Category Archives: Common sense

There will be a mistake. A bad one. Customers will be inconvenienced, damaged, frightened, perturbed, and angry.

Say you’re sorry. Then say what happened. Then say you’re sorry again. Save the soul-searching “This has been a bad day,” stuff for your spouse — because it’s been a worse day for many of your customers.

Do not try to publicly minimize the inconvenience your company’s foul-up has caused its customers. You don’t know what it’s like for them. Also, blogs will skewer you.

Over-apologize, over-compensate, over-fix. Do you want to be Toyota?

Check out these apologies.  Both help a bit, but they have flaws that could easily have been avoided. Can you see them?

A long day at McAfee

Blippy And Credit Card Numbers

Trying to convince me that your company name (which is not an acronym) must be written in all caps just because you say so is bad enough. You most certainly do not get to specify that some letters in it are to be in bold while others are in regular font.

Don’t lecture, and don’t read from a script. Especially if you’re demoing over the phone, check in once in a while and see if I’m still there.

If you’re presenting at an industry conference to a room full of people that includes press, showing slides stamped “Confidential” on screen sends a weird message.

If you launch a product from your New York office, and a journalist from CBS (or anywhere for that matter) calls at 3:00 PM West Coast time to do a story, you might want to tell your receptionist that the response, “It’s after hours here, someone will get back to you in the morning,” is really more infuriating than helpful.

Better yet: Put contact information for your execs or your PR firm up on your Web site so said journalist doesn’t have to deal with your receptionist in the first place. See: Tip #22.