How To Keep Clients On Your Side Through Service Glitches

Written by Mike Shapiro | | March 14, 2018

There will always be times when there’s a sudden, unforeseen interruption in your service to customers. When that happens, like most companies, you’re probably pretty good about reaching out to them to manage the situation and minimize damage.

But there are also lots of other occasions when you have some advance notice — when you can see the vague beginnings of something  going wrong, and you suspect it might cause a problem for clients down the road.

In those situations, companies typically go heads-down to fix the problem, hoping they can do so before it manifests itself in a service interruption, and before customers know anything about it.

Then, if and when the problem occurs, clients are angry — mostly because you wasted valuable time they could have used to activate their own contingency plans.

Here’s what you should do to alert customers while you’re working to avert disaster:

  1. Assess the situation. What do you know? What do you think you know? What more info do you need to make a full assessment? In what ways might your customers feel the effects if something actually does go wrong?
  2. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers. What would you want to know right now?
  3. Develop a hypothetical game plan. Think about what your customers could do to help you resolve the problem?
  4. Prepare a communication. It should include: “This is what we’re seeing. It may be that X could happen. We’re working on it and hope we can fix it before it affects you, but we wanted you to know about it as soon as possible. Please think about some potential consequences to you if X happens. We want to work together with you to develop a contingency plan to avoid or minimize any potential negative effect on you and your customers.

Their responses will give you valuable information about the real potential consequences of a service interruption, and enable you to target your work with them– individually, if necessary — to set up a triage to manage the damage.

USE IT NOW: If you haven’t already done so, why not set up a client communication system that automatically tells clients the status of projects and alerts them to potential detours and holdups. We detail this in several articles starting with this one.