Addressing service breakdowns

As part of a successful business venture is the ability to predict, plan for, and deal with unforeseen breakdowns in service. Below are some strategies for potentially preventing and dealing with service breakdowns:

• Because humans are complex and bring a variety of backgrounds to a customer-provider encounter, even though a product or service delivered may function exactly as it was designed, it may be perceived as defective if the customer expected it to perform in another manner. This can lead to service breakdowns.
• There are so many potential reasons that something can go wrong when you are interacting with a customer or potential customer. By considering each when you deal with a customer, you can potentially avoid situations in which your customer, you can potentially avoid situations in which your customers become angry, complain to management, defect to a competitor, or take some other negative action.
• To help reduce emotion when dealing with a stressful customer situation, "sandwich" the emotional issue between 2 customer-focused messages.
• Service recovery efforts are made to salvage the customer-provider relationship and help ensure future customer loyalty when something goes wrong in the service process.
• Using the six-step problem solving model is one strategy for figuring out what customers need and what to do when they do not receive what they expected.