SERVICE recovery is an essential part of everyday dealings with customers - when something goes wrong, customers would expect you to take immediate action to rectify the situation. Action can come in many forms - an acknowledgement, an explanation, or compensation. The question is, are your staff equipped to manage service recovery in a consistent and well thought out manner?

In November 2017, international shopping platform ezbuy failed to deliver the orders of many customers in time due to logistical issues. Many customers left negative comments on Facebook complaining about the inadequate customer service, with some waiting hours to talk to an administrator on ezbuy's live chat service, only to be redirected to the end of the queue. Eventually, the live chat went offline, stating it was "under maintenance".

This incident led to almost 10,000 customers giving up on ezbuy, and jumping over to their competitor SGshop, which saw a spike in transactions since the issue began. In this example, the issue might have been a delivery failure. The more glaring issue, however, is the way the company chose to handle negative comments or complaints.