Customer Experience Superheroes - Series 3 Episode 4 Service Recovery with Katie Stabler

In this series we share the CX Superpowers needed to be a leader in customer experience today. Completing our third series we welcome Katie Stabler, founder of Cultivate - Customer Experience by Design. Through an experienced career in service, Katie shares the importance of treating recovery as a customer experience opportunity. With examples from Tesco & Ritz Carlton we hear how a potential issue can result in a more committed customer. Learning this superpower as well as others in this series will help you become a CXSuperhero.

Hosted by global CX consultant and mentor Christopher Brooks, the discussion includes practical tips for any customer service operator to employ. Katie is a contributor to the Customer Experience 2 publication along with Christopher.

For more on this topic reach Katie on  https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-stabler-ccxp/.

CX Superhero podcasts are brought to you by https://clientship.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of Client Chips Customer Experience Superheroes Podcasts. This is a series designed to bring you ideas, insights, and inspiration from the world of customer experience. Share with you what we believe are the CX superpowers that you need to be a leader in customer experience today. We meet individuals who specialise in aspects of customer experience, share case studies, and bring you the latest trends in this series. In this episode, we meet Katie Stabler, who is the founder and lead consultant at Cultivate Customer Experience by Design. Katie is a contributor to a new book coming out called CX2, and in it her contribution talks about the importance of heroic customer experience recovery. Okay, so I am absolutely delighted to um have Katie Stabler with us. Hello, Katie. Hello, Chris. How are you? I'm great, thank you. Fabulous. So Katie is a CX uh consultant, runs an organization called Cultivate Customer Experience by Design. And Katie and I are gonna be appearing in uh a book coming out soon called Customer Experience 2. And it's one of those things that when you you look at the list of kind of who's contributing, there's always a topic that kind of stands out, and you think, I'd love to know more about that. I contacted Katie, she's very kindly said that she'd come on board and do a CX superheroes podcast, and we're gonna be talking about service recovery. So I'm really excited about this because it's a massive topic in CX. I think as we'll find it's quite untapped, but before we get into that, let's just take a step back, hear about you, Katie. So you're well known in the world of customer experience. How did you get to where you are today? And kind of, you know, what is your take on customer experience?

SPEAKER_00 2:15

So I uh started, I think, with probably very humble roots like most of us, uh, frontline customer service. Uh, did my time in contact centers, worked on the desk at Woolworths, if you remember good old Woolworths? I do, yeah. Um, and Boots, so very customer service orientated. And then I spent a good 10 years in the not-for-profit sector, so working deeply within different charities. And I don't think you can find a more organically customer experience focused uh organization to work in than a charity, right? It's very nature, obviously, it's very user-centric. Uh so I think I probably developed my passion for customer experience um working in those charities and building services that were completely orientated around the service that we deliver, intensely focused on feedback. Um, but my first, I suppose, official capacity in CX uh was when I moved to Lowell, which is a debt collection company. Okay. Yes, so um, most people would not consider debt collection and customer experience to go hand in hand. But I previously worked for a not-for-profit debt charity, and when I saw the opportunity to go to uh Lowell for customer experience design and delivery manager, and they were asking for someone to be the customer voice and advocate for the customer, it just seemed like an opportunity too good to miss to go into an industry where customer experience was not at the forefront and they were very new to it. I yeah, I couldn't say no. Um and it was an amazing journey. Um, two years there, a lot to do, but with an organization that was very gung-ho towards customer experience to really try to make a difference. And that's actually where I first came across customer experience recovery. So I'll touch on that in a bit more detail. But then I moved um from Lowell and I spent a year working for a global membership organization leading their customer experience strategy, and that brings me to where I am today consultancy, customer experience, doing what I do and doing what I love.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Wow, who'd have thought that a journey via a debt recovery agency would actually be where you found the passion? But you know, fair play, it must have been a very progressive leader there to kind of recognise that you know when we're managing people who are in crisis, then they need compassion and support as much as they need help with getting back onto the right financial footing.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah, I mean, I work for an amazing customer experience director who somebody once referred to as being the grit in the oyster, which I absolutely love. Well, that's how the perl forms, isn't it, around the grits. So I and I love that, and that will stay with me forever. Um, but yeah, you you hit the nail on the head, Chris. Uh, customer experience for customers who are in very vulnerable, difficult circumstances is all the more important. And what's particularly interesting is these are what we we we dubbed captive customers. But at the end of the day, these are customers that, quite frankly, do not want to be your customers. Again, it's even more important to deliver a good customer experience. Yeah, and it was yeah, amazing, full of challenges, but an absolutely uh ethics journey.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Well, what a very interesting journey you've had to to where you are now, because obviously you have an earned frontline service position, you know, working on the desk of Woolworths, which is you know an organization we all we all miss massively. But then in two spaces, being you know, charities where transaction isn't really what it's all about. A lot of customer experience is around transactions, not really about that. And actually, to your point there, then you say, Well, if it's not transactions, it's about loyalty in debt recovery. It's it's kind of it's not, is it? You don't want people to be back there again and again. So you've really had to look at customer experience from probably some perspectives that most people don't get the benefit of doing so. So that must have really uh you know been been rewarding to kind of see customer experience working in those spaces.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Amazingly rewarding. And I think what was most rewarding is actually seeing the cultural changes in the organization and right down to the front line. So you would have people you know on the phone, agents working really, really hard in normally quite difficult circumstances, and they were previously never open to hearing customer feedback because who would have thought to ask how was your experience with your tech collector? So when we actually started to do that and feed that feedback back to the front line, and actually it was amazing to hear what positive feedback that you would get, you know, how much of a relief they felt customers felt when they got off the phone, how much pressure had been lifted, you know, how long it had taken them to build the courage to make that phone call. So the feedback was often amazing, and to actually start giving that to agents and letting them know how they were making an impact on that customer's day uh was phenomenal. And you really started to see the development in the back end around um the way we looked at quality assurance, the way we were looking at different KPIs, and overall a performance improvement. Um, it was an amazing piece. It's a shame that it took so long to get to that stage. That's not a progressive organization in that sense.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

But I think in that piece you've given us kind of a full confidence that you've got the credibility when it comes to talking about service recoveries. That's that's the topic, that's your contribution to the book. Two words, service recovery. What does it mean? What is service recovery?

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Basically, when something goes wrong, you are on the forefront at being able to fix it. Um and not just fix it, but turn a detrimental experience into a positive experience. So you're not just neutral, you're not just you're not just fixing it, you're going above and beyond to make it something that a customer will hopefully remember for a good reason and not a bad reason. And the reason that we came across this uh whilst working for Lowell is because it was a you know very, very big organization servicing a lot of customers and with potential for a lot to go wrong. So there was an absolute need for it. But within any organization, there is this need because it doesn't matter how much you plan for perfection, you know, you can have the best technology, the most amazing staff, but eventually something does go wrong, a button gets pushed that shouldn't have, um, a member of staff is having a bad day, or even external environments impact your business, in one way or another, you can create a negative customer experience. So planning to fail means that if that does happen, or more should I say, when that happens, you're actually in a position to proactively fix it quickly, collaboratively, and with the customer at the center of what you're doing. So customer experience recovery is, you know, it doesn't matter how big your business is, where your business is, what sector you're in, what you do, it applies to everybody. And everybody who takes the stance to look at this in a proactive way, you're putting yourself on the forefront of being incredibly customer-centric.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

It's a cultural thing as much as an actual activity, it's that mindset of actually always thinking about a situation and thinking how you turn it into a positive outcome. Would that be right?

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Massively so. Because if you if you think about when things go wrong, it depends what kind of culture you work in as to how quickly someone is to put their hand up and say something's gone wrong. So, you know, you you can work in very risk-averse cultures, which tend to mean that people operate in silos, and unfortunately, if something goes wrong, their natural instinctive reaction is to fix it themselves as quickly as possible, with the best intention, you know, they're trying to limit that impact. Um, but actually having uh fixes in such an unstructured, informal way can breed bad practice. Okay. So if you're thinking, let's say you know you're working in a reasonably large organization and something does go wrong, and maybe it's impacted what you believe to be, I don't know, 50, 100, 200 customers, you might fix that again with the best intention, feeling like you've done what you need to do internally. Um, you may or may not tell the customer about this fix. But if you don't consider this in a wider perspective, considering other areas of the organization that you work within, you don't really know the scope of the problem. You don't know if it's happened before, you don't know if it'll happen again, you don't really know why it's happened, what the root cause to that is, you don't fully know the scope of how many customers have been impacted because you don't really have full awareness of the issue. So, one amazing thing about a customer experience recovery process is if you have the process in place to support your employees to identify and fix and provide a solution for the issue, then you're creating this safety net for organizations to be more risk tolerant and for individuals to put their hand up and say there is something wrong. I'm coming to this process now to fix it. And again, you you start to, when you do that, not only are you opening up a more risk-tolerant culture, but you're also opening up um departments to come and work together with a really customer-focused ambition. So you might have an example from when I was working at Debt Collection Company, is when we were looking at service recovery, you would have customer experience in the room, you'd have the contact center lead in the room, you'd have compliance, because obviously we were a regulated organization, you would have finance, you'd have operational risk, you'd have all of these department heads coming in and focusing on the problem and focusing on it with a customer-centric perspective. So, not just around what is the issue, how do we fix it, but what is the issue, how do we fix it for the customer? And that was amazing, again, particularly for that organization, because culturally it took us uh so many steps forward. So it's a really great opportunity to break down my silos, get departments working together with a very customer-focused view.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Well, I mean, it it is one of the big challenges in CX is actually to get different people around the table. And I guess, you know, you've you've you've used that um expression risk risk tolerant. I guess that's that's the position you need to get the organization to in order to allow or encourage people to come around the table. If you if you're if you're risk averse, the chances are you're not going to get those people to the to the table. So I can see there's quite a bit of you called it a process. It it is more than just kind of sprinkling a bit of fairy dust in here. You do need to work to make sure that the the culture, that the individuals recognize that this is something we will tolerate, we will we need this to happen, we allow this to happen. And actually, where there is then an issue, the good news is we all come together collectively to fix it.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

Exactly. And you know, you talk about risk um averseness and risk tolerance, and that comes in on so many different levels because uh one of the ways I've seen customer experience recovery work epically is when your employees are empowered to fix it. So this isn't about a renegade running off and doing it themselves, it's about making sure that again, your your processes, your internal policies are very clear around actually you know what you're enabling your staff to do. Um, you don't want someone to have to hold on to an issue and have to work through three forms of hierarchy to be able to fix it, if actually they can do that themselves. Yeah. And I think obviously it wouldn't be right not to bring the Ritz-Carlton into this. I haven't worked for the Ritz-Carlton, but everybody knows of their amazing customer experience. And I think you know, they do this in an amazing way. So they empower their employees by enabling them all to have a budget. And if a customer goes to that employee, no matter if they're the concierge, service desk, uh repair person, if that employee goes and uh highlights an issue, they are empowered and financially empowered to fix it for them. And you, you know, that that is absolutely amazing. And it shows trust in your staff, it eliminates that risk piece, like you know, you again you're trusting your staff, you're letting them do what they're there to do, and the customer has a massive uh benefit from that.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Um, are you are you aware of the the Joshi um example from Ritz Carlton? Amplifies what you're saying there. So family stayed at Ritz Carlton Hotel and realized they've left one of the children's toys behind, Teddy toy behind. So the dad phoned up and said, like to get our toy back, and they said, We found it. It's gonna be a while, we'll get it back to you though. No problem, we'll get it back in a couple of weeks. It took a couple of weeks to get back, but when it got back, it arrived with an album of pictures of Joshy working in the kitchen, changing the beds, working on the front desk, relaxing by the pool, and it just said, We didn't realise you didn't leave Joshie behind. Josh loved it so much here that he wanted to spend a bit of time working with us. And all these lovely photos, him in a little outfit and everything, and it's just a teddy. And that arrived back to the child, the teddy and the book, and that's what that empowerment could do. And it went viral, it went crazy viral, you know. Dad just published it, but it's that permission you say, giving people the opportunity to say, How do we recover this situation to a point where you create an incredibly positive outcome?

SPEAKER_00 15:11

And that is such a great example of that.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Can you go in with service recovery as an isolated customer experience solution, or do you find you've got to have a mature organization in the first place? I mean, how how do you how do you approach it? If I'm head of customer service and I'm constantly just firefighting, how do how do you bring this sort of thing into the into the organization?

SPEAKER_00 15:33

It's absolutely part of the strategy. And I think you know, one of the the I guess the best ways to get buy-in is to talk about it in a sense of customer feedback and customer complaints. Okay. Because, you know, no nobody wants customer complaints. No the ideal organization is not to receive complaints. And the thing with the customer experience recovery process is that the aim is to eliminate complaints or or reduce the whole point of a customer experience recovery process in the the most ideal form is that you as an organization would recognise an issue before your customer does. So ideally, before it even gets to the impact stage. And then what that would do is it give you the opportunity to fix it. Now, it might have already impacted the customer in some way, but they aren't aware of it yet, or it hasn't impacted them enough to the point where they're actually ready to contact you and complain about it. It gives you that opportunity to identify it before any of that happens and proactively contact the customer and say, sorry, Mr. Customer, this has happened. And then whatever your solution may be to that. And the whole point of that is that it gives them a great experience, it builds an amazing amount of trust with the customer because you're open and transparent and you fixed it before they even had to broach it with you, and you're eliminating complaints. Yeah. So one of the ways I think, and and this would be where an organization would most need it, is if they are seeing a high volume of complaints. Why? What is the root cause? What is broken? What is the process that's broken? And at that point, that's when you can start to have the conversation around well, okay, how what do we do to try and eliminate some of this? And I think you know, the earlier you are as a business in your journey, the easier this is to implement. But moving forward, bigger the organization, more structurally complex the organization, it isn't impossible to do, but it absolutely needs to be considered strategically. Um, but what I found from experience is as soon as you start to see the benefits of a process like this, um, financially, uh reputationally, culturally, then it starts to become a process that's quite quickly embedded and quite well taken by the majority.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

So I'm I'm glad you mentioned that. I was going to ask you about that in terms of you know, if you bring it in as an organization, you might say, we already do this, but do you do it in a deliberate, systematic way that you know the next person who comes in knows the best way to deliver it, which is great. You know, you get a bit of investment support, but then someone's gonna be saying, What difference is this making to our business, Katie? So so what are the sort of KPIs or the ways in which you could measure the success of service recovery? Would you recommend?

SPEAKER_00 18:15

So I think one of the things that always talks to the board is money, of course. And you you can attach a financial um rate of investment to this. So you can look at the issue that has presented itself and you can um you can do trajectories based on how many customers this has impacted, what's the level of detriment? Um, if they were to transpire into uh complaints or using your previous percentages on you know complaints volumes, you can start to associate a cost to that issue. If you weren't to do anything, you can start to associate a cost. Yeah, what's the cost to measure a complaint? What would be the cost of compensation if that was the case? Versus the cost of fixing the issue. So what's the cost of people's time in that room? What's the cost of the root cause uh analysis? What's the cost of the fix? If there is some kind of um proactive level of compensation, what's the cost of that? So there's a financial um association you can make, then reputational. So we all know that the world that we live in, people are so quick to jump to social media, to online feedback uh platforms, um, even if it was a big issue to the press. So there's also the cost of eliminating all of that, reducing your bad press, reducing your bad social media. And then you can look at it from a custom uh an employee experience perspective. So, you know, we all know that um organizations that really strongly engage in customer experience, I think it's a Forbes stat where it's 150 times more engaged employees. So it's exactly the same with customer recovery. You know, when you when you're working in an organization where your employees are engaged, they know they're empowered, they're in a position to fix an issue when it comes, proactively fix an issue when it comes, not have to listen to complaints, you know, the list could go on and on and on and on. Um, you're gonna have a happier workforce, so you can measure it on employee satisfaction as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:14

Well, thank you. That's really useful. I, as a customer, will get a sense that you're a company that looks after me if things go wrong, which must encourage me to come back. But then importantly, that kind of that softer side, which is you get employees who are engaged and more productive, more satisfied, and that has its knock-on effect. So, really, it's a triple whammy, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 20:36

Absolutely. Yeah, so we've all had an example of when customer experience has failed, um, and you can probably think of one where it's been recovered well. And mine is a personal one of Tesco's, um, and it's not the best example because it did actually get to complain stage, but it's still my favorite example of customer experience recovery. Uh, so in a nutshell, I'd been doing online delivery with them three weeks in a row. They had completely failed with the substitutions. It got to the point where I couldn't sit in silence. I had to complain. So I wrote this long complaint email with all of the things that they had not done right. And I got an email back off this guy, and it was just epic. He started off by calling himself a complaint rock star, which first of all, I liked. That might not have hit well with everybody, but I really liked it. And he went on to talk about every single thing that I'd told him went wrong, told me why, but it was in a humorous way. And he even wrote a little poem at the end, which was in the tune of the Fresh Prince of Belair theme tune. And I'm interviewing with that. It was brilliant. And I mean, I'd like to think that this wasn't a renegade member of staff, and that maybe he'd looked at my profiling, he'd looked at what I'd ordered and my age, and maybe thought that this would be okay with me. And it was brilliant. I ran straight upstairs, told my other half, I put it straight on social media, tweeted about it, I Instagrammed it, and it just was a really great example of how. I'd had a bad experience and he totally turned it around. And my response to him was great, it was incredibly thankful. So he probably had a good day off the back of it. It was very simple but very effective. And I'm still a customer of Tesco's, so that says something.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Because that situation wouldn't have occurred. This is actually quite complex because you wouldn't have run upstairs and told someone and then told the world about how great Tesco's were unless they'd let you down. But no company would say, what we need to do is let our customers down so that we can prove to them we're we're so good at what we do. I mean, you just wouldn't, that wouldn't be a sustainable strategy. But that's in theory what's happened, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Yeah, absolutely. But it could have gone very different way. You know, if I'd have had a stuffy complaint-response email that, you know, just ticked its boxes and did what it needed to do, then fine. But it didn't, it went above and beyond. Um, and it made my day, and I still talk about it to this day, and I still preach about it and talk about it publicly. So it's just the power of what uh that extra bit of effort can do.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

There we go. Very interesting. I mean, I think it's always good to be able to take the theory and apply it to real life because you know, the way you talk about it, it just seems so obvious to do, but you know, when you get into an organization, it's going to be that storytelling, the Ritz Carlton's, the Tesco's, that helps people kind of visualize it and bring it to life. Do you share examples in your uh contribution in the book?

SPEAKER_00 23:23

I do, yes. I I use that as an example, um, and I use a different Ritz-Carlton example as well.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

Right. Someone once described it to me as you don't want people to have handcuffs, you don't want them to be hands-free, you want them to have handrails. And it's that, isn't it? It's given that kind of freedom to be able to express yourself individually. It can make a big difference, can't it?

SPEAKER_00 23:43

I suppose the the end point of this really is just if you're an organization with customers, which hopefully you will be, then don't let this happen by accident. You know, grow with what your your amazing staff are doing. Put policies and processes in place to enable them to do that with confidence and make sure it's with intent. Some might even say, Katie, cultivate customer experience by design.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Some might say that, yes. I want to hear more of this. I mean it's a great topic. Obviously, the book's coming out soon, Customer Experience 2, and that's going to be available on Amazon. People like the way you talk. How can they get hold of you? Where can they come to?

SPEAKER_00 24:20

You can find me on LinkedIn, uh, you can find me on Instagram under the Customer Experience Provocator. Um, and you can find me via my website, which is www.cultivatecustomerexperience.com.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

Well, thank you. It's been it's been a really interesting topic, and thank you for bringing it to life in such an animated way. There's a lot to take out of that, I think, for our listeners in terms of freedom by design. So it's it's really exciting to kind of hear you talk so passionately about it. Best of luck with it with the book, best of luck with uh continued success helping organizations to recover customer commitment through great service design. And uh I thank you very much for being a part of the CX Superheroes Podcast series.