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July 20, 2012 at 12:00 AM
Your company’s brand represents the value customers receive when they interact with your business. It’s a promise of sorts: When you choose to purchase from us, this is what we will deliver to you. When you break that promise—through defective products, shoddy workmanship or poor service—you may just lose the customer. And in this age of social media, you might also lose your reputation, too.
Remember the musician who made a YouTube video about United Airlines breaking his guitar? It was a PR nightmare for the airline. His video was viewed more than 12 million times and spawned a whole culture of people creating videos to showcase their service complaints.
How can you avoid making service mistakes that hurt your brand? And what can you do if those mistakes happen (as they will on occasion despite your best efforts)? Here are four insights culled from recent experience.
The U-Haul “reservation” that wasn’t. We recently arranged to rent a truck from U-Haul and made a reservation weeks in advance. We also confirmed a few days before our move date and phoned on our way to D Jay’s Service Center to say we were on our way. But when we got to D Jay’s, our truck was gone. Though our reservation form didn’t indicate it, apparently there was a set pickup time. When we arrived past the pickup time, we found that D Jay’s had rented our truck to someone else. No other trucks were available.
