Every Mistake Creates An Opportunity
I received this notecard last week:
For lovers of shelter magazines, the world ended sometime around the end of January this year. Domino Magazine forclosed; its publisher, Conde Nast, decided that it was all over. Over a half million subscribers were out the magazine they loved. I was one of them; I believed that Domino was one of the best edited and best designed magazines I’ve ever read. I subscribed more out of appreciation for their craft than the actual subject matter.
Breaking Trust
I believe that when you owe someone something (a customer buys something from you) and it falls through, you own them two things: the delivery of what they wanted in the first place and an apology. Sometimes the delivery of the thing might be impossible (your room at the hotel was given to someone else), in which case the apology better double deliver or triple deliver. When someone apologizes to you and you accept it fully, it’s usually because in your own mind you think, “yeah, he/she finally understands why this disappointed me / pissed me off so much and now that we’re both at the same point, I can move forward.”
Like most things in life, we learned this best from our mothers when we were young. When you punched your brother or sister in the face, what did your mom do? She made you a) stop punching your sister in the face and b) apologize. If you’re like me, in the long run the part that meant the most wasn’t your mom teaching you to stop punching, it was the apology.
The game-changing question is: if you make a mistake, is your end goal to simply correct it and move on, or use the mistake as an opportunity? I guarantee you for each mistake you’ve made in your life in which you truly apologized (and the person on the other end accepted it), you built something better. Maybe it was a better customer. Maybe a better relationship.
Who’s Problem Gets Solved?
When Conde Nast decided to shut down Domino, they had a few business issues they had to sweep up off the floor: over a half million subscribers had paid for a Domino subscription. They would have to provide a refund or give them a different product (which, as an aside, would do wonders for whatever title suddenly received a windfall boost in their rate base of subscribers). One way to solve this problem is to do the above: move the list to another shelter title (Architectural Digest) and alert the customers of the change. A postcard is one way to do that.
But, who’s problem is solved by that? Some might see that act as not entirely aligned with solving the Domino subscriber’s pain point. And, as a friend commented to me, it could be the ultimate admission that Conde Nast didn’t know what they had with Domino if they decided to gift those users to AD – the Domino reader defined herself (pronounal bias is right on here – most Domino readers were women) as unique and different from the typical oldschool sheleter reader. This is a bit like Whole Foods closing and telling its customers that their old gift certificates would be valid at McDonald’s.
So-So Method
The above method is a so-so method of asking forgiveness. The fact that the message came ten weeks later, riddled with passive voice and printed on a 1-color postcard is perhaps a bit downmarket, but I can understand that this is the cheapest way to disseminate a message to a lot of people when you don’t have their email address.
End User Headspace: “Okay, at least I’m not losing money.”
O.K. Method
When I told Andrea about this (unfortunately for her I have been talking about this Domino postcard for a week), she very quickly delivered an idea that someone at Conde Nast should have executed on: why not give the victimized subscribers choice? A better method of asking forgiveness here would have been a series of options. Point me to a website and let me click on what I want. Conde Nast owns dozens of magazines.
End User Headspace: “Well, that’s too bad. But on the other hand now I get to pick a shiny new thing.”
Better Method
If the publisher wanted to apologize and show the subscriber they really had their interests in mind, they could have done something special. They could have run the O.K. method and added Domino editor Debra Needleman describing each optional magazine in a short series of video clips. “Hi Domino reader. We really enjoyed bringing you Domino but unfortunately we ran out of time to make it work from a business standpoint. I hope you know we really liked creating it for you. As a make good, I’d like to suggest some options for your subscription. If you really liked section X in Domino, you might be interested in Title Y. I’ve been reading it since 2004 and my favorite section is…”
End User Headspace: “Well, that’s too bad and I can understand that. I liked that they took the time to make sense of these other product for me since I didn’t know a lot about them.”
Best
What’s the best method to apologize to a customer when you’ve done them wrong? I don’t know yet. If you believe that screwing up is an opportunity to destroy or strengthen your relationships, the answer to what defines “best” would have tremendous value. I’m working on it. If you’re interested in exploring sharing your story about a business mistake and the opportunity gained (or lost), drop me a line.
