Declare Inexperience to Experience Forgiveness

You want your frontline staff to be experts and for shoppers to recognize the expertise. Yet a trio of researchers at University of Bordeaux and KEDGE Business School find a payoff in boldly proclaiming that an inexperienced frontline staff member is, in fact, not yet an expert: If there’s a service failure during the subsequent sales transaction, the customer is more forgiving of both the employee and the retailer and, if the customer has already built an attachment to the retailer, is more likely to return in the future than if the warning of inexperience had not been provided.
     Based on their study findings, the researchers do add cautions: The customer must not have already experienced a series of service shortfalls from that retailer. And the announcement of employee inexperience must have been given upstream—prior to the service failure—such as by the employee wearing a badge labeled “In Training” or saying at the start, “This is my first week at the job.”
     Researchers from European School of Management and Technology, Loughborough University, Ruhr University Bochum, and FOM Hochschule Hochschulzentrum Berlin identify another effective upstream method, which they call psychological vaccination against disappointment. In their study, a group of 1,254 airline passengers were sent a pre-flight email saying the company’s commitment to service quality had earned it several awards. A set of passengers within the group also received, in their email, phrasing that said long waiting times at the baggage claim cannot be eliminated.
     Among the passengers who subsequently experienced long waiting times, customer satisfaction was clearly higher for those who had received the added message. Importantly, the added message did not decrease customer satisfaction among passengers whose waiting times were shorter. The psychological vaccine only helped. It didn’t hurt.
     Timing of a retailer’s response counts for the downstream, too: Researchers at IMED Business School in Brazil, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven find that an apology for a service failure and a promise it won’t happen again are both effective in recovering trust. But the timing of each influences the effectiveness. An apology, which is seen by the victim as demonstrating integrity, best comes promptly. A promise, seen as a sign of competence, best comes a few weeks after the incident. Perhaps this is because a credible promise requires gathering information about what occurred and what will work to correct the problem.

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Have Staff Who Show and Share Expertise 

Vaccinate Shoppers Against Disappointment 

Multiply Recovery from Double Deviation