This weekend, I stayed two nights at the Red Lion Inn in Sacramento. We paid $89 per night for the room, and without going into all the bad details, it was not worth it. With the exception of a good free breakfast and wait staff on Saturday and Sunday morning, the experience was dismal. What made it even worse was knowing that others in our group had gotten MUCH newer and nicer hotel rooms in the area for the same or lower price.
Today I got the obligatory e-mail asking me to rate my experience. My rating was honest and VERY negative.
Less than five minutes after I completed my survey, I got an e-mail from Josh Rockford, a Senior Customer Care Representative with Red Lion. Here is the text of that e-mail:
Please accept our sincerest apology for the inconveniences you experienced regarding the condition of the hotel, and the room and the overall experience you had during your stay.
As a gesture of good will, I would like to offer you a gift certificate good for a free night stay at any Red Lion Hotel. Please send me your mailing address and we will send this to you via certified US mail.
I will be passing this information onto the General Manager at the Red Lion Sacramento to avoid similar issues in the future.
Thank you for taking the time to share your comments and if you have any questions, please contact us at Customercare@redlion.com.
Regards,
Josh Rockford
Senior Customer Care Representative
Yes! I was impressed because that is the way it should work! I expected to hear NOTHING from the hotel because that is what you usually hear after you take the time to complete one of these surveys. Instead, I got an apology and a very acceptable gesture of recovery. Because of Josh, I will once again consider staying at a Red Lion Inn (just not the one in Sacramento).
Recovery matters. Make sure your business has a system to listen to customer concerns, and make sure you have a system to recover from any failures and restore your customers’ confidence in your product and service. And if you neglect the system to fix the things your customers complain about, your business deserves the financial hardship it will experience.
If you plan well, service recovery can be an opportunity to impress.
You should follow me on twitter here.
Bret,
I’m glad to see things turned around a bit for you after your stay.
Contrast that to the web host I’ve been dealing with.
This new host did an “upgrade”, send out a notice to let us know that our sites would be inaccessible on a Saturday and that all would be well – the upgrade would not have any effect on our sites. So far so good.
The day after the upgrade I noticed all kinds of problems with my site – not the least of which was that they had deleted the orginial database (thank goodness for backups). The backup was less than ideal, and much of the original sidebar information was gone.
So Sunday I sent an email to their 24-7 service. No response. Monday I called, and got a pleasant person on the phone who said the changes would be made right away.
Long story short, here it is a week and a half later – nothing. I’m spending my own money to have the fixes made and have my site moved to a new host, even though my “term” with the former one isn’t completed. I sent two notes to the CEO to let him know what I’m dealing with, and got no response – not even an apology.
The best money I’ve spent in a long time is to move my site to a new, more responsive and competent host.
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
February 9th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
That sucks, Mary Jo. You know i believe there is no excuse for bad service. Companies deserve the economic pain they will experience when they treat customers badly. But I think we have to hold them accountable. We need to complain more, and we need to do it more loudly and more publicly. Thanks for sharing! Bret
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