A little over a week ago I posted about a customer discovering a bug on the
WonderProxy website, and
how I handled the situation. I wanted to speak to that once more, in part as a follow up based on feedback I received, and in part about why I didn’t panic that a customer had found a rather critical problem in my website.
First, the follow up.
The overwhelming opinion is that I did okay in handling the issue, but I could have done better. Namely, I should have emailed the customer as soon as I confirmed the issue. That way the customer would be in the loop throughout the entire process. The fact that resolving the issue only took a few minutes was a mitigating factor, but really I failed to keep the customer in the loop, and that earlier notification could have allowed them to better plan use of my service.
In the future, I’ll behave differently. I have no intention of setting up auto-responders, but I can, and will, do better in terms of keeping customers in the loop.
Second, not Panicking.
Customer Service is a big topic, there’s a tonne of research out there on customer satisfaction, their interaction with customer service, etc. The body of the research shows that customers who have problems that are resolved to their satisfaction are on the whole happier than customers who had no problems at all. Keeping that in mind, I didn’t panic. This was an opportunity to have a very happy customer, rather than a crisis.
The research I read was admittedly based on hotels (with an interesting anecdote about discovering a customer who over something like 207 nights of stay had not yet paid for one, as every time they complained about something and the night was comp’d). But the data resounds well with me. We’ve all got a plethora of customer service horror stories, and precious few great ones. As a result, those great customer service experiences are carried with us, and often shared with friends and colleagues.
While I don’t intend to go as far as to introduce bugs into the system simply so I can fix them in a fantastic manner, I will embrace every opportunity I get to show a customer great service.
