This is one in a series of posts where I document my startup journey. If you just landed here, go to this link and you’ll find all the other posts in the series.
There’s one thing I have had to get better at over the course of the last 18 months: apologizing.
I’ve had to apologize for many things. Delayed deliveries, mixed up orders, damaged products, unsatisfactory packaging, rude third-party delivery guys (yes!), the proverbial nine yards and a little bit more.
The details vary, but there is common thread in all these apologies. In their most general form, they sound like this:
I’m sorry I failed to meet your expectations.
That is because all these mistakes we’ve had to apologize for are matters of expectation management. I have to admit we’ve been a little haphazard in that department.
Here’s the most recent example:
We received a fairly large order from a certain customer who had ordered from us a couple of times before. At the point of ordering he asked me when the delivery could be made, and I said it will be done the day after next, because that is the time we needed to deliver given his location, unless something went wrong.
Something did go wrong. Our rider couldn’t make it, and when the customer received the order, it had been 4 days after placing it.
He was not happy. We had delivered his earlier orders in a day or two, and he was expecting the same speed this time. On top of that, I had told him the package will only take two days to reach him, and I had failed to deliver on that promise. He contacted me and said that he was very disappointed with the service, and that it’ll be his final order. “Time and Word matters most in business,” he said.
Now, this is completely on me. I had made things so.
When something like this happens, I freak out a little. Knowing that you’ve fucked something up is unnerving enough, but what bothers me the most is that I don’t have the communication skills to let the customer know that I truly feel that way.
I’ve always tried to own up to those mistakes and make my apologies come out as sincere as possible, but there’s still a lot of work to do. Not just with the apologizing part — because frankly the solution is to come to a point where we don’t make mistakes that need apologizing for — but with maintaining customer interactions that don’t result in unrealistic expectations.
How do you manage expectations?
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