TAKE CHARGE: REMEMBER THAT MANY TIMES THE CUSTOMER DOES NOT EXPECT THEY TO BE INFALLIBLE, BUT THEY KNOW HOW TO ASSUME AND REMEDY THEIR ERRORS.
'I have a cleaning services business. I committed the serious lack of abandoning them for four days in a row. Dirty offices, accumulated garbage, dissatisfied secretaries and very annoying people is what remains… Can I get a client back after an error? What do I have to do? ' RODOLFO KENDHALL.
Sometimes it is feasible to recover a lost customer, although organizations are more likely to recover a customer when they have not yet decided to stop buying from them. (See Retrieve Clients, Entrepreneur, April 2000.)
When a customer decides to stop buying from you, it means that their anger is advanced and getting it back will not only be more difficult, but more costly.
The most important thing is to know the source of your discomfort. According to their own research, customers experience four different costs caused by poor service (breach of commitments) and they are the source of their discomfort:
1. ECONOMIC COSTS
Loss of money, additional investment of money, loss of customers, jobs, business, overtime pay, etc. In your case, your clientele may have had to hire someone else to clean up those days, and that came at an additional cost.
2. TIME
They had to set aside a certain period to resolve the breach.
3. SOCIAL
If the service that you did not provide negatively impacted customers, suppliers or business employees, a cost is registered in the image of the company, which is difficult to quantify and even more to pay.
4. EMOTIONAL
The anger, discomfort, and frustration it causes your client are also significant, albeit intangible, costs. All this will weigh on the decision of your clientele.
Sometimes the client experiences only some of the costs, although the most common is that they are several, if not all. For this reason, recovery must be aimed at reducing or reducing the cost of the customer's experience. If you absorb some of these, the reason for changing providers is cushioned or disappears. Remember that many times the client does not expect him to be infallible, but to know how to remedy his mistakes.
In the case of this cleaning company, what you need is to offer something more to your client to regain their trust. Introducing yourself personally to the person who hired your services and offering satisfactory explanations is only the first step. They must be given a compensation scheme that could involve:
OFFER THE SERVICE AGAIN
With a free trial period, or at a lower cost than usual, so you feel that you are going to get something by hiring them again.
OFFER A CONTRACT
Like the normal one they always handle with customers, but with a guarantee clause specifying that the incident will not happen again and committing to absorb the costs that this implies, if it should happen again.
BOTH OPTIONS
Of course, any of them will imply a cost for your business. But the cost of running out of customers or letting the company's bad name run is much higher.
If you can get the customer back, remember that you could never look bad on him again, because it would be practically impossible for them to hire you again. Once they can forgive, but nothing more.
