Business Apology with a Kick

Our Pediatric Dentist is dedicated to making going to the dentist an extremely positive experience for kids: they have TVs over the patient "beds" where they play kids movies, video games galore around the office, a huge tropical fish tank, and they give ice cream after the cleaning along with balloons, goodie bags of dental supplies geared towards kids and tokens for the trinket machines. It's truly a wonderful experience for them all the way around. Usually...

Last Friday we had an unusually bad experience. Both boys had appointments at 3:30 and we arrived on time. We got called back around 3:45 pm and the X-rays and cleaning went really fast with the hygenist being very patient with two hyperactive 8 year old boys (it WAS a Friday afternoon after all). But, then we had to wait for the dentist. And wait we did. She finally came in close to 4:20 and while she was looking at Travis I ran Tom down to the bathroom - literally less than 5 minutes.

When we got back, she was gone and we were told she'd be right back. so we waited again. Close to 5pm she came back with sincere apologies that she really had meant to only go check one patient and come right back but then she had gotten sucked back into her normal rounds around the office.

I could understand that and I could see they were very busy and honestly it was probably easier for her to finish up with a whole bunch of patients and just make one family unhappy than to come back to us and potentially make lots of families unhappy. She gave the boys extra tokens for the trinket machine for being so good while waiting and although I was a little frustrated by the lateness as I had other errands to run I generally put it out of my mind. It was basically another day at a doctor/dentist office.

That is, I forgot about it until yesterday when I received a letter from the dentist that felt heavy, like there was a card in it. I thought maybe they had started some new weird program or were sending a new magent and almost tossed it. But, I opened it and read a very nice apology letter that basically stated they werre sorry for us "waiting beyond what is considered a reasonable length of time" and then it went on to say "Please accept the enclosed gift and our appreciation for the relationship we are so grateful to have with you."

Inside the note was a smaller envelope with a gift card to Starbucks! I thought, "that's pretty nice and totally unexpected". They hadn't written the amount on it, so I logged in to Starbucks figuring it'd be $5 or maybe $10. It's a $25 gift card! How wonderful an apology is THAT?

Honestly I would have been fine with just the note to me - just an acknowledgement that something went wrong - since she'd already made it up to the boys with the extra "toys". But, for them to go the extra mile and send something to me that I will definitely use and will make me remember them in a positive way - that's the way to do an apology!

I think more businesses can take a page out of their book on how to do business and how to make customer feel truly important to them. Thanks Jenkins & LeBlanc - we'll be back soon! :)