The other day I received an email from an on-line retailer.  They noticed that I had items in my shopping cart but hadn’t checked out.  To entice me to complete my transaction, they offered a discount on the shipping fees.  Unfortunately for them I had already purchased the item from one of their competitors.  Like many companies, they tried too little, too late, to recover from a critical customer moment.  In their case, that critical moment was the checkout process.  It was too hard and too buggy.  So, I went somewhere else.

Many businesses are striving to provide the perfect customer experience.  They want to delight their customer in every moment and with every interaction.  Striving to make every moment perfect is a noble and worthwhile endeavor.  Those who succeed will certainly be rewarded. 

However, it’s important to realize that not all customer moments are equal.  Customers want a positive end-to-end experience but certain interactions can make or break the entire experience.

The most critical moments in the customer experience are the ones that are unrecoverable.  Every business has them.  They differ based on the nature of the business but they are equally critical regardless of the business.  As their name implies, unrecoverable moments are those instances, interactions, or transactions that if executed incorrectly cannot be easily fixed (if fixed at all). 

The biggest mistake the businesses make is trying to fix unrecoverable errors reactively.  Usually the reactive response is to throw money at the problem in the form of discounts or freebies.  While that may pacify the customer in the moment, it doesn’t undo the error.

The best way to resolve unrecoverable moments is by being proactive.  Don’t let them happen in the first place.  When I was in college, I worked at a one-hour photo.  While we had quality controls in place to ensure that the prints were good, our boss had extra controls in place to make sure that the negatives were developed properly.  He said, “We can always reprint a picture, but if the film is blown, we’ve lost someone’s memory.”

The first step in being proactive is determining which events are the most unrecoverable (there is a continuum) and how likely they are to occur.  Messing up any order at a restaurant is bad.  But messing up a drive-thru or carry out order is unrecoverable since most customers won’t find out until they get home and probably won’t drive all the way back to get it corrected.  A free order of fries next time around takes away the sting, but it doesn’t recover the lost meal.  In the retail world, especially on-line, not being able to find or not understanding how to purchase a product is unrecoverable.  People will just move to the next store.  In service industries unrecoverable errors generally occur when making first impressions or at the moment that the service is needed.  For business to business transactions, missing critical customer deadlines is unrecoverable.  It doesn’t matter if you’ll take 50% off the price of a promotional item, if that item arrives two weeks after the promotion occurred.

Some people have argued that the botched rollout of healthcare.gov in the US was unrecoverable with regard to the critical youth market.  If so, it could jeopardize the entire program.  Time will tell if the young people were scared off or not.  But, if your business requires people to sign up for something, it better be easy and it better work on the first try.

The next step in proactively addressing unrecoverable moments is determining the process and resources required to minimize problems during those moments.  For example, adding an extra verification step (and person) to the carry-out order may help catch errors before it is too late.  Of course, every organization needs to compare the costs associated with preventing an unrecoverable moment with the risk and costs associated with having those moments.

The final step is to teach your people to recognize when situations are becoming unrecoverable.  People who recognize that an unrecoverable moment is approaching can often improvise a solution on the spot.   Understanding the step just prior to an unrecoverable moment is also important.  In the past several years I’ve been surprised at how much more companies are willing to spend to “get me back” than they were to keep me in the first place.  They always try too late.  If they only tried to solve the problem before I left, I might still be with them.

Ideally all interactions with your business should be excellent.  However, sometimes even the best businesses fall short.  Focusing on and minimizing errors during unrecoverable moments will help solidify customer loyalty and retention.