Hair salon owner Erika Wasser, left, has her hair touched up by lead stylist Samantha Sheppard at a Glam+Go studio, Thursday, July 19, 2018, in New York. Wasser owns nine salons in three cities. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)Erika Wasser and her staffers arrived for a big appointment – hair and makeup for a bridal party of 11 – to realize someone had goofed and the salon space they share in a Miami hotel wasn’t available that day. And the bride was expected in an hour.
“We messed up HUGE,” is how Wasser, owner of nine Glam+Go salons in three cities, remembers the Saturday a year ago. She quickly pulled out her credit card, reserved a suite in the hotel, and “the bridal party and our team literally transported everything – dryers, chairs, everything basically not nailed down – from our salon and recreated an en suite Glam+Go.”
“If there’s ever a day you don’t want don’t want to mess up,” Wasser says, “it’s a wedding.”
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Misunderstandings, mistakes and breakdowns can happen at any company – including a giant like Amazon, which had the embarrassment of its website not working properly at the start of its much-advertised Prime Day. Small business owners know they might not be able to survive negative reviews on social media, so when they have customer service disasters they need to try to not just mollify customers but please or even thrill them.