You know, if there is an industry that seems to have more problems and more difficulties, its gotta be in the restaurant business. So when I talk about service recovery, I’m talking about when the customer perceives that you’ve done something wrong and they get irate, they get upset, they get really mad.

Learn how to eliminate most customer complaints in the healthcare industry? 

The 4th step in service recovery: compensation. Just saying I'm sorry is nice customer service. Compensation moves it to what I call service recovery. How do you take the customer who is ready to kill you, who never intends to come back, how do you flip the situation so that he is more loyal, that he comes back?

The third element of service recovery is we have to be empowered. That means every single person has to be able to make a very fast decision on the spot. They have to be able to bend the rules to take care of a customer, to make a customer over-happy. The last thing we want is an employee to say, "Mr. Customer, Mr. Tschohl, Miss Gonzales, we have rules, we have policies and we have procedures, and there's nothing I can do about it." 

The marketplace today demands speed. Apple with its iPhones and iPads, has apps downloaded every millisecond. Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg of Google in their book, How Google Works say "The pace of change is accelerating."