Clarins: Service recovery at its best

I had a really unpleasant experience with a sales assistant at the Clarins Takashimaya counter yesterday as I wanted to know more about one of their products that was raved in a skincare forum (Multi-active Night Prevention Plus lotion) as well as to collect a sample promotion that was from the Clarins Singapore website.  Since it’s not the bad service that I want to talk about here,  a quick summary would be that the staff in question was outright rude and unpleasant. I wondered whether it was a culture inculcated by the company to encourage such behavior and decided to write in to the company with my experience.

This morning, I received an email from Clarins with the standard and expected response that the feedback has been attended to. Although it was mentioned in the email that the retail manager will follow up with me, I doubt whether there will be any follow up. However, I was proven wrong when I received another email from Mr. Larry Foo, (President of Clarins Singapore), apologising for the service lapse and assuring me that they are reviewing practices to improve their service standards. I was surprised to receive an email from the top management of Clarins Singapore but most importantly, I could sense the sincerity in the email. Then and there, I thought to myself, “At least they bothered to reply personally to feedback emails!”.

Thinking that the matter has come to a close, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a call from a florist deliveryman and my sister to inform me that Clarins has sent over a floral basket. This is certainly beyond my expectations and a very nice finishing touch to this incident. Service recovery was quick, prompt and sincere and for me, the personal touch totally worked.

Even though the sales assistant at Takashimaya did a fairly horrid job in his service, Clarins  Singapore’s management did a wonderful job with salvaging the situation and went beyond expectation to putting things right. This is a very good example at how damage control and service recovery is at its best.

Of course, companies should not wait until a service lapse occur before they start looking into their service procedures and training. However, it is also important to put in place a proper service recovery procedure so that every customer’s feedback and comments are properly handled and treated with care.  With social media widely used by the public (this blog is an example),  people can share their experiences in the shortest time with the widest reach. I share my experiences on forums and similarly obtain information about products and services from forums and blogs too.

I think it is definitely important for companies to know and track not only comments about their products/services through the traditional channels (e.g. direct feedback to companies, survey forms) but also customers’ rants and ravings on the Internet. With that, they can track reviews of their products and services right from the customers themselves and not wait till an absolutely irate customer to inform them about the problems.

On a different note, I think there are customers out there who are at a dilemma on what to do when they were given sub-standard service. Should we send a feedback to the company? If we do, will we cost the staff their jobs? Frankly, It took me a few hours to decide to write that email to Clarins but I decided to go ahead as the issue here is not to get that poor guy fired but rather, to inform Clarins of the poor service delivered and that they need to get something done to improve their service. Of course, the fact that the sales assistant’s behavior was totally rude and unacceptable also helped me in making the decision.  I was just a step away to saying goodbye to Clarins’ product for a long time.

Would you have written in to feedback on poor service received?