The Power of Moments

A study of service encounters asked customers to recall recent satisfying and dissatisfying interactions with employees of airlines, hotels, or restaurants. Almost 25% of the positive encounters cited by customers were actually employees’ responses to service failures: slow service, mistaken orders, lost reservations, delayed flights, and so on. When employees handled these situations well, they transformed a negative moment to a positive one. Every great service company is a master of service recovery. (An executive of a company that builds custom homes shared with us an insight from his customer satisfaction data. To maximize customer satisfaction, he said, you don’t want to be perfect. You want to get two things wrong, have the customer bring those mistakes to your attention, and then hustle like mad to fix those problems.