How we recovered from a corporate disaster by putting customers first

Straight-talking, common sense from the front line of management

Q

Waitrose faced a flood of customer complaints after a botched IT upgrade created chaos in its stocking system and left shelves empty. When things like this go wrong, how can a company recover from such a setback?

A

In a world where we rely on technology to run our businesses, it is almost inevitable that things don’t always go to plan, particularly when setting up a new system. It pays to be paranoid, testing every element as much as you can before pulling the plug on today’s trusted method and putting all your faith in IT’S latest development.

But technical glitches don’t just occur when introducing a new system. Major problems can appear when you least expect them, as happened to us at Timpson exactly two years ago on Jan 1 2022, when our point-of-sale credit card readers stopped working. The first inkling we had was at the stroke of midnight in The Oyster Catcher, our pub in Rhosneigr on Anglesey, north Wales. As the clock ticked into the new year, all credit cards were refused and we could only accept cash.

When our shops opened the following day we discovered the problem wasn’t just happening in one pub – it was right across the business.

We had been caught by a type of “millennium bug” and the first sight of 2022 was enough to give the software a mental breakdown. It took us just over a week to come up with a cure and reprogram every credit card reader from Inverness to Penzance.

In the meantime, we relied on our branch colleagues to use their initiative to help customers – our management style of freedom and trust came to the rescue. Fortunately most of our outlets are within yards of a cash point, but that didn’t help customers who only made payments via their mobile.

We lost some customers (sales fell by about 10pc) but our colleagues impressed many more by trusting them to take away dry cleaning, shoe repairs, much-needed keys, watches and photos with the promise to come back and pay later. We didn’t issue a company statement or put a policy notice on every shop window, we simply asked our colleagues to do their best to satisfy each individual customer. Within a fortnight everything was back to normal. Naturally, we investigated the incident to see how to avoid future problems and took a critical look at the way we dealt with the crisis.

Initially we thought our supplier would be able to put us back in business but quickly realised they were incapable of reprogramming the whole of our estate in double quick time – we had to do it ourselves, through the support of colleagues who volunteered to work around the clock.

Although we said a few choice words within our own four walls, we never publicly blamed our supplier for the problem. Customers don’t care who messed up – they deal with us, and any fault is our fault. Never qualify a “sorry” by saying “but it wasn’t our mistake” – just minimise the amount of inconvenience caused to your customers. The incident cost us a few sales, but it would have been much worse if we had lost loyal customers by insisting on payment before handing over dresses needed for a weekend party or photos printed for a funeral.

Insurmountable problems often appear out of the blue. In the mid-1970s, when Timpson was part of United Drapery Stores (UDS), we were keen to open shoe repair bars in all its department stores. The trial unit was inside Whiteleys of Bayswater, in west London. In the first month, Bernard Lyons, the UDS chairman, sent his chauffeur into the store with his favourite pair of crocodile shoes.

However, when the chauffeur returned, no one could find the shoes – we had lost them, and lost our reputation in the process. We had a similar disaster in Harrods, which invited us to stand in for its engraver. We engraved a trophy for the daughter of the owner, the late Mohamed Al-fayed, and misspelt her name.

Public opinion is also pretty unforgiving. It takes years to build up a positive reputation but that trust can disappear in a week of bad publicity. Customers aren’t bothered if your technical disaster knocks your profits, but they do care when you fail to deliver a decent service. While you are frantically trying to fix the IT failure, also look at the situation through the eyes of your customers. Find ways to show that despite your short-term problems you are still 100pc in favour of delivering an exceptional service.