Turning lemons into lemonade: how mistakes can cement your customer relationships

Last month, after living in denial for over a year, I finally decided that it was time to accept the fact that I couldn’t read. Well, I could read; I just couldn’t read small print. No, that’s not quite accurate. I could read small print; I just couldn’t read small print while wearing my contact lenses. Middle age, it seems, waits for no one.

I paid a visit to my local opthamologist, who informed me that I am an extra-challenging case. You see, in addition to being quite nearsighted and the new development of presbyopia, I also suffer from astigmatism. Now, multifocal lenses for the aging population are fairly common; toric lenses for astigmatism are quite common. Toric multifocals? Not so much. But I digress, because this isn’t a story about my new (and fabulous) contacts; it’s a story about a mistake that turned me into a loyal customer for life.

Because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to wear my contacts every day, I ordered a pair of bifocals as well. I picked out some lovely frames, the optician measured… whatever it is they measure in order to figure out where to place the near-vision correction, and I planned to get my shiny new glasses in about a week.

A week later, I received a call from one of the women who works in the optical department; we’ll call her Kristy, because that ‘s her name. I was conducting a training session that day, so she left me a message to tell me that there was a problem with the lenses, and she’d have to reorder them. This meant that I’d be waiting at least another week for my new glasses.

When I called Kristy back to ask what the problem was, she did something unexpected: she admitted that the problem was her fault. When she put the lenses into the cutting machine in order to trim them to fit the frames, she failed to secure them properly. The end result was that the lenses couldn’t be secured in the frames.

Without any stonewalling, and without any excuses, Kristy took full responsibility for the error. Was I still annoyed? You betcha. But it kinda takes the wind out of my angry sails when someone takes responsibility for her mistakes. So I thanked her for being honest, and asked her to put a rush on the re-order, which she willingly agreed to do. Then she thanked me – repeatedly – for being so nice about it. As if that wasn’t enough, Kristy followed up with me by phone every few days to keep me updated on the status of the order.

When the new lenses arrived (ten very long days later), I had some scheduling issues that made it difficult for me to get there before closing time. So guess what Kristy did? She offered to stay at the office until I could get there. She said that after the problems I’d had, it was the least she could do.

I’m betting that I wouldn’t have gotten that kind of consideration from a large eyecare chain, for several reasons:

• Large companies have Big Books o’ Policies that dictate every move they make; employees are discouraged from varying from The Book.
• A large company probably wouldn’t have even bothered to contact me; they would’ve waited until I called them, and then I probably wouldn’t have gotten the full story (I’m really not biased against big business, but I know that large companies breed bureaucracy and impersonalization).
• Large companies likely don’t treat their employees as well as The Eye Center clearly does; let’s face it, the CEO of your average Fortune 500 probably hasn’t even seen most of the people who work there. That being the case, said CEO certainly can’t have any kind of working relationship with the employees, which it turn makes it easier to ignore the needs of those employees.

That last bullet point is the single most important predictor of customer loyalty, in my opinion. Unhappy employees don’t go out of their way to give the customer a delightful experience. Unhappy employees don’t generally take full responsibility for their mistakes and then do whatever is necessary to fix them. Unhappy employees typically don’t care if their employer loses a customer (or 1000 customers), because unhappy employees typically don’t care about their employers’ success.

So what’s the moral of this very long story? First, that astigmatism becomes a real pain in the bum once you get past 40. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. On second thought, I suppose that’s not a moral so much as it is a warning, so let’s try that again: the moral of the story is that treating your employees well is one of the keys to building customer loyalty and a successful organization. If you treat your employees like faceless, nameless drones; if you make them feel insignificant and unimportant; if you treat them as costs rather than as assets… well, then you’re missing a big opportunity to evangelize your business from the inside out.

The kind of passionate word of mouth you get out of customers? You just can’t buy that. And whether that word of mouth says that you rock or that you suck is not up the CEO or the senior management team; it’s up to the rank-and-file. Your front-line employees are the people who deal with your customers. Treat them well, and they’ll treat your customers well. When you do that, everyone wins.

Ask yourself a few questions:

1. How much freedom do you give your employees when it comes to making your customers happy?
2. When your organization makes a mistake, do you admit it freely and openly, or do you try to hide it?
3. When was the last time one of your employees went way beyond the call of duty just to help a customer?
4. What’s the one thing you can do today to make an employee feel special enough that s/he’ll take that extra step for your customers?

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