Loss is too important to wait around...

Wether its a missing phone or your house is on fire, waiting around just isn’t an option. Yet, this is the standard practice for most approaches to your customer experience.

Hurry up and wait is a painful customer experience that has been adopted far too commonly across all the Lost & Found processes. We get it. Lost & Found can be difficult, people can get emotional (sometimes very angry), and it’s often not very successful.

Customers are just trying to find their lost stuff?

So why are you waiting to answer that question? Or even worse only going to talk IF we find it?!?!?!

Customer Experience builds a foundation on a relationship with your brand and organization. Putting in a crazy amount of expert to get them to a place then actively blowing them off when they have a problem is crazy.

Sure it might take awhile for an item to be found or it might never show up at all. But you should still try to help them and possibly try to prevent that from happening in the future.

I bet you are thinking “so if this pompous a**hole thinks he’s so smart how should we do it then”?

If we understand the job to be done then just do the job. Lost & Found is:
– Customers looking for their lost stuff
– Customers not sure what they should do now
– Customers wanting some hope and support

So if those are the jobs then let’s do those jobs well.

Customers looking for their lost stuff:

This is an easy one that many organizations are doing already but they let it get sort of wonky in the middle. Looking for the missing stuff means you need to collect, in one place, from every part of the organization. Once you have all the stuff you need to let the customers look for it!

That is the part where organizations tend to go wrong. They use a form, an email, curtains, or phone numbers to report that items are missing.

Reporting something ≠ looking for the item

At Liff Happens we have specifically made it our mission to figure out all those fidly bits in job of loss. Wether that’s streamline operations to have items show up quickly when found to get the found items in front of people when they go looking. The tricky part is customers often “look” for there stuff in every way possible from asking people, calling, emailing, searching the website, and even not looking at all (this is an annoying one). So to address this we make it really easy to collect items and then push that information out in as many ways as possible to get it in front of the customer and ultimately get those items back. Think of us as The Office’s Whuphf but for Lost & Found.

It’s not there so what do they do now?

With an often low “success rate” (the number of people who find their loss items divided by the number of people reporting an item missing) you will have a lot of customers seeking this next step, especially since items rarely show up right when person begins to look for them. This is the perfect chance to set expectations, teach them how to help themselves (or keep looking without bugging you directly), and a chance to not totally abandon your customers to the elements.

These are the moments to build relationships and help wrong some negative experiences. Don’t ignore but instead put it into a process. If your mission has anything to do with inclusion then you better believe this is the place to show it

Customers seeking hope and support:

Loss sucks… There really isn’t much of a better way to put it. Wether you were pickpocketed or left it in a port-a-potty, it just sucks. After an item goes missing your customers are often lost themselves. They are looking for hope that the world will be alright again. Give them some hope but set a realistic outcome, it also helps to set a bit of perspective on where they are and how much that lost thing doesn’t cosmically matter in the long run but I digress.

Lost & Found is an opportunity to build 1-to-1 human connections, solve a very real and very painful customer problem, and learn more about what your customer cares about most. Don’t ignore but embrace it.

Also, Happy Holidays!

Interested in hearing more or want to chat with the Liff Happens Crew? Drop your info below: