Guest Recovery

WHAT IS GUEST RECOVERY?

Guest Recovery is a large part of the Quality & Customer Experience Critical Success Factor. Not every single guest is going to have a “REMARK”able experience, because we are human and we make mistakes. That’s okay! What matters more than the fact that we messed up or that they had a bad experience is how you handle it. This is what we call Guest Recovery. It’s not just about addressing the issue and getting the guest what they want. It’s about recovering that guest and ensuring they come back. At Chick-fil-A, we always say, “we don’t break up, we make up.” The goal is always to keep our guests! It is not a matter of who is right, but of what is right for the guest. Always remember that a disgruntled guest is an opportunity to create a Raving Fan!

Dissatisfied guests ultimately impact what we call the bottom line. Think of an unhappy guest as lost sales, which, despite how busy we are, is something we definitely do not want. Consider the following exercise to show you what this looks like in reality:

That is 1.7 million dollars annually. Every single guest who walks out of Chick-fil-A unhappy is a serious matter. The impacts of a poor experience are far greater than we can see right then and there. If we continue to fail to meet our guests’s expectations, they're going to stop coming back to eat with us.

They are also going to tell us & others the opposite of what we want them to: instead of becoming Raving Fans who share their awesome experiences, they will become adamant protestors, who boldly declare their distrust & dislike for Chick-fil-A. The only way we can make this better is not by being perfect, because that is never going to happen. There is no scenario in which us being somehow better would solve this issue. Instead, we must accept our faults and shortcomings and recover guests well when we fail to execute with excellence.