Organisations spend enormous sums building brands. They invest in advertising, attractive premises, sophisticated websites and carefully designed customer experiences. Yet sometimes all that investment can be undermined by something remarkably simple: what happens when a customer has a problem.

Good customer care is not demonstrated when everything goes according to plan; it is demonstrated when something goes wrong. It is at precisely these moments that an organisation reveals whether its commitment to customers is genuinely embedded in its culture or exists primarily in its marketing language.

A recent experience with a retailer provides an interesting case study. The original problem could hardly have been simpler. A T-shirt was purchased from the company's airport store, but the security tag was inadvertently left attached. The customer subsequently returned home to Malta, making the standard solution of simply returning to the shop impractical. The company was informed of precisely this from the beginning.

Initially, the response appeared reassuring. A customer-care representative apologised and instructed the customer to post the item to the company's returns operation in the United Kingdom. Importantly, the customer was explicitly told that once the item was received, the security tag would be removed and the item would be sent back. The customer followed those instructions, spending €16.29 to return an item that had been rendered unusable by the retailer's original mistake.

Unfortunately, this is where the system appears to have stopped working effectively. More than two months later, the customer reported that the item had neither been returned nor had there been communication explaining what had happened to it. When the matter was raised again, the customer was asked to provide the receipt, proof of postage and tracking number, even though much of this information had already featured in the correspondence.

Eventually, another representative suggested visiting the nearest company store to have the security tag removed. There was one rather fundamental problem: the company already had the T-shirt, because the customer had posted it to the address supplied two months earlier. Moreover, the correspondence had repeatedly explained that the customer lived in Malta. This is where the incident becomes more than a complaint about a T-shirt, because it illustrates several fundamental principles of customer care.

The first is that organisations must listen, rather than merely respond. A polite email is not necessarily good customer service, and expressions of sympathy become meaningless when the response that follows demonstrates that the customer's history has not actually been understood. There is an enormous difference between acknowledging a complaint and genuinely engaging with it.

Second, organisations need ownership. In this case, the customer dealt with several representatives. When responsibility continually moves from one employee to another, customers effectively become case managers for their own complaints. They must repeatedly explain what happened, resend documentation and reconcile contradictory instructions.

This is precisely where good customer-care systems should intervene. Once a problem becomes unusual or cannot be resolved through standard procedures, somebody should take ownership of the case from beginning to end. The customer should not have to understand the company's internal structures or determine which department is responsible, because internal complexity is the organisation's problem, not the customer's.

Third, procedures should serve customers rather than become barriers to solving problems. In this case, the company later explained that store purchases ordinarily had to be dealt with through its retail locations and suggested that the customer could visit a UK store or ask friends or family in the UK to do so. Yet this overlooked the fact that an earlier representative had specifically instructed the customer to send the item to the company's returns address.

This exposes a broader organisational problem: customer care requires institutional memory. A customer should experience one organisation, not a collection of disconnected departments, agents and systems. Technology should make this easier, and when an email trail exists, the customer should not repeatedly have to provide information already supplied.

There is also a particular lesson here for airport retailers. Airports serve travellers and, by definition, many customers purchasing from an airport store will shortly be hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. A customer-care model that assumes an airport customer can conveniently return to a UK branch therefore deserves reconsideration.

Mistakes happen in every organisation, and a mistake can sometimes even strengthen customer loyalty if it is resolved quickly, generously and intelligently. Customers do not necessarily expect perfection, but they do expect accountability. The real measure of customer care is therefore not how convincingly an organisation says, "We value your custom," but what it actually does when valuing that customer requires someone to take responsibility, depart from a script and solve the problem. Ultimately, customer care is not simply about answering emails; it is about resolving problems.