Stop Service Breakdowns in Their Tracks With Proactive Service Recovery Behaviour Triggers

By Rune Nørager

This morning I witnessed a very elegant example of proactive service recovery as I got a call from the car-sharing service GoMore. The last couple of days I have send out requests to book a car for the weekend. So far I have had 2 rejects and 2 non-responders. It is now Friday close to noon and my summer house weekend is approaching fast. 

Spotting service failures before they turn into a poor customer experience sounds like a tricky service system to set up. However, with the right service design in place precision triggers can alert you to invoke proactive service recovery strategies and save the day for your business and your customers.

I was therefore totally awestruck by the call I got from a Gomore service agent that told me she could see that so far I have had no luck in booking a car. She wanted to let me know a few tips to increase my chances of booking a car. First, most of the requests I send out turned out to be to care-shares with a statistically low positive response frequency. I should instead look for cars with a higher response frequency. For the other two, they were equally low ranking due to their long response time. You can argue that the user interface design might have failed me understanding these two important variables clearly up front. However, there will always be a strategic tradeoff between designing the optimal service touchpoints and factoring in triggers to mitigate potential service failures before they happen. 

Triggers to spot potential failures before your customers.

Gomore has likely implemented automatic triggers to advance customer cases like mine to the attention of service agents so they can intervene before I have a poor customer experience (i.e., a weekend without a car). If this sounds expensive to have a manually operated proactive-service system intervention strategy like a phone call consider how AirBNB does the exact same thing fully automatic. When their system triggers identify customers with no success in booking an apartment they offer to supplement your rental budget with an additional 20€ for free as they know higher priced apartments have a greater acceptance rate than lower priced. 

No car — but still a happy customer

So far still no car - but I am still super happy about GoMore as a customer - and professionally as a UX/CX analyst I am inspired. 

If you would like to learn more about advanced service design tools, like service recovery strategies, then I encourage you to attend our uxCampus seminar in service design in the fall. See all our seminars at uxcamp.us here: