I was recently visiting with a friend of mine who manages a small regional hospital. I was venting to him about a bad customer service experience that I had recently received from the health care industry. He explained that next to patient safety their customer service is the most important thing to his hospital.
He informed me that the most important part of their customer service was correcting mistakes properly after they occur. Customers who had visited his hospital and experienced some type of problem, but had it addressed in a timely and proper manner rated their experience with the hospital more favorable than the customers who had dealings with the hospital and didn’t experience any problems at all.
His management team created a term, Service Recovery, and an action plan to address mistakes made by his staff. He concluded that they now see these mistakes as an opportunity to offer exceptional customer service.
One thing we can be assured of is we will make mistakes as we deal with our customers everyday, but I hope we can take the approach of the company mentioned above and look at these mistakes as opportunities to leave a lasting impression of exceptional customer service.
Learn from the mistakes of others–you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself – Martin Vanbee
He who makes no mistake never makes anything. -English Proverb
Have a great day….Louis
Great blog Louis!