Five Conditions to Repair the Emotional Connection with Your Customer

Repairing the emotional connection with your customers and reaping good results has conditions.

Your apology must:

1. Be genuine.
2. Restore confidence in being associated with you.
3. Honor those harmed.
4. Explain and work to resolve the problem.
5. Be delivered swiftly and with humility.

Remember when you were a kid and your brother or sister punched you or pinched you? Sure, he or she apologized. But it didn’t mean much because:

• Your parent was usually prompting the words.
• You received an apology too many times before, just to be punched again another day.

This is what we put our customers through when we deliver a hollow apology and then don’t fix the problem causing the issue. You’ll likely get credit when you apologize once for a problem. But when it repeats, another letter for the same problem won’t cut it.  Your currency with customers and their trust in you will dwindle.

Beloved companies turn “recovery” into an opportunity that says to customers, “Who else would respond this way?” They are zealots about recovering customer goodwill.

The measure of your company is determined in the moments of recovery. And beloved companies obsess over every moment of these situations because they know that customers are keeping score.