Great Customer Service and Problem Resolution

Having spent my entire career in the hospitality industry, working for companies that pride themselves on great customer service, I tend to sometimes scrutinize how other organizations handle this aspect of their business - from grocery stores to doctors' offices. It's not to say the companies I have worked for are perfect - no company is. Sure, we all strive to be perfect. As the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi once said, "Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence." When it comes to great service, I have always believed that it is not about being perfect, it's how you react and respond when opportunities arise that makes the biggest difference in the eyes of the customer. And I'd like to share a recent story that illustrates, quite perfectly, how companies can overcome problems by going above and beyond to make it right - and usually, it doesn't cost them a dime to do so.

My older son's baseball team made the online edition of the local paper for winning its little league championship, along with the team photo seen at the top of this blog. There was no guarantee it would ever make the print edition and just being in an online edition was cool enough - more than I ever got as a kid! But as luck would have it - a couple of weeks ago, it did. After driving to a few local stores to try to track it down, I gave up and figured I would call the paper the next day and ask how I could obtain a copy.

However, when I got home that evening, upon further inspection (the photo, above, of the paper was shared by another parent) my son had been cropped out of the photo. It was clear to see what happened. He was on the end on the bottom right and he made the photo unsymmetrical so they must've tried to crop it to fit the column width and as a result, made the photo square, leaving him off. Now, this is not the end of the world, but for a 9-year-old kid who was the only one cut out, due to an editing error, well let's just say it was a big deal to him.

I was the Sports Editor of my college newspaper at Towson University and I spent many years as a freelance sportswriter in the Washington, DC area after graduating college. So I certainly understand how, especially when on a deadline, these things happen when trying to properly lay out the paper and make things fit. Nevertheless, my son was upset and I decided to email the Sports Editor of the paper to see if anything could be done.

She replied right away and said she didn’t oversee youth sports or community news but copied the person who did. That person then replied right away and immediately apologized for the error and informed me that the photo would be re-run the following week (it is a weekly paper). She then asked me for my address and told me she would mail me several copies to my house so I wouldn't even have to worry about tracking one down on my own. I thought, "wow - this is great, problem solved!" I was thrilled and I knew my son would be as well. As I said, problem solved and on to the next thing. But then, later that night, the graphic design person of the newspaper who made the mistake (I presume), also sent me a very nice apology note along with a high-resolution PDF copy of the original page with the corrected photo along with a PDF of the front page as well. I was extraordinarily happy of course and used the masthead to create a hybrid image for my son for printing and framing (above). Needless to say, the paper went above and beyond on multiple fronts, including re-running it the following week (plus mailing me copies) and also sending me the two PDF images.

One thing I’ve learned, especially working at The Ritz-Carlton and Marriott as well as Carnival - plus being the Disney fan that I am:

Great customer service is not the absence of problems. It is when you take accountability for a problem then go above and beyond to fix it in such a way that leaves the person even a bigger fan than they already were to begin with.

I've actually blogged about this before, and shared an example in Hospitality Vitae, a blog run by a colleague of mine, Leticia Tavares, of an instance at Walt Disney World that left me blown away as well. The point is, sometimes the greatest examples of customer service start out as problem-resolution stories. And this one is another such example. So, now I have the PDF image of the paper and, as promised, last week, I received a few physical copies of the paper itself waiting for me in my mailbox when I returned home from work (pictured right). It is safe to say, as I stated above - problem resolution, when done right, leaves the person a bigger fan and advocate than they originally were - that is exactly what happened in this case. Not only was I extremely pleased with the final outcome, but I was also personally touched by how the staff seemed to genuinely care and show concern for their original error, which now seems incredibly minor based on how they resolved the issue.

This paper not only has a new subscriber, but they have a "cheerleader" of sorts as well, as I have taken every opportunity to share this story, including leveraging this blog to do so.

Tell me, have you ever encountered such an act of above-and-beyond service when it comes to problem resolution? Did it leave you feeling the same way I felt? Let me know in the comments!