So just like you say, who plan to fail, who have that ready to go on, as soon as something does go wrong, they're able to identify and fix it. I've worked in a few organizations where we have developed a customer experience recovery strategy and it's so easy to do. It's just that you've got to put a bit of time and effort into doing it and then take time and effort into embedding it within your organization. I do actually have a bit of a six stage process, if you'd like me to talk you through that.
Valentina: Oh, yes, absolutely, because that was actually another question that I wanted to ask you after this.
Katie: Well, I mean, it can be done in so many ways and it really does depend on your organization, the size of your organization and the products or the service you deliver. So this is a generalistic approach, but it's certainly something that no matter what size you are or what you what industry you're in, this can apply to pretty much any organization. And first up, the important thing is to identify the issue. So when something goes wrong, if you can, the best case scenario is you identify it before your customer does. I mean, that's the Holy Grail. If you can fix something before it really even impacts your customer or before you customer knows it's impacted them, then you're absolutely in for a winner. But it could be self identified. It could be customer identified. And then you need to move quickly, and this is a speedy process, but you move quickly on the assessment phase, so, OK, you know what the issue is? What is it actually doing? Who's impacting and how is it impacting them? Are we talking about something pretty minimal with low cost or impact or is actually quite significant with high customer impact? Once you have an idea of the issue, then that's the opportunity to get in a room with your peers, with the people who can make decisions and collaborate on a solution.
Katie: And when we were going back earlier talking about how you can kind of jump those hurdles of developing customer centricity or embedding a customer experience strategy, I'll continuously go back to banging the drum of collaboration. The more people that you can get involved in customer experience initiatives then and the more skin in the game that they have, the better embedded they will become. And the the quick the more quickly the culture will start to develop. So particularly from a recovery process, get the people in the room that you need to get into the room and talk about the issue and share how it's impacting the customer. Always have somebody in there who is that strong customer voice who is always saying, but what about the customer? But what about the customer? Because you'll always have somebody on the flip side saying, no, that's too expensive to do it that way. You know, always thinking about the commercial. And that's fine because you absolutely have to have a commercially balanced approach to customer experience recovery. But that's why you need those voices in the room to create that balance and also its knowledge. So you may go into that meeting and talk about an issue that's impacted the customer. And you may know about point one and two, but you may not know about three and four, which is also like hiding in the background.
Katie: So making sure you have the right people in the room who can shed the right light and awareness on the issue and then come up with a solution collaboratively is one of the strongest game changes of a customer experience recovery process. And then after you've gone through that collaboration phase. Time for action remedy, so you know you know what you can do now is the time to go out and do that. So it could be something as simple as contacting your customers to tell them what's happened and apologize. There's a really great saying. He said it now to put it in the notes, maybe, but it's around respond and regret and then a remedy respond to regret remedy. So let the customers know regret is in show apology and then fix it. It could be if it is a significant issue that remedies more than just an apology, you know, you might end up having to go down the realms of compensation or having to fix something that's broken. But whatever the what whatever it is, now is the time to fix it. And then you're fixing it internally, so after you've sorted it for the customer, you've got them back in a position where actually they're no worse off at the beginning, but ideally, the better off now is the time to fix it internally.
Katie: So you know what's gone wrong. How has it gone wrong? Root cause analyze it. What's happened? Where is it being broken? And then make sure it's fixed so that it doesn't happen again. And then lastly, the final piece in the puzzle is to learn, so, you know, you've gone through this process. What have we learned at the end of it? How have our customers responded to our reaction? How have our employees responded to reaction? How have they dealt with it? How have they reacted? And the biggest thing going back to something again, that we mentioned earlier is around that cost benefit analysis of this. So customer experience recovery process isn't necessarily cheap, does cost the organization. If you think even just from a resource perspective, getting people in a room, that's time and money, never mind proactive contact and potentially compensation. So, you know, money is added into this equation. But what cost would have happened should you not have proactively recovered this issue? And the cost of an issue can be significant, know it can be customer complaints. It could be significant reputational damage. If you're a regulated industry, you could have regulatory costs like fines.
Katie: So one of the best things to do at the end of this process is making sure that you're pulling data and analytics on the back of it so that you can really, again, demonstrate return on investment, show the board that this is a process that is like 10 times its weight in gold and then making sure that as you go forward through your journey as an organization, you're learning from this or this process becomes slicker and quicker every time. And you won't have to come up with new solutions in the future because hopefully your problems won't happen again. If they do, you know exactly how to fix and respond to it. So it's a common sense approach, really, but it's just having the ability to formalize it, to make sure that everybody within your operation knows about it and understands it. And to be able to support everybody within your organization with a framework and guidelines say that if something goes wrong, they know how to fix it and they know that they've got operational support or organizational support to do so. They can do it flexibly. They can do it in an empowered nature. And the reason that the whole having to work through hierarchies to get approval, because you've already got that top line approval right from the beginning.
Valentina: Thank you, Kitty, for sharing this with us. I believe our listeners will find this six step framework for customer service cover a super valuable. Also, the fact your emphasis on the importance of planning to file for failure or or just the fact that organizations should acknowledge that think sometimes fails. That happens and it's normal.
Katie: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you remember. I mean, this probably is quite specific to UK folk, but it was a few years ago, Lloyds, the bank was in the media quite heavily for their online banking services going down. And it wasn't really the fact that it went down, but it was the fact that their communication was so terrible. And then there was there was nothing on the back of it. But if they have been more prepared, if they'd have had the proactive ability to get in touch with people and say, you, hey, you know, online service are going to be down for a little while, we're really, really sorry. We'll be back up shortly. Then they could have remediated a significant amount of the bad press that they got, but they were in the news for days and days because of this issue. And that's just one example of many. And there are loads of great examples out there of the opposite, as well as like really great customer experience recovery, which just like it does, every organisation should be looking at examples of great customer experience recovery just to show how it can be done.
Valentina: Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. I've got I've got one last question before we finish this episode, and I always ask, what would you what would you what advice would you give to aspiring civic leaders?
Katie: Oh, now, that is an interesting question, and it's so much I could give, but I think the top thing that I would say is that. You need to be practiced in both customer experience practitioner and show you at least need the foundations, but if you've got the experience of, you know, everything across the customer experience, landscape, from insight and analytics to customer journey marketing to building customer experience strategy from work teams, that's one side of it. The flip side, the other side, which is equally important, is the whole piece, because customer experience in my in my experience, it really is a matter of religion, stakeholder engagement, because you can't run customer experience with just one person. You know, the customer experience, somebody in the business may be accountable for it, but everybody in the business is responsible for it. And the biggest impacting factor of running a successful customer experience strategy, in my opinion, is the ability to engage with stakeholders and really get them on your team. So you need to be somebody that is not only really versed in costumer experience principles, but who is actively able to dig deep into every department snake, get stuck in meetings, make sure your firm part of every conversation, because there always needs to be that customer advocate voice. And yes, you can start to build out with customer champions in the organization and soon there'll be more and more people who are practically doing your job for you. But at the beginning especially, you need to have a really strong ability to lead, not necessarily your team, but department wide, because you need to get people on board with your strategy and that can take a lot of work.
Valentina: Thank you. Thank you very much, Katie. Actually, I just remembered this recent experience that I had when you were talking about different examples of customer experience, recovery and what went wrong a couple of days ago with Mango. I ordered a dress online, came home, didn't fit, and I ordered home pick up return. And of course, as I usually do, I miss the collection date. And I tried to I tried to book another collection date online on the Mango website. And for some reason there was some error on the website and I couldn't do it. So I contacted their customer service team and told them that I couldn't do it and that I need to. What happened in that I need to order another collection date or set up another collection date and they send me an email back. But it was clearly just some kind of a High-Powered response, like automatic response, saying, like, this is how you order like home return home, pick up return. And I'm like, I know, I know how to do it, but I'm telling you that it's not working. And I got quite upset, you know, because I knew that I would have to go to the post office, which is in the town center, and I don't want to do it in my head.
Valentina: I was thinking this is the last time that I ordered anything online, a mango, because I know for sure that if I order something online, especially if it's clothes, I most 90 percent of the time I have to return it and I don't want to return it when it's so inconvenient and inconvenient to even talk to the customer service people. And so I told them that. And and then yesterday they sent me another email apologizing that they were sorry. And they contacted the company and they asked for another collection. They that they will get back to me with it with a set date shortly. And I'm like. OK, things like it was a burden to talk to them and the whole process was a burden, but if they hadn't contacted me back and fixed the issue I for a long time in the future, I would not have considered buying anything online for my go. So good for them.
Katie: Good faith, a really great example. And, you know, you're so right. You know, quite often now when I am looking online retailers, oh, I sometimes won't even go to the retailer for a specific item of clothing. I'll go to the retailer because I know that they have a really slick and smooth returns policy because that kind of experiences is what you want, isn't it? Ease. And I had a very similar experience to you and it's one that I continue to talk about for years. It was with Texaco's and actually for anybody who wants to hear the full story to go on my LinkedIn, there's a video of it. It's it's it reads the full response that I got from this amazing customer experience agent. But really quick snapshot we can tweak that failed to deliver what they promised from an item perspective. Finally, it got to the point where I complained shouldn't have ever got to a complaint stage. But the person who responded, his response was absolutely epic. He had humor. He he wrote a response in the theme tune of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Very interesting. Not everyone might have been done with that. But I found it highly amusing. And also to the point of that response, he answered every question I had. He fixed everything that I intended to be fixed. He refunded and compensated. He went way over and above and he just absolutely made my day. And he's a perfect example of customer experience recovery because he basically picked up an unhappy, frustrated customer, me, and turned me into a raving advocate of them, because I still every year when not memory of my social media, I post his response and share it to the world. And I still talk about it publicly as I am right now to this day. And that's exactly what you want from a customer experience recovery process is to leave your customer in a better position and hopefully keep them coming back for more.
Valentina: Yeah, exactly, that's a good story. OK, thank you. Thank you, Carrie, very much for coming on our podcast. And I hope this is not the last time that you're on our podcast. And we will have opportunities to collaborate in the future.
Katie: Me too.
Valentina: If you're interested in what Katie does, definitely check out her LinkedIn profile and also her latest book called Customer Experience Do, which is available on Amazon, if you like this episode. Don't forget to, like, share comment or subscribe on your preferred channel. And I will see you next Monday.
