Occasionally, into each life, a little rain must fall… in this case, the “rain” is an unhappy customer; this isn’t an “if”, it is a when. When you are in business, and you deal with customers, be it internal customers (employees), external customers (paying customers and clients), or your service partners (distributors, vendors, etc) – eventually someone will feel unheard, uncared for, or mistreated. Should this unhappy customer ruin your day?

Leading organizations in many industries have sharpened service recovery into a potent competitive edge. They understand the power of effective recovery as a customer retaining and employee engaging technique.

To build a powerful culture of service recovery in your organization, focus on these key areas:

Problems with new products are not unexpected. Apple should act on complaints over iPhone 4 to increase customer loyalty.

Regardless of whether Toyota was slow, ignorant or delusionary to the faults in its vehicles, one thing it has finally done is to say “We are sorry”. But this is only Step One in a successful service recovery.