Made mistakes?:Don’t worry, here’s how to make the best out of screw-ups-Boodopt Start-up Diary #5
Customers send you a scathing email of complaint. Long-time users cancel their subscriptions out of frustration. New users who have come out of free trial decide to stop using your service…sound all too familiar? Everything is going well until…everything isn’t.
Yes, I am talking about the screw-ups that are all too common to start-ups. Bound by limited time and resources, start-up teams more often than not have to prioritize time over quality control. And let’s face it, the limitations are not going away anytime soon and thus mistakes do occur often.
After apologizing profusely to the customers (and hoping they will continue with our services), here’s the big question: so we have screwed up, what’s next?
Below are some tips from our experience at Boodopt on turning each mistake into a opportunity for improvement.
Investigate what had gone wrong
After admitting that there is a mistake, don’t just leave it there! Ask them what went wrong. For every complaining customer, there are another 9 who have left without saying a word. Just think about it: That one pissed off customer who bothered to write you an email may in fact be a treasure trove of brutally honest feedback.
It is an intimidating experience trying to speak to an angry customer, so the key is showing sincerity in solving his/her problem.
Just a few weeks ago, we had our second trial event. Just before the event, many participants were visibly excited as they expected to get helpful feedback on their business model. Unfortunately, due to technical glitch, we were almost a week late to deliver on our promise of a sentiment analysis report and a leads list.
While speaking to a few participants, I noticed that one of them had a noticeable hostile tone and decided to dig further. At first, he was reluctant to talk any further, but in the end he relented after my persistent messages. He told me that he was disappointed that we had left them waiting without informing them about the delay. He suggested that we immediately inform our future customers the problems instead of keeping them guessing.
At that moment, we immediately realized what was going wrong and was able to fix it in time. We would not have discovered it if we had not been persistent in finding the root of the problem.
Talk about it within the team
After a screw-up, there is a natural urge to blame it on someone. Resist the temptation as it is a sure-fire way to make things worse. On top of that, it has negative long-term implications for the team dynamics as well.
Start-up is a team game, no one can be blameless if the team wasn’t performing. The customers do not care who is at fault; all they care about is getting the problems fixed. So focus on the issue at hand, immediately discuss within the team:
1.What happened?
2.What went wrong and at which step?
3.How to fix it?
An open discussion ensures that everyone on the team has a full understanding of the situation and has full ownership of the actions taken.
Apply the fix immediately
Now that everyone is on the same page, the most important thing is to make sure the discussed solution is applied immediately. No “one week later” or “we will do it soon” bullshit, just do it right away.
From our experience, when things get shelved, they often do not get done at all-for a small start-up, there are new issues almost every other day. If it is an important problem-and you want to get it done, do it there and then.
Document the new practice
Working on a start-up, there is one glaring weakness that we realized about ourselves: the difficulty of changing a long-held belief or a practice.
Indeed, after implementing the changes (for example, how often we kept in touch with our clients), we found that it was easy to lose track and revert back to our old ways.
We started experimenting with many new methods to keep us from falling back all the time, some were effective and some had no effect. We were at our wits’ end until we started documenting our learning and new practice as we go along. The result was remarkable: we discovered that the documentation process imprinted the lessons learnt deeply onto our subconscious mind. In fact, what you are reading now, is part of our effort to archive our learning. Granted, it is not a fool-proof method and we still made old mistakes. But when it comes to the same situation, there is a tendency to be more cautious and think, “Where have I seen this before?”.
Confucius once said, “If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.”. Let me add on to this quote, “If you make a mistake and do not learn from it, correct it and document it, this is called a mistake.”
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