Let’s start with a simple customer-oriented question. Which is worse, a big failure or a microfailure?
What’s the Difference Between a Big Failure and a Microfailure?
This question demands a subjective answer. You should not try to quantify the impact of the failure exactly because each individual in an organization will have a different feeling of its importance depending on several factors.
- How the failure impacted the organization’s customers
- The number of impacted customers
- The importance of each impacted customer
- How each customer reacted to the problem
- How the failure impacted the organization
- Financially
- Relationship with customer(s)
- The effort required to recover successfully
- The role of the individual you are thinking about
- Job Responsibility
- Personal accountability
- Their relationship with their customer
- How secure they feel about their job
Once you understand these issues, you can determine if the failure was a big one (macrofailure) or a small one (microfailure). With a big failure, your company will hear directly from someone in your customer’s organization. You know you are in big trouble when your customer’s CEO calls your CEO, and the stuff rolls downhill.
On the other hand, no one calls your company after it experiences a small failure. It is “no big deal” and never rises to the level of someone needing to shake up a supplier. However, just because they never call you doesn’t mean they will ignore the failure.
Can Microfailures Have a Cumulative Effect on a Customer?
Absolutely!
Let’s assume you have home delivery of The Wall Street Journal (or any other daily newspaper.) Delivery has always been between 7 AM and 8 AM, rain or shine. And then one day the Journal does not arrive.
You say to yourself, “I guess John (you know the delivery person by name) was off, and his replacement did not have the complete route list.” You call the delivery service, and your copy arrives within 30 minutes. It’s all good so far. If John returns the next day and follows his normal delivery schedule, then the missed delivery will soon be forgotten.
But what happens if another missed delivery occurs in the next week?
You call and get a quick delivery, but now you’re thinking, “What is going on when John is out? I had two problems in the past two weeks.”
A third failure will cause an angry customer to complain about the missed delivery, and a fourth instance may cause you to think about switching your subscription from the print newspaper to online newspaper access. But before you switch, you ask yourself, “Do I really still get as much from reading the Journal as I did in the past, or can I easily find out everything I need from other online sources?” And you have a good chance of completely dropping your subscription.
So, four missed deliveries in a relatively brief time, even with excellent recovery each time, and you end your long relationship with the Journal. That is precisely what happened with my local newspaper and me.
Suppose several microfailures can lead to someone canceling a newspaper subscription. In that case, many microfailures in a B2B setting can also result in losing a customer or having them cut back their business with you until you can regain their trust.
How Important Are Service Recovery Efforts?
Since most services are “manufactured” in front of or with your customer, making every interaction a perfect experience is impossible. For example, a 2015 study reported that on a national scale hospitals report between 600 and 1,600 newborn falls each year… and the report opined that the figures almost certainly fall short of the true number of incidents.
As we have seen, you can easily lose the customer if you do not recover from your errors quickly and to your customer’s satisfaction.
If you are new to the concept of service recovery, then read the classic article “The Profitable Art of Service Recovery.” by Christopher W.L. Hart, James Heskett, and W. Earl Stasser, Jr. in the July-August 1990 issue of the Harvard Business Review. You can read about creating a service recovery strategy here.
Can the Number of Microfailures Be Reduced?
Absolutely! You can follow a three-step process to reduce the frequency of microfailures.
- Detect microfailures. Since your customers doubt you can contact your company when a small issue occurs, you must change the customer’s attitude. It would be best if you let them know that no issue is too small to ignore. Explain that no one will be “punished” because of a problem but that the company is committed to improving all customer experiences. But, you must first ensure that all of your employees agree with this approach and support your initiative when they communicate with customers.
- Repair the failures. Depending on your industry, you should consider offering a small gesture or non-monetary compensation when someone reports a failure. You should not make a big deal about fixing the issue and preventing it from happening again. Your employees should be empowered to act in real time to satisfy the customer.
- Prevent future failures. Employees should share the problem and solution with others in the company to ensure that preventative action is quickly implemented. Field-suggested corrective actions should be filtered into in-house corrective action programs. The results of these combined efforts should be shared across the whole company at least once a month.
The Future Is Up to You
Remember that businesses and individuals consider many of their purchases to be used to increase and improve their infrastructure. This is true if you sell refrigerators to individual families or packaging equipment to multinational corporations. They buy your products and services because they need the outcomes they will derive from using them. Anything that gets in their way will cause the customer to think about changing suppliers if left uncorrected, and it happens again.
This is one business situation where your future is in your hands. Don’t let inactivity on your part cause you to put your business under additional stress.
To learn more about service recovery, read “Aftermarket Service is All About Recovery and Customer Satisfaction.”
About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting helps our B2B product manufacturing clients grow their services revenue and profitability by applying the methodologies and techniques associated with Customer Value Creation and Customer Experience professions to assist its clients in designing and commercializing new services and the associated business transformations. Contact Sam here.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay