Can you recover from a faux pas? Of course you can. The mechanism of recovery is appropriate communication delivered in the form of a quiet storm of friendship.
Your customers understand that best efforts don’t always lead to successful conclusions. In other words, we all mess up once in a while, no matter what. Customers will tolerate mistakes if you make up well. Yes, just as you have to learn to make up with your spouse or your friend when you disappoint, you have to learn how to transfer those same make-up skills to the business world.
The first thing I recommend that you do in responding to a mistake is to quickly take ownership of it. No excuses. Your customer doesn’t want to hear it, nor does he have time to spend on it, nor is he interested in the reasons for the mistake. He just wants to know how you are going to fix it and when. An occasional mistake can actually be a good thing for your relationship. This is an opportunity for you to show your customer that you can be counted on to deliver just as well when things go wrong as you can be counted on when things are going smoothly. Poor trouble management can very easily lead to the end of a business relationship. Good trouble management will promote your customer’s confidence in you. Your customer will be watching you very carefully and he will look for these silent communicators in your trouble management performance:
- Responsiveness.
- Responsibility.
- Reward.
I have already addressed 1 and 2. Number 3, Reward, is the gift of friendship that you can deliver to your customer. You deliver this reward silently in the seriousness with which you approach the problem. The immediacy of your reaction, the pace of your response, the quality of the personnel you assign to correct the problem, the intensity of your desire to get it right for the customer, your recognition of the importance of the matter to the customer all create a quiet storm of friendship. If you have established an Outfluence quiet storm of consistent performance throughout your organization from the beginning, your trouble management program will be a component of the storm and will occur naturally. This is a storm you won’t mind getting caught in.
