The customer doesn't expect everything will go right all the time; the big test is what you do when things go wrong.

- Sir Colin Marshall (Chairman of British Airways)

Good one DJ.

That Service book I was talking about... (great read!! )... this is a BIG theme throughout.

They've done studies on this: if you mess up big time and show great recovery, they perceive you better than if you did a perfect job!

I *heart* all this behavioral-studies stuff!!! (geek-hat on today). lol

TOTALLY agree with this! I just had an experience with an associate photographer of mine....she had VERY bad feed back from a client so we more than compensated him and he was SO pleased. I have no doubt he will recommend us in the future soley b.c of the way we handled the situation!

melissa

Most people on this forum are too young to remember this -- but back in '82 (gee, sounds like a movie quote) there was the Tylenol crisis in Chicago where someone poisoned a batch of Tylenol and 7 people in the Chicago area died as a result. Johnson & Johnson (makers of Tylenol) was faced with a PR crisis. There are case studies in b-schools about the effective response J&J launched to resolve this issue -- I mean, who would want to take any kind of o-t-c drug after this happened? Turns out that J&J did such a phenomenol job responding to this crisis (which started with the pulling of ALL Tylenol from store shelves and then lead to much more stringent controls on packaging) that they ended up with an even higher share of their market after 18 months. I know the Tylenol case is a rather macabre example, but it illustrates the point that even in a horrible crisis, there is tremendous opportunity to shine. (But I won't go in to the story about how I "almost burned down a church" when I forgot to remove the plastic covers from my monolights... )

I also like the internal brand promise that Horst Schulte created for the Ritz-Carlton chain:

"We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen."

I think sometimes we forget just how much our clients trust us and how they expect us to be truthful and honest in every aspect of our business, even if we have made a mistake. We can apply this to our lives even outside our business, for I think by being truthful and honest you can only gain. (may be hard at that time but it definitely pays off)