Lessons About Service Recovery

Last week, on my way back from client trips in Europe and Africa, British Airways could have been the hero of my entire trip. Instead, they violated one of the most important principles in customer service:

Own the resolution to the customer’s problem, even when you didn’t cause it.

Many of you may have seen the fires at Heathrow that stranded a quarter of a million passengers. I was one of them.

Businesses experience issues that impact customers all the time; we all know that. How you act in those situations can either build life-long loyalty or create raving detractors forever. Guess which one I am? I couldn’t even score BA on the metrics we use for service recovery because they failed on the basics:

1. Poor, incomplete communication: I received a cryptic message from BA telling me not to come to the airport. No details. No flight information. No additional communication.

2. Being hard to do business with: Phone lines were all down. Chat was down. Emails bounced. Literally, BA was impossible to reach. Great companies have a contingency plan for when they have a wide-spread emergency. This wasn’t BA’s first widespread, epic emergency, and they failed…. again.

3. Blindly inconveniencing your customer: My flights were randomly rebooked, some were not rebooked at all, and then randomly rebooked again before being cancelled. Rinse and repeat.

4. Never following up: BA never followed up with communication on anything. No notes from their leadership. No details on the state of their operations. Everything I learned, I learned from the media. Ouch.

5. Never acknowledging the problems caused for your customers: BA never acknowledged the severity of the issues I experienced. No empathy. No apologies for the disruptions. No concern for my trip.

One of the cardinal rules for customer crisis management is to get communication right, quickly. Be thoughtful, detailed, comprehensive, clear, apologetic, and follow-up urgently when you have more information. When companies have been through a public crisis before (in this case the Iceland Volcano eruption in 2010 that disrupted air travel for weeks), customers expect you to be prepared for the next crisis. Anything less is a failure that will have long-lasting brand impact because you have eroded consumer trust in your operation and your leadership.

The best brands in the world know that customer trust is the most valuable asset they have. Nothing increases consumer trust and loyalty faster than when you perform brilliantly when your customer is in distress, and you have teams trained in impeccable service recovery.

I’ve always flown BA, but after this experience, I will go out of my way to fly other carriers even with a transfer. That’s what consumers do when they can’t trust you. This time it was BA, but this could be any brand in any industry. When you lose trust, you lose customers.