The caller, a Dutch woman from a small town in the Netherlands, called in to recount an experience she’d had with Apple more than 10 years ago. A student at the time, she saved up and bought herself a  new “blueberry” iMac, only to find after several weeks that there seemed to be a bug. She tried going to the reseller she had bought it from, but without an extended warranty they couldn’t help her. Same story with Apple’s customer service. After a series of frustrating phone calls and letters, the caller resourcefully looked up the format of Apple’s email addresses (ex: letter.lastname at apple.com) and wrote a letter to Jobs himself. In it, she told Jobs how long she had saved to buy a new Apple product, and that she had chosen Apple for its brand promise as the best tool to meet her needs as a student. She didn’t realize the value of an extended warranty at the time because of that brand promise, and now she was out both a computer, and her savings. She didn’t expect a reply, but wanted him to know how disappointed she was in the turn of events.

To the caller’s complete surprise, she received a call from Jobs the next day. “That’s not the way we plan for things to work on any of those levels,” said Jobs. But sometimes mistakes happen, both on the product side as well as the services side – and, in this case, sometimes both at once. Jobs apologized, and that week the caller had the best iMac money could buy plus all possible accessories sent to her, with a signed apology note from Jobs. To this day, she said she thinks of him as a hero.

Owning your brand reputation

This story took place before the explosion of social media, when reputation management was arguably less essential of a daily task, at least in hospitality, than it is now. One might imagine how many times a story like the one this Apple customer recalled may have been told or how far it could have spread within today’s fast moving social media landscape.

At the hospitality seminar later that day, Stowe Shoemaker, a Cornell Hospitality professor, taught attendees how to determine the definite and measurable value that hotel brands should place upon Word of Mouth (WOM). This value goes both ways, both for negative and positive WOM, with negative stories often being retold far more times than positive ones. According to Shoemaker, that WOM value is a critical part of the equation in determining a hotel customer’s lifetime brand value (which can, from the participants’ reactions, be surprisingly high!); calculating that value can provide tremendous business intelligence for determining courses of action in customer service, public relations, social media, and other key engagement areas of your business.

Recover from service failures to create fans

Although Jobs could have responded to the flagged service issue in a number of ways that would likely have been met with satisfaction from his customer, he chose to take an extra step that ultimately turned a negative customer experience into a loyal lifetime brand relationship. Ten years later the caller is still an Apple brand ambassador, prior to her blueberry iMac purchase – proving that negative brand experiences can be spun quickly and with minimum effort in order to create loyal, lasting fans that will be valuable to your brand. 

Shoemaker contended that Loyalty to hotel brands does not rest on the hotel being perfect or covering up mistakes, but in fact, in many cases, depends on brands responding to service failures quickly and properly per channel – including through social media, both that the hotel controls as well as external sites. Reputation management has reached a tipping point in our industry this year, but is not always mentioned hand in hand with creating brand loyalty. The take away to learn from Jobs’ story and Shoemaker’s lecture is that hotel brands need to understand key communication channels, their audiences, and respond to service failures in ways that help show the understanding, human, and receptive side of your brand.

*Image source: Pristine Creation