Guest article by Moshe Davidow.

I sat back to relax and listen to a webinar by Dave Murray from the DiJulius group talk about Service Recovery. I needed to hear someone else talk about how important service recovery really was to an organization. Gautam Mahajan, Bill Price and I had just written a book about Zero Complaints, and I needed to know that we were not alone in our thoughts.
Halfway through the webinar, Dave talked about the two tokens of customer service and service recovery, which I had never heard before.
The two token theory of service recovery is described by Jason Fried:
When you deal with people who have a problem, you can either choose to take the token that says “it’s no big deal” or the token that says “it’s the end of the world”. Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other one.

The big question of how to improve customer service and complaint handling is well handled in our book on Zero Complaints – the Path to Continuous Value Creation (to be published by Routledge in January 2025). Value Creation needs to be an organizational culture, where the focus is on continuous value creation, which starts by eliminating value destruction. We believe that focusing on Zero Complaints by eliminating the root cause will lead to customer centricity, vastly increased profits, and a huge increase in customer and employee satisfaction and loyalty. Prof. Philip Kotler wrote the foreword to the book.
The book starts by focusing on the difference between complaint handling and complaint management, continues into examining the ROI of both customer service and complaint management, and discusses the actual steps an organization needs to take to achieve customer centricity, as well as all the benefits. Imagine, if you will, an organization of people all looking to add value to other people.

The book ties in nicely with the two token theory. We want employees to feel that every complaint is the end of the world. Not to “force” the customer to choose the “no big deal” token, but to engage employees to proactively be looking for ways to eliminate possible complaints from customers. We want to get the managers involved in actively supporting the employees quest for eliminating complaints.
Most people like to help other people, but are not able to because organizational policies won’t let them. Organizations need to factor this heavy cost into all of their decision making. The tools are in this book.
It shouldn’t be that difficult. Have a supportive organization that employees love, and customers love and advocate for, or continue on the slippery slope to oblivion. Your choice. Our book will show you how to do it before your competitors.

The book is a culmination of work that each one of us has done on different elements of the issue that lead us all to unite our viewpoints and develop the idea that Zero Complaints is the best, fastest and easiest path to get to customer centricity.

Moshe Davidow
Adjunct Lecturer: Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences
Associate Editor: Journal of Creating Value





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