Apologizing Does NOT Get to the Root Cause

Making the Most Of Customer Complaints - WSJ.com:

Here’s a good article from the WSJ about customer focus and quality
improvement:

“All too often, companies have customer service sort
out the immediate problem, offer an apology or some compensation,
and then assume all is well. This approach is particularly damaging
because it does nothing to address the underlying problem,
practically guaranteeing similar failures and
complaints.”

Of course, if you’re just putting the fire out without looking for
a root cause or for prevention, you’re going to have the same
problem occur again. It seems that many organizations respond to
each problem (overreact even) as if it’s a “special cause” when the
problem is really a “common cause” that’s a result of some
underlying process or system. The article continues:

“The chief aim of managers in service recovery is to
help the company learn from service failures so it doesn’t repeat
them. Learning from failures is more important than simply fixing
problems for individual customers, because process improvements
increase overall customer satisfaction and thus have a direct
impact on the bottom line.”

That starts sounding like a Lean mindset — a ” Lean Solutions”
approach even. There are many examples in that book (including
Fujitsu) where companies were able to turn complaints into the
starting point for a real process improvement process. The goal of
any complaints department should be to help initiate improvements
that drive future complaints to zero.

If employees aren’t allowed to help improve the process, they may
take a turn for the worse after getting frustrated with the
continued complaints:

“Even though complaining customers represent an
opportunity to fix problems and improve satisfaction, alienated
employees often see them as the enemy. In a study of a major
European bank, employees in Switzerland consistently indicated that
they did not consider reports of missing account statements to be
complaints. As one said: “These things happen. There is nothing we
can do about that.”

One way to keep employees engaged and serving customers is to give
them some freedom:

“Ritz-Carlton, for example, the luxury brand of
Marriott International Inc., authorizes personnel at the front
desks of its hotels to credit unhappy customers up to $2,000
without asking a supervisor’s approval. On the other hand, in one
of our consulting projects, a client reacted very negatively to
this approach, claiming that such a policy would be too expensive
for his company. We replied that the high cost of poor service is
exactly what makes this system work so well: It forces management to eliminate service
failures in the first place.”

Just recently, I complained to a Hampton Inn I was staying at in
Illinois (and was booked to stay at again for multiple weeks). The
“high-speed” wireless internet service was the furthest thing from
high-speed. I complained the first night and the hotel was unable
to fix anything. The second night, I called the 800 tech support
number and they were unable to fix anything. The third and final
night, I received this in my room after complaining and pointing
out that I’d have to choose a different hotel for my future weeks
if they didn’t have good internet access:

It’s a bear that says “Beary Sorry” with the Hampton Inn logo on
it. Oh, and there was a nice (I suppose) handwritten personal
apology note. OK, warm fuzzy feeling. But it did nothing to fix the
problem. It did nothing to say what they were going to do to
improve the internet access for the next stay.

In fact, having these bears laying around implies that they have so
many customer service complaints that they had the special bears
made up. It’s too bad they can’t invest that cash and time into
improving the actual service. I’m not going to stay there again
just because they gave me a bear.

After canceling my future reservation, I got a voice mail from
someone at the hotel. They apologized (again!) for the problem and
said they were taking one night’s worth of charges off of my bill.
OK, great, they are saving my employer some money. But that doesn’t
tell me what they’re doing to fix the problem and doesn’t make any
sort of case for why I should stay there again.

Basically, they just threw away $129 of revenue. If they had talked
to me live and asked what I wanted, “give me a refund” would have
been the last thing out of my mouth. You see this a lot on the TV
show “Kitchen
Nightmares” (now into it’s second season). Some manager is
comping guests when there’s a problem — free appetizer, free
dessert, etc. As the WSJ article (and my experience) showed — it’s
doing nothing to actually fix the problem if you’re giving away
free desserts every night instead of fixing the underlying
problem.

Do you have similar experiences, as a customer or in your
business?