There’s a great line in the book Human Sigma by John H. Fleming and Jim Asplund:
Feelings are facts.
Customers use feelings to form their perception about the service they receive. These feelings are much stronger, and much more important than what actually happened.
Service failures can create strong feelings about poor service. Research shows that fixing the problem might not be enough to make the customer feel good again.
If we want our customer to feel great, we have to overcorrect.
Here are some examples:
A winery shipped wine to the wrong address. They fixed the problem by sending a new shipment to the correct address and overcorrected by letting the first recipient keep the wine they incorrectly received.
A cable repair technician fixed a glitch in the customer’s cable system and then overcorrected by showing the customer how to boost their wifi reception.
A technical support agent helped a customer access a locked account and then overcorrected by showing the customer some new features that would save her time.
In each of these cases, the customer went from feeling bad about the problem to feeling great about the extra level of service they received. All because of the overcorrect.