Everyone (except my husband!) makes mistakes and every company does too. The key is how you recover. Lately, corporate recovery has been getting more and more flawed.

My six-year-old grandson is placed in intensive care two days before he and his Mom and two younger sisters are booked to fly on United to visit us. I called United. At first I am told that they will give me a full credit as soon as I send information re the hospitalization but that I need to call another number. The other number results in a phone call that last 3 hours and the answer I get never changes from the first moment – there will be no refund ever and each ticket will have to pay a $100 per ticket penalty. I am asked for my frequent flyer number and knowing that I have flown around the world several times with United and used to have the highest status available, I am sure they will relent. But no. Eventually I am told that no one at United can ever grant me a refund. I point out that I am sure the CEO could, but I am swiftly corrected on that notion! I suggest that maybe the 4 year old and 2 year old should fly alone while their mother stays home to take care of the 6 year old in the hospital. Silence. More calls, more frustration, more no results. It’s bad enough that I am very worried about my grandson without having to contend with these rigid customer service policies. I finally have to admit that they have won the battle. Now the war ensues. I cancel my credit card that gets me United Airlines miles. I vow never to fly on United again. I tell as many people as I can how badly they acted. And then a few weeks later when it’s time to rebook the flight, they suddenly give me a $100 travel certificate per ticket to make up for the $100 penalty they have charged me. This is a great example of too little, too late. The damage has been done. Providing the certificate the day I called would have been appropriate, but now there is no recovery to be bought. The fact is that for $400 and poor timing they have deprived themselves of thousands of dollars worth of future business. Is it United that always says at the end of the flight, “We realize you have a choice of airlines and we appreciate you choose us”? They sure don’t act like it.

A few days later, I have a similar situation with Apple. Early on I even suggest a way for them to recover which is quick, simple, cheap, but they insist they have their rules. I remind them that they already violated their rules when they made a mistake on my order, but that gets me nowhere. A couple of weeks later and another two hour phone call and they offer me the solution I had suggested initially. I was polite enough not to say, “If you had only taken my suggestion two weeks ago, you could have saved us both a lot of time and trouble.”

When I was running a division of a software company I periodically volunteered to take customer complaint calls. It gave me a great sense of how our customers were feeling about how we were treating them. I found that a little empathy and quick recovery was key.

How does your company recover when they make a mistake? Do you know? If not, you should. And do you empower your customer service reps to offer a recovery right up front before frustration levels are too high for most any kind of recovery to work?

My prediction is that as more and more customer service is sent offshore and the offshore employees are provided no latitude in managing customer satisfaction issues customer support will continue to degrade. Eventually, I think the pendulum will swing back, customers will be glad to pay a little more for a lot better service, and customer support jobs will start returning to the United States.

Just don’t fly United! And PS to husbands, flowers work great!

Gillian Parrillo
The Sacramento Executive