How to Embrace the Power and Possibility of Service Recovery
A guest blog by Stefan Ravalli (from 2020, reposted here from my old blog)
I’m out for dinner with my wife at a really nice restaurant and everything is fine. The flavors of the food and drink are on point and so is the timing of their delivery and the knowledge and efficiency of the team. Everything is fine until a server spills something on me. Now things have the potential to go from fine to truly wonderful. Wait, what? Am I a sadist? Do I love signalling how gracious I can be while someone is grovelling? Or maybe I’m a freeloader excited at all the free stuff I might get.
As much as I love free stuff, what I love even more is service that’s better than fine. And that tends to happen more often if there’s a glitch. Because beneath all the refinement offered by even the highest, most luxurious service experience, something intangible will be lacking if you have a sense that the team is simply following a tight protocol.
This is why the best reviews and highest rates of customer loyalty emerge from service scenarios where something went wrong and the organization recovered extraordinarily. The key word is extraordinarily — as in, they remedied the situation with unprecedented care and attention. Everyone makes the occasional mistake and trying to make up for it is considered the bare minimum in service. Can you recover in ways that go beyond what is expected?
This article looks at that moment of service recovery and to use it as an opportunity to really blow a customer away. We’re going to look at why they can be so magical and the key ingredients of that magic like trust, care, spontaneity, singularity and authenticity. In other words, a service recovery that definitely doesn’t make the customer feel like they’re being put through yet another cold, calculated protocol.
Service Recovery Situations Will Remind You of What You’re Really Selling
Why are beautifully-recovered service experiences often considered the best ones? Because service isn’t technical, it’s emotional. Any service-oriented business is in the market of emotions. And customer journeys that dip and recover offer the most memorable emotional arc. Emotionally-charged reviews and stories to friends are more likely to follow from such a scenario.
Customer loyalty is more likely to emerge from a good recovery because the organization basically stress-tested itself in front of them and revealed that not only are they awesome when things are good, but they’re even better when things inevitably go wrong. They can be trusted to handle anything.
Even if you’re at first annoyed by the service error, there’s an excitement that fills the air — the team is forced to go off script. They now have to genuinely emote that they care, rather than just recite the polite-sounding lines that they repeat dozens of times a night. Whatever happens next feels unique, in-the-moment and attentive to you as an individual. You didn’t get the pre-packaged experience where every interaction is simply a checkmark on a to-do list. A service experience that falters and recovers feels more personal — you are getting an experience that is singular to you. When things go wrong is when the service team becomes spontaneous and adaptive. And the experience begins to feel more authentic — you get to see the quality of humans they are rather than just the quality of the systems they have in place.
That’s why truly effective service recovery can’t just be a gesture of, “What can we do for you beyond what we normally offer?” It has to be driven by, “How can we compassionately see your unique struggle and offer you something tailored to your truest needs?”
Build A Business of Empowered Humans
What do people love about their local hangout? There is no script being followed by the people serving there. Just real, in-the-moment connection. Kindness and goodwill that occurs spontaneously, because you, the customer are valued as an individual human by other individual humans. How do you recreate this on a larger scale? Start by empowering your employees to be individual humans.
So I say have a solid service recovery protocol…so that it can be broken. Obviously you need prepared strategies for meeting the uncertainties of a shaky situation, but you also need to trust your employees to use their good judgment and creativity to recover in ways that are beyond what you normally do. Protocols and policies are nothing in comparison to what your people on the frontline have learned (or intuited) will delight their customers on an individual level. Your employees are more likely to do the intelligent thing when they are given the respect, space and trust to do so. It’s being bogged down with policies that make them freeze up and not know how to act.
This autonomy allows your team to tick the boxes of singularity (“They sought to please me in a way that they wouldn’t have for anybody else; therefore they care about me as an individual — I matter”) and authenticity (“The person serving me did what they wanted to do, not what company policy was compelling them to do; they aren’t just avoiding trouble — they care about me”). And I guarantee this autonomy provides greater employee loyalty since it makes service an interesting, creative experience that engages the highest levels of their problem solving skills. After all, what’s a huge complaint about service work: “it’s dull, repetitive and doesn’t allow me to use my God-given intelligence.”
How Extraordinary Can You Be When Things Are Going Well?
I’ve often joked about having a service company that deliberately engineers constant mishaps just to always have the opportunity to heroically recover — not a sustainable model in any way, please don’t try it. But can you be heroic, just generally, and not as an act of penance? Can this sense of spontaneity and personal attention be baked into a company’s service culture without the need for catastrophes?
Yes. It’s very valuable, gratifying, and inspiring to the team to enable them to start being thoughtful and spontaneous as a general practice, no matter how things are going. Some companies make a habit of offering their customers unexpected, kind things that they didn’t have to. This requires allowing your team to develop relationships to your customers and gathering more information about who they are beyond just the context of their business relationship with you. Maybe they’ll off-handedly mention some unfulfilled wish with no expectation that you can help them with it. That’s the perfect opportunity to shock and delight them by delivering.
Hospitality environments make this easy because there is more opportunity for social conversation and what I call “wholesome eavesdropping.” When I was a server/manager, I used to listen in on guests saying things like, “It sucks, they don’t have my brand of cigarettes anywhere in this town.” I’d ask a smoker where to get them and deliver a freakout-inducing gift to them. Other service environments don’t make this as easy, but it is important to always ask yourself where you can allow more space to, as Danny Meyer would say, “Collect the dots that you can later connect.”
Being unnecessarily extra kind and caring is likely to reduce the number of complaints. Psychological studies show that kids are more likely to act out and seek attention when their parents don’t give them validation during periods when they’re being well-behaved. Skilled parents know to constantly check in on their kids and say, “I just want to let you know that you guys are awesome and so well-behaved. What kind of cool stuff are you up to right now?”
Makes total sense, right? Kids want attention from their parents and if they know they’re only going to get it when they act out, then they misbehave. They’re choosing to pursue negative attention because, subconsciously, they feel like it’s better than no attention at all. Is there much difference in the psychological dynamics of the client-company relationship? They come to you with their needs, expect care and attention and make noise when they don’t get it.
Start Celebrating Your Team…Especially Their Mistakes
The same principle goes for managing employees. What if, as a leader, you gave your team positive attention when they continued to do little, routine things well? Do you think they’d be less likely to subconsciously seek your attention by breaking something? Try adding that to the cauldron and see.
Let’s raise the bar a little: start celebrating them when they make mistakes. If it hasn’t already, I’m expecting this part of the article to trigger thoughts like,
“Does this really work?”
“Celebrating mistakes? Really?”
Why not? Show me one organization that prevented them through punishment.
Another thing that makes employees freeze up is the fear of who’s going to get blamed and punished. Their preoccupation with consequences takes them away from handling the in-the-moment situation properly. They’ll be more likely to hide mistakes from management so valuable data is lost.
Now, this principle doesn’t mean you’re encouraging mistakes — that would be irresponsible. This doesn’t mean you don’t tell your team when they’ve dropped the ball. You’re just focusing your care on how they recovered from the mistake and what they learned from it. Were they smart, creative and caring in how they made up for it? Did they learn and grow?
In her iconic book Mindset, Carol Dweck unlocked the psychology of encouraging students, employees and competitive athletes to constantly improve their performance. She discovered that successful people were trained to handle mistakes. When you can love mistakes, you can love the learning process. And when you love the learning process, your growth is unstoppable (hence she termed this the Growth Mindset).
As a leader, encouraging your team into a Growth Mindset is simple: validate their progress; not their pre-existing talent (that creates ego, complacency and fear of imperfection); not their absence of mistakes (that makes them afraid of learning); and definitely not their repetition of mistakes.
That’s how you celebrate mistakes — by cheerleading the learning they inspire. Growth is the only thing that really needs energy and attention. That’s how you effectively celebrate mistakes: by highlighting and embracing the opportunities they created for growth. This sounds so simple, but so many service-based organizations teach their people to become allergic to mistakes. And what happens? They keep making them, because they become scared of looking at them and addressing how they can learn to not make them.
But I completely understand: This is not easy for the people (and even the leadership) involved in the service experience to deal with. Mistakes hurt egos. That’s why I tend to be so emphatic about personal practices that help with mental and emotional management. Self-compassion helps to enrich mistake-embracing tendencies.
After all, why do we hate making mistakes? Because they feel uncomfortable. And those feelings make our minds tell false stories about our deficiency and low worth, making the whole process of mistake-based learning a plague to avoid. That’s why meeting mistakes head-on is not something you can expect anyone to naturally be good at. In fact, even the highest performers can be the worst at handling mistakes. In Mindset Dweck gives account after account of great performers falling from grace because their egos made them allergic to the mistake-based learning process.
Basically, being able to make mistakes is a learned skill. So there is one mindfulness-based practice I want to leave you with that you and your team can make a regular practice to embrace the inevitable mistakes with much more moxy. Your customers will thank you — and you’ll thank yourself for practicing this because when you take the unmanageable pain out of service, it becomes joyful.
Every time you make a mistake and feel the inevitable emotional pain of it, practice Self-Compassion in four simple steps:
- Call it. So many people don’t acknowledge the fact that they’re struggling. It is a complete gamechanger to simply notice that you’re uncomfortable and say to yourself, “This is a moment of struggle. I’m uncomfortable because I messed up. Everyone feels this way when they make a mistake. It’s natural and human.”
- Notice. How do you physically feel in your body? Tightness in the chest? Hot and electric everywhere? How are you breathing? Shallow and quick?
- Inquire. Deepen and slow your breath. Bring the same attention and care to the uncomfortable feelings as you would a customer you want to dazzle. Ask yourself, “What do I need right now? Reassurance? Validation? A sense that I’m capable?” And then set a positive intention, “May I give myself what I need.”
- Serve yourself. Tell yourself something kind and understanding — like a friend would tell you. Give yourself the care that you would normally outsource. Say something to yourself like, “Everyone makes mistakes, because everyone’s human. This bothers you because you care — and that’s what great professionals do, they care.”
This takes some practice since we are not in the habit of being kind to ourselves. Practicing this regularly completely transformed my relationship to myself and to service. I generally felt calmer, happier, more energized, and more driven to take on challenges. It’s also now a much quicker practice for me. It doesn’t have to be a plodding step-by-step process. It’s ultimately just meant to create a feeling of care and compassion to yourself and once you can channel that on demand, you’ll be ready for anything.
Now you’re ready to get out there, make mistakes, learn from them and leave a cheering crowd of delighted customers in your wake.
About Stefan
Stefan Ravalli’s helps professionals and organizations tap into the fullest power of the service opportunity. His Serve Conscious project merges his background in hospitality management with his training as a meditation teacher, mindfulness coach, and wellness content creator. He teaches techniques that empower professionals to build truly effective relationships with customers — and themselves! By managing the inner challenges of work life and bringing mindful service principles everywhere, we can truly thrive and grow as people and businesses.
