Service recovery in the hospitality industry

How you handle a complaint decides whether that guest ever comes back.

In hospitality, your duties go far beyond cooking the food and checking guests in. Every element of your venue that a guest interacts with, and every piece of customer service they receive along the way, gives them no end of chances to find something unsatisfactory.

You might always strive to give the best possible service, but it is impossible to please all of your patrons all of the time. That is where service recovery comes in: using a negative customer experience to create a positive one.

Dealing with unhappy customers is challenging, but it remains an essential skill to master when you work in hospitality. How you take control of the situation and bring about a positive resolution is known as service recovery.

The overall goal is not only to defuse the situation, but to create a loyal customer out of the initial tricky situation.

If you want to adopt service recovery in your own venue, here is everything you need to know.

What service recovery means in hospitality

In essence, service recovery is about saying the right things at the right time when a customer tells you they are unhappy. That might be a face-to-face confrontation, a complaint over the phone, or a digital one: email, social media or a review website.

Poor service recovery can be disastrous for customer retention. Take a customer who complains that their meal arrived cold, and calls the wait staff over.

Excellent service recovery, in this case, is to apologise to the customer, bring out a fresh meal, and maybe throw in a free drink or a discount. An added touch is the manager double-checking that the issue has been resolved and the guest is fully satisfied. But even that might not be enough.

Go the extra mile

Instead, go further by doing something the customer did not expect. Exceed their expectations and show that you genuinely value them. That way you can turn a negative experience into something positive they will remember, and they will want to come back, because you clearly care.

Now imagine the restaurant arguing back instead, telling the customer they are imagining it and refusing to help. That is a very different story. We have all read Tripadvisor reviews and social media posts that made the news off the back of poor customer service. Suddenly one small incident can threaten the business entirely.

That said, this is not about being held to ransom. Service recovery gives you a second chance at getting it right, and it puts the reputation of your business first by making sure any issue is fully rectified.

Practise before it matters

It is easy to reflect on a difficult situation after a poor customer interaction and decide what should have been done differently. The harder task is giving your staff the tools to handle it correctly in the moment.

Your staff all need to be on the same page when it comes to service recovery, which is why training is so vital. The way your employees handled things at previous employers may differ from yours, and if this is the first customer-facing role someone has had, they may not have these skills at all.

A great way to practise is to set up mock situations for your staff to work through. Airlines have done this for years, training cabin crew to work through challenging situations before they ever face a real one. If your staff do not give your mock customer a satisfactory response, that can be corrected before it has any chance to hurt the business.

You cannot please everyone, but you can try

In truth, your customer may be frustrated for a reason that is completely out of your control. They are venting it through you, despite an excellent experience overall. These situations happen, just as genuine complaints arise even when you have done your utmost.

What you should always do is look for ways to resolve the situation to the best of your ability. More often than not, open dialogue and calm reasoning take the heat out of it and show customers that you are listening. That goes a long way, well before you get to the stage of offering a refund or similar.

On the flipside, ignoring the complaint, or worse, displaying an unprofessional attitude, inflames the situation and makes it much harder to fix. Taking an understanding approach to any grumble directed at your venue demonstrates that the customer is a priority. That is a much better way to promote satisfaction and retention than appearing not to care whether they dine with you again.

Make it procedure, not instinct

Service recovery is a vital tool that every one of your employees needs to know. Customer service is a multifaceted experience and cannot be based on good interactions alone. It is when things do not go to plan that a business shows its true colours, so make sure yours look good: put a clear, practised procedure in place for service recovery, and train every new starter on it.

Getting to know your customers and their preferences helps you exceed their expectations in the first place. Your digital tools can gather the customer insight that feeds personalised marketing, and brings people back before a complaint ever happens.