It’s the school holidays.

Time for a relaxing couple of weeks with the family on some warm, sandy beach.

It takes most of the year to build up to this picture of summer bliss but only a few minutes to demolish it.

I was in the small airport of La Palma one evening, waiting for the return flight home.  There are only a couple of flights a week between Manchester and La Palma and I was booked on the second one.  The incoming plane landed with a slightly heavier touchdown than normal but this was largely ignored until the captain spoke to all passengers planning to board the plane to say that there was a technical fault with an on-board computer.  The good news was that the faulty part had been identified. The bad news was that it was in a warehouse in Luton, over four hours away by direct flight.

The plane was going nowhere that evening.  Fortunately for the 100+ passengers, the airport closed at 2300 hours so there was no possibility of staying the night at the airport.  Coaches arrived promptly and everyone was taken to a nearby hotel, allocated a room and had dinner and wine on the house.  In the morning, there was a briefing for everyone and the flight eventually took off 18 hours late.

A friend of mine had quite a different experience.  His plane was cancelled and he was left to fend for himself at another European airport.  There was no support to find alternative routes home and no meals or accommodation offered.

There may have been some differences in the type of holiday arrangements each of us had but the contrasting events serve to highlight that a setback need not be converted into a miserable customer experience.

Things do go wrong even in the best-organised businesses.  It’s how we cope with these events that make one business differentiate itself from another.

Consider how your business copes with an error.  Are your people empowered to sort things out (within appropriate guidelines) for the benefit of the customer, or do they just add the problem to a growing pile of customer complaints and get on with processing something else?

By recognising a problem, reacting quickly to it and seeing it from the customer’s perspective, a customer with a problem can be “rescued” and turned into a loyal customer who will pass on this story to other contacts.  In my particular case, I am very happy to recommend Thomson as a tour operator as they “rescued” me.

Have a great summer.