Can this sale be saved?
By Jenny C. McCune • Bankrate.com

Mistakes happen. In spite of the best of intentions, something can and often does go wrong with a prized customer's order.

What a small business does next can save the sale, the customer relationship and set the company apart from competitors. In fact, a botched sale can be an opportunity to shine and make a customer for life.

"The real key that separates the person who really understands sales and marketing and the one who doesn't is how they handle mistakes," says Tracy Schneider, principal of TLS Marketing, a Seattle-based marketing consulting firm.

"It's not that you don't make mistakes. It's that when your company makes a mistake, you have this grand opportunity to show what you're all about because you know how to handle it."

Salvaging a sale takes three steps, says Mark LeBlanc, president of Small Business Success in La Jolla, Calif.

First, acknowledge to yourself and to the customer that there is a problem. That can entail not only documenting the problem, but giving the customer a chance to vent. Then determine if there's a sensible way to resolve the problem or make amends. Finally, if a remedy exists, implement it.

Admit the mistake
Sincerely admitting that your company has made a mistake can go a long way toward rescuing a sale.

"We often think that we lose customers because of price," LeBlanc says. "We actually lose customers because of laziness, indifference or carelessness."

Or as Steve Waterhouse, president of the Waterhouse Group, a consulting and sales development firm in Scarborough, Maine, puts it: "When you drop the ball, you drop to your knees." In other words, ask for forgiveness and apologize.

Unfortunately, this can be easier said than done.

"A lot of businesses go into defense mode. 'Not me. It wasn't our fault,'" says Linda Pinson, author of Anatomy of a Business Plan and publisher of business-plan software.

But don't just apologize for appearance's sake. If an apology by you or your employees strikes a false note, the customer will recognize this and often won't be placated. When Schneider stopped at a retailer to pick up a free packet of seeds, the counter worker just shrugged and said the store had run out of the promotional item. That left a bad taste in Schneider's mouth and she no longer shops at that store.

Make it right
When an online distributor of Pinson's software dropped the ball with some book orders, Pinson stepped in personally.

"My repair involved calling every customer personally," Vinson says. "Not an employee of mine. I explained what happened and did some damage control."

She salvaged three out of the six book sales.

Take two different sales scenarios: one gone right, the other gone wrong.

When TLS Marketing's Schneider came to pick up her car at Nordstrom's valet parking, she had a long wait. The attendant noticed, made a call and apologized. More time passed and when the attendant finally drove up, the car wasn't Schneider's. It was the same make, model and color, but it wasn't hers. It turned out the identical cars had been parked side by side.

Once the parking lot attendant realized his mistake, he brought down Schneider's car. He did more than apologize, though. He didn't charge Schneider for the visit and he gave her two free passes for future parking.

Nordstrom's response shows how it's done. First, the employee noticed the problem and then admitted it to Schneider. When things escalated, he took steps to reimburse Schneider for her lost time and inconvenience. He apologized and made amends.

Making a mistake worse
Then there's the tire dealer who left a customer spinning his wheels.

The customer took his vehicle to a local dealer to have tires changed. When he arrived at the appointed time to pick up his car, the work wasn't completed. The customer waited and didn't get his car until shortly before the store closed. The customer drove off, only to have one of his tires nearly fall off as he made a turn because the mechanic had failed to tighten the lug nuts.

After being towed back to the tire dealer, the customer was given a lukewarm apology and told by a clerk that the manager was on vacation for a week and nothing could be done until he got back. When the manager returned, he apologized and repaired the Jeep's wheel that had been damaged by the loose tire. He also offered the customer a discount on snow tires for another vehicle.

But it was too little, too late, especially when the discount turned out to be within pennies of that winter's snow tire sales price. The company lost tire business for three vehicles, all of which require multiple sets of tires. For future wheel work, the customer switched to a company that calls after each service to see if things went well.

The mistakes that the tire dealer made were classic. It didn't empower the worker in charge to make things right. That delayed the customer remedy by a week. Above all, the workers who first handled the situation were slow to apologize and didn't want to admit that a mistake had been made. A well-mannered apology could have gone long way in making the irate customer forgive the dealership and continue to do business with it.

Make appropriate amends
How does a small-business owner figure what's fair and how to keep a sale? Gene Fairbrother, president of MBA Consulting Inc. in the Dallas, recommends the 20-percent rule.

"Do 20 percent more than what you think is necessary," Fairbrother says. "You should also ask them if that is satisfactory. Talk them through it so that you get them to accept a decision that you feel is proper."

Of course, companies must be careful when resolving a customer-service problem. Ask yourself, is this sale worth saving? "You have to determine if there is a method of resolution, including one that you are both happy with," LeBlanc says. "Sometimes the customer isn't always right."

A nightmare customer who complains about everything and anything, may not be worth keeping. He may be more bother than he's worth and may never be satisfied. "Sometimes the volume of business isn't necessarily the determining factor," LeBlanc says. "If the customer is continually over-demanding and is always beating you up about prices, he may not be worth keeping."

Teamwork and monitoring
Small companies also can salvage sales by teaming up and monitoring customer concerns.

When Steve Waterhouse owned a community paper in the early '90s, mistakes were a way of life. "It happens when you're a paper. There will be typos in the ad copy or other problems," Waterhouse says.

One successful way to ensure that customers stayed customers was to use a team approach. If one of a sales rep's accounts reported a problem, the first step was an apology and a remedy for the problem. Then he'd send another sales rep to double-check that the customer was satisfied with the apology and the make-good solution.

"Salespeople don't want their bosses checking up on them, so having a co-worker stop by the account and make sure everything was OK was a great way of handling things when we dropped the customer-service ball," Waterhouse says.

Monitoring is another way to ensure repeat business. Teach your employees how to recognize when there are problems with sales. And remember the importance of following up after a customer has a problem, says MBA Consulting's Fairbrother. "That's where most people drop it," Fairbrother says. "They say, 'OK, problem solved.'"

Fairbrother recommends sending a written apology up-front and then closely monitoring the customer for the next two or three months. "Put them on the a watch list or a VIP list, and make sure that they are taken care of," the consultant says.

The bottom line: almost any sale can be saved if your company takes quick and proper action to access the situation, offers a remedy and, above all, apologizes. Maybe you think your company's already doing this. If so, be careful.

"Everybody believes they give good customer service, but many businesses don't," LeBlanc says. "It's something that we all need to stay in business. We need to create not just satisfied customers, but enthusiasts."

Jenny C. McCune is a contributing editor based in Montana.

-- Posted: May 22, 2002