Mexican food and do-it-yourself carpet cleaning. Before you go wild with possible connections between those two, look again at the title: Service recovery.

Two recent real-life experiences illustrate how companies-even successful national chains-can struggle when it comes to recovering after a service failure. Yet the return on investment for improving service recovery can be fantastically positive. Just a little planning and customer service training can build life-long customer loyalty. The key is thinking about recovery from the customer's perspective, not the company's. Without focus on what customers value, botched attempts at service recovery can leave customers feeling even worse.

First, Mexican food. A customer attempts to use a frequent customer reward coupon during a holiday weekend promotion, confusing the cashier and store manager about how to ring it up in the register. There was no restriction on the reward; they were just frustrated at not knowing how to process it. For that, the customer was chastised for using the reward, was embarrassed by them yelling to each other across the restaurant, and was actually told how lucky he was that they would make an exception by letting him redeem the reward.

The first complaint e-mail to the chain's corporate headquarters didn't earn any response. The second e-mail eventually got a reply stating that the first e-mail had already been replied to via a personal call to the customer's mobile phone. However, no such call was ever received. In addition, the e-mail stated that the company would like to offer a free meal if the customer would come to the restaurant for lunch with the manager who could then "personally clear the air."

So, put yourself in the customer's shoes. How was the recovery handled?

. GOOD: The company has a complaint reply policy of having someone personally call the customer.

BAD: In this case, that call never actually happened, although everyone assumed it had.

SUGGESTION: Keep track of every step of your recovery process, especially when multiple people are involved.

. GOOD: The company offers a free meal to dissatisfied customers.

BAD: To claim the free meal the customer is pressured into sitting down with the manager to personally discuss the complaint. That sounds intimidating at worst and awkward at best.

SUGGESTION: If you choose to send compensation, send it with no strings attached. Add a personal note that the manager is always available face-to-face or by phone, in case the customer wants to share more feedback. Don't make it sound like the manager wants to debate the customer.

And now, do-it-yourself carpet cleaning. A customer begins to clean his carpets and soon discovers that the cleaner is actually leaking liquid from the bottom. Afraid it would ruin the carpet pad, she rushes down the hallway to the shower where the rest of the 3.5 gallons gushes down the drain. After 30 minutes of cleaning up the flooded room, she calls the company to complain. They diagnose a broken valve and send her back to the store for a new one. Have a good day. Zero effort to recover and absolutely no effort to apologise.

Fortunately, the representative at the store is polite and apologetic. "Don't worry; I will restart the time so you don't have to bring back the machine until two hours later tomorrow." The representative now has a big smile on her face, because she feels like she has just saved the world-but has she?

The complaint e-mail sent to the chain's corporate headquarters got an immediate response! Along with a point-by-point response to the specific concerns, the e-mail said, "Please let us make it right for you. If you would please send in your original rental form, cash register receipt, and a brief explanation of what happened, we will gladly send you a refund."

So, put yourself in the customer's shoes. How was the recovery handled?

GOOD: The store restarted the time.

BAD: That didn't help the customer at all. In effect she said: "We are generously not going to charge you for the time you've wasted on our faulty product. We're also not going to charge you for the time it took you to make two trips to our store or the time it took you to clean up the flood inside your house." Restarting the time to give the customer an extra two hours for her pain and suffering didn't benefit her at all.

SUGGESTION: If you choose to offer compensation, identify something that would be valuable to this specific customer and appropriate for the situation (not too much and not too little). Or choose not to offer any form of compensation, but be thoughtful about it.

GOOD: The company headquarters offered a refund.

BAD: To rent the carpet cleaner, the store captured everything from the customer's name and address, her driver's license number, and even the number of hours on each machine by serial number. Why would they possibly need her to jump through all those hoops all over again to get a refund? It adds insult to injury.

SUGGESTION: Find ways to make it easier to do business with your company (both when things go well and when they break).

The point of these examples is to encourage you to re-evaluate your current service recovery process to see if it adds value for your customers, to think through everything from the customer's perspective and then put simple, repeatable procedures into place.

Were these horrible service failures? No. Would customers be justified in never going back to these businesses? No, certainly not for these reasons. But with so many competitors out there, why wouldn't they explore their options?

In both examples, it seems that the companies are still not "getting it." They're probably confident that the customers are satisfied. And guess what? After all this, neither company asked them if they were. Therefore, not identifying their current customer satisfaction.

For three decades AchieveGlobal has emphasised the importance in the balance of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and the success and profitability of your business.