It’s not a shame to be wrong, it’s a shame to work badly. What rules help create a culture of error correction and grow your company?
In modern culture, it is customary to focus on achievement and ignore failure. Errors are perceived as either a deviation from the norm or overestimated. Hence it follows: a mistake is a loser. We have developed a special culture of working on errors. What mistakes can happen and how to turn them into a way of company development.
Hide bugs and remove bad reviews
We are guided by two theses:
- Everyone is wrong.
- Whoever says he is never wrong is lying.
If there are no reviews on the company’s website in the spirit of: “You messed up”, then these reviews are simply deleted. This does not mean that the company is good and sinless. It’s just that there are special people there who track these reviews.
When buying a product, for example, on a marketplace, you read reviews, and there: “The product is so-so, it worked for me less than the warranty period”. Often this attitude towards the product is automatically extended to the attitude towards the seller. Naturally, the entrepreneur is trying with all his might to hide that he is wrong.
In fact, social media and testimonial sites are a powerful tool for addressing weaknesses in company policy. When we first started, we didn’t pay attention to bad reviews and didn’t react to them. Now we have started to work on the principle of “black box” – the book with that title was written by Matthew Syed. It is by this approach that we perceive mistakes and emphasize: we are not hiding anything.
The appearance of negativity on external sites means that the client was so upset that he was no longer ashamed, found it possible to tell an indefinite circle of people about this. Then we come to the comments and try to find out what happened in order to then analyze this situation. In my opinion, this is the most productive way to work with reputation. If the company does not respond to the claims, then the author of the claim in the public field automatically becomes right.
Do not follow the correspondence of the client and technical support
Customer support calls are the easiest way to find out what users are unhappy with and improve it. We have a search in the application where you can search for any words. We search for “why”. The logic is simple: if a client asks us “why”, he does not understand something. It means that they gave bad advice. We had 78 thousand why in 2019. In half of them, as a rule, there were moments where we could explain the situation in more understandable words or anticipate it.
We used to count likes / dislikes. Then we realized that the dislike reaction might not be our fault: the news could simply upset the client. As a result, this tool was removed. On the other hand, there are internal experts who randomly look through the correspondence with clients. During the working day, they devote several hours to reading. Thanks to this, we improve the service or introduce new quality standards. So, we changed the style of messages and mass mailings: we learned to speak with clients in an understandable language.