No matter how good you are at what you do, there’s always the potential for things to go wrong on a day in the life of your small business. Sometimes, events that lead to unhappy customers who didn’t get their expectations met have nothing to do with you. At other times, it could be you yourself who has messed up their order. Or, it could be the people who work for you who failed to take care of something that needed to be done.
When this happens, it seems like the end of the world. At the very least, it can feel like the end of a positive relationship with the people who rely on you to deliver what they need. Now, your customers have lost faith in you and perhaps they will take their business elsewhere. A mistake happened, but is there hope? The answer is that it depends on how you handle the situation. Below find some tips to make good on a customer transaction gone wrong.
Listen to the customer. The worst thing that a customer can experience when their order is messed up in some way is the feeling of having no one to turn to. We all have been that person stuck on hold punching numbers into the voicemail system in vain trying to get in touch with a human who can help solve the problem.
Don’t make this a running theme in your small business, even if you almost exclusively do business on email rather than by phone. The situation is the same. Your customer is experiencing a problem or is not receiving what they paid for. They want someone to listen to what happened and validate the issues they are having. Even before the problem is solved, it will make a huge difference just to connect them with a human being who gives the impression of caring, and who will take care of whatever went wrong. This means you need at least one stellar customer service person. If you’re not up to the part where you hire other people, then that person needs to be you.
Determine what went wrong. Was it a shipment delay? Did something break in transit? Was there miscommunication over expectation of the services that were to be provided? Once you figure out what happened to cause the problem, you can then move ahead to solve it. As you do this, avoid blaming people. Instead, make it your aim to work together to fix whatever occurred. It is not your goal to point fingers but it is your goal to find the right people who can help you make good for your customers on behalf of your customers.
If you can’t seem to fix whatever went wrong, or if the customer is not satisfied with whatever you offered as a way of making up for what happened, then you should give their money back. This will hurt your business in the short term because maybe this was a big sale that you were relying on to meet monthly revenue goals. But the sad truth is that sometimes we must take a loss and move on. It’s always possible that your customer might remember that you gave them what they wanted and lived up to your promise, which means they could very well return to do business with you at a later point. But even if this customer never buys from you again, you will want the assurance of knowing that they won’t turn around and badmouth you to other people.
You want the protection of knowing that you have a solid reputation for integrity in place. You can keep this reputation intact by doing your best to serve your customers. If you are not able to do so then give them their money back. Try offering a coupon. Sometimes a customer is unhappy with the end deliverable but it is not so serious that they would want their money back. Maybe the order took an extra long time which made them feel like they had a right to complain. Or maybe the order got mixed up and they did not get what they received without a lot of extra back and forth to try and rectify the problem. If these things happened, then one thing you can do is give your customer a special coupon. This actually serves a dual purpose. One, it can smooth over a problematic moment with your customer. And two, it can actually bring the customer back for more business in the future.
Don’t get mad. It’s not always a cliche story of the big bad company out to get the poor unsuspecting consumer. Sometimes, people can be jerks. That includes individuals who solicit your business and then demand more than the agreed-upon exchange of cash for services or a certain product. If you’re having problems with an exceedingly difficult and boundary-violating client or customer, then do your best to muck through the current challenge with them. Then, perhaps see to it that you won’t be doing business with them in the future. You do not have to openly declare this, but you can red flag their account and let your employees know that future transactions with said customer are off-limits.