Proactive Experience Recovery (PXR)

*Originally posted 26th May 2017 - Updated for 2020*

How would you like to completely eliminate customer complaints? Sounds good right? Well, you probably can’t, not in the near future anyway so get that out of your head right now. We can, however, get close to eliminating all complaints by using proactive complaint identification, communication and compensation.

In short, if something goes wrong in an experience it should be identified and compensated before the customer even has the chance to complain. I refer to this as ‘Proactive Experience Recovery’ or ‘PXR’.

So here’s an example – when your flight lands late, wouldn’t it be cool if you got an SMS right after you land saying?:

There is a simple 4 step process to practicing PXR*

• Identify
• Monitor
• Communicate
• Compensate

* To start we have to go in with the assumption that your experience isn’t complete crap anyway – if that is the case you need to fix that first. PXR is for things that sometimes unavoidably go wrong not for things you could just fix in the experience.

Identify:

First, you need to map out an ideal experience. If everything went well perfectly what would it look like to your customer? Then at every point in the journey/experience/process (however you prefer mapping) what are the things that could go wrong? Once you’ve got these you need to look at the dissatisfaction drivers that actually cause complaints. Not all dissatisfaction is created equal. Work on the things that trigger complaints first. Late travel arrivals, late deliveries, long wait times, service outages, wrong charges and so on. You probably already have the capability to do so.

Monitor:

Monitor the experience IN the experience. Doing this means that in the experience, in real-time, in the moment, you can react when things go wrong. Before you can react though, you need a set of rules and thresholds. If we look at a late flight, how late is late enough to piss off a customer? 1 minute, 10 minutes, 1 hour? Set those thresholds and create rules that will automatically trigger the next step.

Communicate:

Tell the customer you know things didn’t go well before they even get a chance to complain. Immediately. Email might be too slow in today's fast-paced world but you can send an SMS, make phone calls, reach out over Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram…and depending on your customer even Snapchat maybe?

Let’s say you’re a gig ticket company. Let’s say I’m an avid Snapchat user (I’m not) and I already engage with your brand on Snapchat. Let's say you’re monitoring gig ticket dispatch and delivery as you know late delivery is a big source of inquiry and complaint volume. Let's say I’m a Justin Beiber fan (I’m not) and Let's say you can see that my Justin Bieber concert tickets didn’t get dispatched when they were supposed to. Don’t just wait for them to come late and risk me being upset and complaining. Send a Snapchat, leave me a video message “Hey James, your gig tickets were supposed to be sent out today but there has been a little delay, I’m personally going to send them out first thing in the morning and I’m going to automatically refund 20% of the ticket price back to your card right now as an apology.”

These communications can really help re-set and manage experience expectations. The idea of the proactive communication is so they don’t have to go through the extra aggravation of calling you – tell them you know things didn’t go well.

You could even communicate face-to-face and super low tech.

Compensate:

Next, you need to figure out how much this is worth to you. The cost of not having a complaint is measurable, the goodwill that this proactive resolution will provide may not be as easy to quantify. It might be worth a 10% future discount (to encourage them to use you again), it might be a 20% automatic refund, it might be a 100% automatic refund, it might be freed drink or meal, it might be something else completely but whatever it is, it needs to be automatic and easy for the customer to use/redeem. Don’t make the customer apply or work for the refund just put the money back on the card. Don’t make them have to download a voucher, put the code in the SMS or message or credit their account with them having to do anything.

For God’s sake – don’t send them a feedback survey afterward. You already know it wasn’t good and you’ve worked to put it right…don’t go and piss them off again and make your cool proactive resolution seem disingenuous, as if you’ve only done it for a good score, not because you care.

And that’s it. Identify, Monitor, Communicate, Compensate.

I don’t have any stats to show how much this will reduce complaints because I’m pretty sure there aren’t any companies doing this…Amazon might be doing a bit of this. Help me out if you know of any. All I have is a hunch and a pretty decent understanding of how customers tick.

You will be spreading goodwill to beyond just the people who complain as not everyone will complain, some may just leave so there are some quantifiable returns in the measurement of complaint reduction and some that might we unquantifiable like good will.

Only 4% of dissatisfied customers will complain, and 91% of the remaining customer will simply leave and never come back*. If you are only fixing problems for the 4% that complain you are missing a massive opportunity. 

Rules

There are 2 rules to keep in mind by the way.

1. The problems have to be something you can actually monitor.
2. The solutions have to be something you can do 100% of the time.

Here are some more examples:

Cable Provider: WhatsApp

Cab App: Push Notification

Hotel: Face-to-face

“Hi, welcome to the XYZ Hotel, I’m so sorry you had to wait in line for so long, we just had an entire coach of people turn up just before you, I completely understand that is the last thing you want after a long trip. Here is a voucher for a complimentary meal in our bar and grill, I hope that helps you relax tonight”

Online Retail: Phone Call

“Hi Mr. Dodkins, it’s Helen from OnlineRetainer.com you’re supposed to get a package from us today at 1pm but my system has just notified me that this isn’t going to happen. Our driver has GPS and our system noticed that he was too far away to be able to make it to you for that time. I’ve given him a call to see what’s what and there’s been a car accident, the motorway is closed and he’s stuck there for now. You’ll still get your package today but he will deliver the package at 5pm instead unless you’d like to push it back until tomorrow. Either way, I’ll send an SMS to confirm but I just wanted to ring you and let you know not to wait in at home anymore. I’ve also credited your account with ￡10 as an apology, you can use that for whatever you like on the website. Sorry again, hope you love your gear when you finally get it this evening’

You could take it further than just things that would trigger a complaint to things that would make customers annoyed but not enough to complain. This would depend on how much positive feeling and goodwill you’d like to create for your customers – for example, if a customer has called you and had to wait on hold for more than 30 minutes you let the customer know that wasn’t cool and compensate somehow. It can even work for hyper-personalisation, like if an airline knows I prefer an aisle seat but notices that I got a middle seat and so on, but in all honesty, we probably don’t need to go this far just yet.

PXR won’t work for every possible problem and complaint but it will work for a lot of them – Figure out what upsets customers, measure and monitor those things, proactively look for failures, immediately contact customers telling them that you know it went wrong and then compensate somehow even if it’s just a small gesture. Some kind of gesture goes a long way to change how a customer feels about a particular situation ESPECIALLY when they have had to ask for it.

If you want to know more about Proactive Experience Management (PXR) and how to implement it in your organization, connect with me here on LinkedIn, drop me an email at [email protected]

Talk soon,

James

*4% stat source: 1Financial Training services.