It happens to nearly everyone. What? The online blunder. When you work on the Internet, there will probably come a time when you make a critical error that makes you want to kick yourself.
The way you handle it will not only impact your business but your reputation among your peers, your customers, and your prospects. The vast majority of the most successful internet marketers will have stories they can tell about costly errors they’ve made.
Online Blunders
A lot of things can go wrong in any business. When you make a critical error online, the fallout can be huge. What could go wrong? Typos, broken links, wrong links, incorrect prices, and other things can go wrong and cost you money, time, customers, and your reputation.
A mistake could even result in a poor review that outranks your own website and haunts you for a long time. When major things go wrong online, it can impact your online reputation in a big way, and reputation for online marketers is vital. Errors and online blunders can cost you money and make you feel silly. What’s the most important thing you can do? Make it right.
People who are considering doing business with you will usually look into your reputation and if they see a past blunder, they may hold this against you. But if they see that you made it right, this demonstrates your ethics and integrity.
No one is infallible and the vast majority of customers realise this. They’re often pretty forgiving if you make it right. Sure, it might cost you some profit but you can retain your credibility in your customers’ eyes if you: honour a low price, make something wrong right, apologise for mistakes, and treat them like you value their opinion and their business. After sales service can make one-time customers loyal lifetime customers.
Sure, mistakes can be costly but not fixing them could be even costlier. Some online blunders cost you money because of the wrong approach but if you do something that could potentially harm your reputation, it’s time to do some damage control:
• Fix it.
• Say you’re sorry.
• Learn from your mistakes
If the error has resulted in online discussions, track what people are saying, if it’s a scenario that could have fallout. Then, you can address complaints and public lynching individually. By addressing everything individually, carefully and professionally, you can minimise the impact to your online business. Eventually, your fifteen minutes of fame (or fifteen minutes of shame) will pass.
Every time something goes wrong in business, it becomes an opportunity to learn a lesson and sometimes mistakes can even be serendipitous. After you’ve done the damage control, all you can do is sit down and do a post-mortem to examine what you could do to prevent further online blunders happening in the future.
See you at the top of Google!
Sean Rasmussen
SEO Australia Pacific
AussieSEO.com © 2007 - 2010
Hi Sean,
Unfortunately, I’ve made some online blunders but you can recover from them. I think the same rules apply online as offline when you make a mistake.
You have to do your best to fix the situation, apologise for what you did wrong and be genuinely sorry, make amends if it’s at all possible and don’t do it again. I think the thing to remember is that no-one is perfect and we all make mistakes.
Then, I think it’s a matter of just getting on with it. We have to move forward.
.-= Jazz Salinger´s last blog ..Learn and Earn – It’s a Marathon Not a Sprint =-.
Hi Sean
There are two distinct words in this article that stand out and they are ethics and integrity. It takes lots of courage to apologise after a stuff up and depending on the blunder, there could be widely strewn collateral damage to mop up.
The most important factor is to address the customers like you have mentioned, in the most sincere way. If you take action to redress the situation immediately via communication, people know that you are in your integrity.
This needs to be followed up then with delivering whatever was promised in the first place and I would say a few added extra bonuses (just to be nice). That’s the ethical part.
Great information. Thanks Sean.
Blessings,
Elly
.-= Elly´s last blog .. =-.