Give your customer a cookie

At my favorite coffee shop, they do a lot of things right for their customers. A recent example is how they handled a service recovery situation.

I had placed a lunch order and it didn’t get prepared and served right away like usual. Someone forgot to process the order. After I asked about it, the employee apologized and took care of it very quickly. And, she included a chocolate chip cookie in my order at no charge.

This might seem like no big deal. And it’s not. It was a simple, honest error with a nice recovery. No harm no foul.  And that’s how it should be. Service recoveries should not be turned into an earth-shaking event. Apologize, fix it, offer a little extra and move on.

The other thing they did well was they paid attention. They chose a chocolate chip cookie to give me as an extra because they know I like them. They know this because they pay attention. (Apparently, I buy them often).  Simple, easy and entirely effective.

Do you know what cookies your customers like? How could you fit them into a typical service recovery?

Other articles you might find useful:

• How to resolve a customer complaint
• Subway Offers Both Extremes of Customer Experience
• Improve Customer Service by Staying Flexible
• How to Handle Customer Complaints
• Lowes Knows Customer Service

Tagged as: Customer Experience, extra mile, service recovery