Understanding the Mushroom Treatment and why we tend to treat customers that way was only the first step. Moving forward, we shall look at the steps that we need to take to make sure that customers don’t get ‘The Mushroom Treatment’.
Take this lesson as we explore the steps to be avoided when ensuring customer delight and don’t forget to take the accompanying quiz at the end of the lesson.
Why You Must Ensure you’re your Customers Never Get ‘the Mushroom Treatment’-Part II
Communicate even – and especially – the bad news
Frequent communication entails keeping your customer informed of developments involving the deliverables you had committed to, especially regarding technical snags, outages and service failures, even – and especially – those foreseen.
Be upfront when things go wrong. And, as you had learned in the earlier lesson on managing service failures, provide customers with the course of action identified to right the wrong.
Keeping customers abreast in case of failures and snags also allows customers to come up with alternatives to ensure business as usual operations.
Also, be prompt in reverting to a customer’s email or message, so that they know you are ‘plugged in’.
Promptness and frequency in keeping customers abreast of things give them one less matter to worry about. They know that the project/ deliverable is in safe hands and their mental bandwidth need not be used to stay on top of things.
Don’t Let Saving Face be Your First Response
The temptation when things go horribly and publicly wrong is to try and save face. It seems a natural response, considering the succeeding chain-of-events can be both embarrassing and challenging. Worse still, some people never even show up to solve the crisis.
Both these never work.
The following stories involve two crises, similar in constitution, which had occurred in the same year, and managed so very differently by their CEOs. Today, these are case studies in how open, frequent, and empathetic action and communication – or lack thereof – impacts situations, the people involved and the organisation as a whole.
