

Customer Service Conundrum. How Far To Go When Things Go Awry? - sbarsh
http://blog.packlate.com/customer-service-conundrum-how-far-to-go-when-things-go-awry

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tptacek
Spend the $400. Not because it's right but because it's the right thing to do,
and for not enough money to matter.

Then figure out what the process failure was that caused these people to get a
different room than they expected. Using that information, either fix customer
expectations for the future or fix the process that is failing those
expectations.

Is it strictly reasonable for people to expect compensation for being in a
"holding pattern" you put them in? Probably not. But you have nothing to gain
from sticking up for yourself when the circumstances are this fuzzy. They're
"right enough" to win the argument, or make it not worth winning for you.

At the point at which you have to spend money to keep them happy, you should
be looking at the whole situation as an opportunity to turn them into
evangelists. Counterintuitively, it is the people who have experienced things
going just a little bit wrong who you are best positioned to impress, since
they've stumbled into a high-touch relationship with you.

~~~
shalmanese
There are people who make a professional game out of extracting as much money
from CSRs as possible. You go broke if you try to appease these people. The
dirty little secret of every "we provide exceptional customer service"
companies is they all have exception clauses for these types of people.

From the scant information provided in the article, this seems like it could
be one of those people.

~~~
tptacek
There are those people indeed. So, pay these specific people their trivial
$400, and then (a) figure out what your site did to create an 'exploitable'
gap in expectations, or (b) figure out what your process is doing to create an
'exploitable' failure to meet those expectations.

The answer to this problem could be as simple as a banner stating something
like "in the event your room cannot be booked, you will be notified and a
[comparable room] will be provided if you'd like to continue with your trip".

Or, it could be that the reliability of property managers becomes a business
metric, and managers who are overly casual with reservations are either (a)
paid less to offset refunds that will be generated, or (b) excluded from the
service.

In the meantime, there's one (1) of these parties here; why not do what you
can to make them evangelists?

