So,  none of us perfect. We know that at some point or another in our lives, we'll all make mistakes. Of course,  this naturally translates to the business world. If you are in business for yourself or working for someone, you will at some point make a mistake with a customer, it's inevitable.  What often sets business' apart is how those mistakes are dealt with.  It is relatively easy to turn a customer's problem into a positive experience for them by dealing with the issue correctly, but it can just as easily lose you a customer.

Let's look at a real life example. My wife and I order pizza occasionally, sometimes when we've both had a really long work day, or we're entertaining guests and we don't have time to prepare a meal... pizza is a quick and tasty solution to our hunger! For the most part, with the occasional exception, we've ordered exclusively from one place when we wanted pizza.  The  service has been acceptable, we really like the food, and they have combos that give you a lot more than just pizza for a reasonable price.

However, we had a problem several weeks back: after a particularly long day, we ordered some pizza for supper and had it delivered (something we never do, as I prefer to pick up the pizza and save on the delivery cost... but it had been one of those days...), and this is where things started to go south. For starters, it took almost an  hour and a half for the pizza to arrive, which was double the time they told us it would take. The pizza was cold and the garlic bread had no cheese (something they had charged us extra for).  Not only did this pretty much ruin the  entire meal for us, but when I called them up to complain, I was put on hold 4 or 5 times and had to keep explaining my story.

So after another 10 - 15 minutes of my time wasted on the phone, I was essentially told the cold pizza was not their fault as they used a delivery service, and the best they were willing to do is offer me free garlic bread.  This was not a satisfactory response for me... and what really floored me is when I responded with, "That's not really going to make up for the entire meal that's been ruined, I'll just find somewhere else to order my pizza from in the future." The response from the other end was, "Okay, thanks... bye!" and I was hung up on.  Now, I do tend to be a bit sensitive to customer service issues, only because we're so fanatical about customer support here at Lifeline, but I can't imagine any customer reacting favorably to this type of response.

I can tell you with certainty that this business hasn't really thought about the implications and costs to their business that this type of breakdown in customer service can bring, because if they had, then they would have dealt with the situation much differently. So, on Monday we'll be examining the cold hard facts, as in what kind of monetary impact this has had on their business and how the issue should have been dealt with.