The Loop I Owed You...
In the summer I mentioned I had lost my website because nobody had checked the backup. It is back, and so is a lesson most businesses skip.
The Promise
A few months ago I wrote about losing my website. Not to a hack and not to anything dramatic. It needed to be moved it from one platform to another. The backup that should have been made was missed, and I had never once checked whether it existed. One day it simply stopped existing.
In that same letter I made a promise. I said this newsletter would move from every second Tuesday to every Tuesday, and that I was telling you publicly because a commitment made out loud costs something.
Then you did what readers sensibly do. You read it, perhaps nodded, and got on with your week. Nobody wrote to ask whether the site was coming back, or whether the weekly letter would really happen. That is completely normal; almost nobody chases up someone else’s promise.
Which is exactly why the follow-up matters so much, and why far too many businesses never send it.
The Waiter Who Forgot
In the 1920s, so the story goes, a group of psychologists were sitting in a Berlin restaurant when one of them, Kurt Lewin, noticed something about their waiter. He could recall every detail of an order that had not yet been paid. Once the bill was settled, he could barely remember it at all.
Lewin’s student Bluma Zeigarnik went on to study the pattern, and it became known as the Zeigarnik effect: the mind holds on to what is unfinished. Later research has been mixed on how strong the effect really is, but anyone who has worked a restaurant floor, and I worked a good many, recognizes that waiter. The open table stays with you until it is closed.
Customers work the same way, with one difference that matters a great deal. Their open loops are not orders and they are the problems they reported and never heard about again.
The Repair Nobody Mentions
Picture a guest who tells reception that the shower in her room runs cold. The team fixes it within the hour. Maintenance logs it, the manager signs it off, and as far as the hotel is concerned the problem is closed.
As far as the guest is concerned, it is still open. Nobody told her or even worse she may have had to ask twice. She does not know it was fixed, or whether anyone cared that she mentioned it, so what she remembers about the stay is the cold shower, not the repair.
It happens often, and not only in hotels. The client whose invoice was wrong receives a corrected one with no word of explanation. The employee who raised a safety issue sees it quietly fixed and never learns that their voice was the reason. In every case the business did the hard part and skipped the easy one, because communication often lacks when it is most needed.
Most businesses are far better at fixing than they are at telling. The work gets done, and the loop stays open in the one place it really matters, which is the customer’s memory. One sentence would close it. “You told us, we truly appreciate the feedback, we fixed it, thank you for letting us know”. It costs nothing, and it turns a complaint into proof that speaking up works. A customer who learns that speaking up works will speak up again, instead of quietly not coming back.
Fixing it is maintenance. Telling them is care.
Closing Mine
So here is my own loop, closed.
The weekly letter happened. Since September there has not been a Tuesday without one, and this is the eleventh in a row. Most weeks a Thursday post has gone out alongside it, and once there was even a Sunday reflective post I felt I needed to write. Not because I suddenly found more discipline, but because I rebuilt how the work gets done, which was the whole point of that summer letter.
The website is back too, georgiosb.com and this time it was rebuilt beautifully I might add. Before we called it finished, we made sure the domain, the admin access, the passwords and the email address were all safe and secure. That was the part I failed to check last time, so it was something we made sure of this time around.
On it you will find forty years of my career, from washing dishes a fifteen in my father’s restaurant in Vancouver to the work I do today, along with the books. If you have read this newsletter for a while and wondered where the stories come from, that is where they live.
The Loop Test
Before the end of this week, try three things. Find one complaint from the last month that was fixed, and check whether anyone informed the customer properly. Find one promise your business made in public, on a sign, a website or a sales call, and check whether you could prove you kept it. Then find one loop of your own, a call you said you would return or a follow-up you said you would send, and close it today.
If the first answer is no, you do not have a service problem. You have a silence problem, and it is the cheapest one you will ever fix.
The Question
When was the last time a business came back, without being asked, to tell you it had fixed something you complained about? And did it change how you felt about them?
Trust is the only currency that compounds without inflation.
Relationship. Not Transaction.
Georgios B.