"Do you remember the last time you sent an email and got a response back, within a minute saying, “FIXED. Really sorry that you had to experience that…” ?"
This is a perfect example of how you can turn a negative into a positive. From my own experience in the past I always noticed that if you make a mistake with a customer job but correct the mistake really quickly you actually form a bond with the customer that is much stronger than if you never made the mistake in the first place. You actually gain because of the error as long as the customer isn't in really bad shape as a result of it. (Of course you would get diminishing returns if you had to correct more than a small number of mistakes in any given time period obviously.)
When I was first getting started, it was common for new users to find little bugs here and there. I'd generally be able to fix them within minutes of the customer contacting me, and that really impressed them. The customers who found bugs were actually happier than the ones that didn't, because the people that didn't find bugs never had an excuse to contact us, so they didn't know we offered great customer service.
I used to joke with my co-founder that we should intentionally add a small bug for all new users so that we could "fix it" immediately after they reported it. We obviously didn't actually do that because it's incredibly shady, but I think it would end up resulting in happier customers in the long run.
We have two Android apps and we get our share of 1-star drive-bys. Usually less than 5% of those actually follow up with a feedback.
We answer EVERY user feedback including international users. I have Google Translate permanently open as a tab and reply in both English and their language.
Our responses have done three things for us:
- It's converted almost every 1-star we've received into a 5-star
- Our users praise us with lots of 5-star ratings just for our customer service
- We get far fewer impulse 1-stars. They read the comments and see that we really do follow up and fix things so they try that first.
I've also handled many very angry emails. With those I take time to explain fully what's going on as passively and politely as I can. Every one of those has turned around positively.
Finally, we don't like to say stuff like "Really sorry that you had to experience that". These days that sounds like the insincere spin we hear from big companies. We just get to the point and use a happy emoticon. I only apologize if it fits the mood.
Porsche flew a new transmission in from Germany at a cost of thousands (very heavy) to repair a defective one in new 2012 911 with only 400 miles. The new transmission was hooked up improperly by the tech (forgot to snap something in) so they had the tech return from home that night and fixed the problem.
The problem wasn't even major and the car was functioning.
GrubHub: I tried to unsubscribe but the link was broken. I sent them an email, and within minutes got an email back saying they had unsubscribed me. Amazing response time and solved my problem!
This is a perfect example of how you can turn a negative into a positive. From my own experience in the past I always noticed that if you make a mistake with a customer job but correct the mistake really quickly you actually form a bond with the customer that is much stronger than if you never made the mistake in the first place. You actually gain because of the error as long as the customer isn't in really bad shape as a result of it. (Of course you would get diminishing returns if you had to correct more than a small number of mistakes in any given time period obviously.)