Service recovery is a topic I try to minimize because the goal is to prevent problems so that recovery isn’t necessary. But this is the real world and “stuff happens” - even when dealing with great organizations. Unfortunately this reality played out on Katie and Nic’s (our daughter and new son-in-law’s), wedding day. An entire series of unfortunate events resulted in all the wrong flowers and a wedding cake that would have put the Leaning Tower of Pisa to shame. It was so bad that eventually the cake had to be separated, the spacers removed and the cake restacked —- still leaning! To Katie and Nic’s credit they kept a sense of humor saying, “Today isn’t about cake and flowers.”

That takes us to the service recovery. Of course we expected a full refund, which the company provided with an apology. But what we couldn’t have guessed was the personal touch they added to recover from the faux pas. When Katie and Nic returned from their Hawaiian honeymoon the store manager and the district manager called to request a meeting. They went to Katie’s office to again extend their apologies, and present her with a very generous wedding gift. They also communicated with me offering assurance that the situation was used as a learning experience and asking what they could do to regain my confidence. They are already well on their way!

In all of my communication with the two high level store managers, the one thing that was repeated time and time again was: “We shouldn’t have missed so many opportunities to fix the problems before it was too late.”

It was obvious to me that these gentlemen were flabbergasted over the missed opportunities. It was also obvious that they seldom had to worry about service recovery, because their team members were accustomed to things going very well.

This is a huge lesson to those of us who seldom deal with service problems of major proportion. You could not have written a more challenging script for the front-line team who was faced with the situations that surfaced while they prepared for this wedding. And quite frankly, that service team had no idea of the support and creative solutions available to them. If only they had signaled for help instead of accepting the minimal options that were right in front of them.

What might keep your team members from signaling for help when faced with an unusual set of circumstances? Would they fail to recognize the importance of the situation? Would they be too busy to care about a single customer among dozens? Would they feel uncomfortable admitting to leadership that problems had surfaced? The leader’s job is to be certain that the answer to these questions is a resounding “No!”

Want to learn about the different team member styles and how each contributes to an effective team? Check out the Team Dimensions Profile. You can take the profile online, or set up an account to accommodate employees who may benefit from this valuable tool / seminar.