The Curious Case of the Missing R, or Why Attention to Detail Matters
Some time ago, we launched our company’s referral program. The program was designed to be as user-friendly as possible so our customers would quickly jump onboard and start sending out invites to their friends to join pCloud.
Whenever we launch a new service or product feature, we get feedback from our clients. We have managed to cultivate a community of people who freely speak their mind, and are not afraid to share it when they like, dislike or love something that we do.
As usual, the feedback about our referral program started coming in — only, these were not the reactions we expected. People were furious with us, and the reason for that was… a typo on our website.
You read right: a typo. A silly little spelling mistake.
See, instead of “through”, we wrote “though”, and our users were outraged. Well, I may be exaggerating a little here, but people were definitely not impressed with the little error we had made. One of them even went as far as asking, “How can I trust you if you make such mistakes!”. Oh.
To the unprofessional eye, a single typo on a website may seem like something minuscule and insignificant but this is not always the case.
Once you reach a certain level of excellence, your customers are bound to expect the same level of quality for everything you do. So when you make a mistake, even a little typo like the one I described, it doesn’t go unnoticed.
This story also goes to show that packaging matters. If you offer an extraordinary service through a crappy website and your social media channels are unattended, your service will not be perceived as extraordinary. If you’re selling the most amazing product that comes in an ugly package, your clients will not be impressed.
Everything surrounding the product you offer speaks to the quality of the product. Your website, your social media channels, the emails you send out, the way your receptionist greets visitors or callers on the phone — all this adds to the image you are trying to build. And when this image is not to the standard that your customers expect, they react.
I get it. It’s easy to confuse “through” and “though” when you’re typing something in a rush. Your spell-checker won’t catch the mistake — but your clients will. And if you think that pointing it out is blowing things out of proportion, you’re wrong.
At pCloud, we were incredibly happy that our users were mad at us for the typo. Here’s what we took out of the occurrence that we lovingly call “The case of the missing R”:
- Our clients pay close attention to the things we do;
- They have set standards to which they hold us accountable;
- Their feedback was also mostly well-intended, which tells us our user community is dedicated to helping us improve our services.
Pretty great, huh? And all it took to figure this out was a silly little typo.
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