I spent a long time in a fairly high-pressure corporate environment, dealing with some high-profile clients doing database, analysis and production work that was complex and fraught with opportunities for mistakes.
I made a lot of mistakes- especially in the first year or two as I was gaining experience. Are you familiar with the “ohnosecond”? It’s that brief fraction of a second when you suddenly realize you’ve made a BIG mistake. Your heart drops into your stomach and you pound your head on your desk hoping you’ll get a concussion and have to go to the hospital rather than deal with the consequences of your oversight. I’ve been there.
At first, my approach was to try and minimize, hide, and made excuses for mistakes that were made, but the further along in my career and experience I got, I realized through the guidance of those wiser than me that there was a better way to handle it.
Recently, over at Performancing, Sean posted about the pMetrics server move and the 48 hour delay in getting stats service restored. I was struck with his honesty about the role he played in the delay by “screwing up” the database move twice. He could have easily just said “the database move took longer than expected because of the distance between the servers”, for example, and never mentioned the mistakes he made. Does being honest about his mistake help or hurt his credibility?
I suggest that honesty and transparency about mistakes actually increases your credibility and builds trust with clients. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s just a fact of life. It’s how you handle the mistakes that makes all the difference. The best formula for discussing an error with a client (or anyone really) is as follows:
- Here’s what happened. Honestly, succinctly, but hopefully put in a way that does not make you look too stupid. Don’t say “I’m such an idiot. I forgot to double check that the file was in CMYK format before I sent it.” Rather, say, “In my effort to meet your deadline, I failed to double check the file format.”
- Apologize. Sincerely.
- Here’s how I’m going to fix it. Provide compensation (as Sean did), a refund, a solution that will meet the client’s needs as well as possible, etc.
- Here’s how I’m going to make sure it never happens again.
Of course, no matter how honest and transparent you are, continually making mistakes will cause you to lose the client. It’s no good if a client finds you perfectly credible if they doubt your ability. A good client will not expect everything to always go perfect, and they also know that even the best designers and service providers will make mistakes. They also know that the best designers and service providers know how to make it right when the mistakes happen.
Even in the world of blogging one makes mistakes and often they can not be taken back. Often they are even VERY public. Kudos for writing this.
Hi Randa
Great Post, you are so right, I do think people respect honesty. Somehow if you fib about the reasons why things have gone wrong it usually comes out in the wash anyway and then they totally loose respect for you.
I used to work as picture editor for a daily newspaper and so was under constant pressure to deliver to daily deadlines and I know that “ohnosecond” that you describe so well…blood rushing to the head so quickly you nearly faint!! What was so hard with that job was the fact that you knew all your work would be chip paper in 12 hours time!!
Anyway hope you had a good Christmas etc.
cheers
Toni
Randa
This is so down to earth.This world would be a much better place if all of us were acting this way.Honesty and transparency are important!
A good point: simple, but often overlooked. Clients want, more than anything, to work with a real person. (Good clients, anyway, who don’t expect supermen/women.) The more we can meet those expectations, the better. Thanks for the post, Randa.
Personally I like working with providers who can admit there mistakes! Who really makes no mistakes at all, nobody. So the better man is the one that tells the truth at all times. Of course this can also go the other way, if you make mistakes way too frequently for my liking I cannot work with that. So admit them, but understand you need to be careful with your work and not make too many.
I believe that it takes two to clap. By being honest and upfront about your mistakes, you are setting a high standard for yourself. However, if you are faced with an unreasonable client, a selfish, myopic excuse for a “decision maker”; your honesty becomes his “aha” moment to lay all the blame squarely on your honest shoulders. I guess if we choose to live by higher standards, we will have to take the occasional mud from the trenches. Call me cynical, but that is a hard truth that quite a few – well, let’s call them people, have rubbed my face in.
I try to always pick clients that appreciate honesty.
Dear Randa,
Wonderful post! How true: “It’s how you handle the mistakes that makes all the difference. The best formula for discussing an error with a client (or anyone really)…”
My focus is on healthcare but it’s really the same logic no matter where the event occurs. Some folks need to be reminded.
Thank you,
~dale
Hey Randa,
I’ve researched this a bit further by doing some surveys for companies, my own company and email lists. And overall people appreciate the honesty a lot, but they also value the fact that it’s a human.
You know what I mean…
“Move of servers has been delayed 48 hours due to various reasons” that sounds so corporate and inhumane. And people, especially online – just want to be able to communicate with a human instead of a corporate identity.
-Dave
Randa,
You’re formula is spot on for “fessing” up. I make and sell baby slings online. With any physical product exchange, there are bound to be mistakes.
Recently I sent the wrong sling to a customer. She wrote an email (out of anger I think) explaining that she was upset.
Here is how I replied:
I think that email diffused the situation because she responded with this:
I’m glad I didn’t try to cover up with lame excuses. Mom was right, honesty is the best policy!
The company that currently hosts my web logs had a problem one day where the server crashed due to a failed hard drive and a failed backup hard drive. They told me the problem and offered a month refund. I felt a lot better knowing what the problem was, and I wasn’t aware of the problem mostly except for an email they shot over to me, letting me know about the problem up front, which was good. I stayed with this company for a couple reasons, one being exactly how they handle problems. They take ownership.
My site went down due to a lack of memory error. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time so I emailed support. The tech figured out the problem and said he fixed it. Checked again, still down so I got a free memory upgrade and the database service started back up. I was little unhappy about the lack of follow up but getting my memory doubled for free I really can’t complain. It bought them some loyalty and I haven’t had but the one problem ever. Have to agree with Chexed, taking ownership means a lot.
Honesty abour your own mistakes has such power, that even celebrities like Marion Jones and maybe even Michael Vick who have gone REALLY wrong will most likely be forgiven from the public.
Of course, honesty about minor blogging problems and how you did your best to solve them is not in that category but the power of forgiveness still applies.
Completely agree. Trying to cover up mistakes will lead you down a path which is self-destructive. While there is a reason to be concerned if you are making mistakes very often, no one expect a person to be perfect all the time.
Randa
That is an awesome post. I totally agree with you that admitting mistakes is the first step toward maturity in an industry. I made a big mistake on a marketing project I was working on and this guy totally called me out on it. Not only did this open a door for me to learn from him but now we are buddies on all kinds of social media sites and I continue to learn from his experiences and I try to remain teachable when I make other mistakes.
Loved the post. Solid advice for me as I’m bound to make a lot of mistakes. Thanks
Im in a start-off at the moment, love your tips, as for the mistakes just think “what doesnt kill you makes you stronger” so it is also with the customers, gaining experience = better relationship.
Excellent post. How all of us handle mistakes that do happen from time to time goes a long way to distinguish true professionals from the competition. I too believe that honesty about mistakes adds to your credibility.
That is some real good advice.
But being a customer, which would you rather hear?
I am not sure if I would rather here a good excuse… or them admitting what they did was wrong.
I might would second guess them in the future, or then again I am sure that with them admitting their wrong, they would make sure it would not happen again.
Great Advice.
I have had to tell some hard truths myself when it was so tempting to make excuses… people do really appreciate integrity though. I know I do!
My first time here, but it won’t be my last.
I learned this lesson early on. It’s hard to admit mistakes, but in general your clients are much more forgiving than you give them credit for. It’s as easy as saying “I messed up, let me fix it”. You’d be surprised at how well this works.
And if it doesn’t, at least you know that your ethics are up to par for admitting your mistake. It’ll catch up with you in the long run.
It’s nice to see a post about taking responsibility for one’s mistakes. I too have seen many instances in the corporate world of desperate buck passing. I, personally, always find it so much more refreshing when someone just steps up, admits the mistake and then works on how to fix it. All the energy in blame deflection could just as easily be used to fix the issue, which is all that’s really important in the end.
You are almost always better off to come clean with a client, once you burn that trust your done. I learned this lesson at a young age. Good post.
Ha, been there a few times throughout my career as well Randa. The way I approach it today is to be honest and up front from the beginning, and I think that’s the best way to build on the relationship with your clients. It’d be nice to know some hosting companies that followed the same philosophy – I could write a book with all of the BS excuses I’ve heard over the years…
I’ve worked with more than 50 clients already doing wordpress themes. but there is one client of mine that stings at the moment! how far should customer support go? as ppl have mentioned here, its okay to admit mistakes and what not.. but what if you currently feel like it’s not ur mistake anymore and the client is just being unreasonable? sorry needed to rant
Honesty is the best policy. Not coming clean with a client will get matters worst. But I believe in standing my ground when I know that the mistake is not mine and the client is just being impossible. You cannot please everybody.
I’ve got into a fairly good habit of admitting to my mistakes, however this is a starting to give me a bit of a reputation. Often I’m required to rework suggestion to clients, because of something outside my control. Now some clients have started to presume that these are due to my mistakes as well and that I’m a bit slap dash.
I’m toying with the idea of not admiting my mistakes at all and blaming everything on external changes, just to save my reputation!
[...] Clay Design – Building trust with clients – being honest about mistakes Are you familiar with the “ohnosecond”? It’s that brief fraction of a second when you [...]
Unfortunately, it does not always work like this. This is all assuming that your client is a decent person. Often times you make one little mistake, and they profit off of this and say “well now I won’t give you the 2nd half” and in a way, it is your fault, but you probably deserve more than just half the payment. People that make mistakes should operate honestly and transparently, but so should the other person. They should be more understanding.
“A good client will not expect everything to always go perfect, and they also know that even the best designers and service providers will make mistakes. They also know that the best designers and service providers know how to make it right when the mistakes happen.”
The above two lines in your Article are the soul of the Article. I like it. In fact admitting mistakes only is not enough. Not to repeat mistakes is what matters.
I fully agree with what you had mentioned in your post. As long as the problem gets solved in a professional manner all is fine. Making mistakes in only human, and we are all human
it takes a great deal to accept one’s mistakes. even i also drew flak for my articles but gradually i got a clear picture. and in future we can only learn from our mistakes hoping it will never be repeated.
Absolutely great post. Being honest makes a difference for sure. In fact, I’ve also found that if you truly express your aggravation over the mistake and your sincere desire to improve the processes over time – in other words be more concerned about it than your client – you’ll see an even better response from them!
Mistakes are part of life! It does happen we you least expect it to. Yes indeed, honesty is the best policy. Of course we should all learn from mistakes and make certain that the mistake isn’t repeated!
Indeed, honesty is always the best policy. Wont always get you the $ – but thats not what is important
We should reframe “Mistake” by hyphenating “MISTAKE” into “MIS-TAKE.” It would make us feel different and better
I think honesty is the most important thing when you’re doing business and also admitting a mistake.
It just goes to show the old saying is right, honesty is the best policy. One time someone working for me made quite a big mistake, but because he was honest about it straight away, it allowed us to get the problem sorted very quickly. If he’d tried to avoid the issue or deny it, it would have been more difficult for all involved.
Being honest sure does build trust and there is even a chance that client may become a good reference for you.
Being honest about making mistakes is so much easier said than done. Great advice!!
Great post but I wonder how many ‘honestly’ apply it.
This is an excellent post and a good example of the kind of timeless advice that can continue to attract readers over the long term. Now if we can just get some of our politicians to read these kinds of posts…
I read again the comments. Some might believe that people respect honesty. Well, yes, but not quite. Being honest to our clients is good, but to let our competitor or friends know about it is somewhat a different thing.
Dylan gave us a fine learning experience about how he handled his client. But I found it quite difficult when it comes to dealing with competitor or friends. I mean c’mon, don’t they gonna laugh and make fun of you because of your mistakes.
I don’t think honesty could be apply to everyone. It’s mainly for our clients. But to some (or many) others, diplomatic answer/explanation might be more suitable.
What do you guys think?
That is a fair point (the general article) but I would advise against being over-honest, as it is the balance between initiative and transparency that really makes the difference to the client’s respect. I’ve had enough experience in either way, you can be sure of that… it’s just your opinion.
So to sum up, I’d recommend being honest, but refrain from scaring them off!
Oh and sorry for the disjointed post, it’s hard to concentrate when you’ve got iTunes stuck on intro-only mode (I didn’t even know it exists..)
Very interesting and seem a sound advice for people trying to abstain rfom Honesty…Honesty gives one an insight about one’s maturity and his level of understanding…and more importantly his commitment to a particular deed…Its not about the principal alone…it is seen that people hiding mistakes continuously blunder mistakes…and yes, everyone knows you have done a mistake…the world is not fool today…Its better you come out and apologise and compensate for the wrong deed….resulting in a happier ending..
So true about honesty building trust with clients. Few days ago I had the same sort of incident with a printer salesman, and I can say that it’s very refreshing to be dealt with truthfully.
You make a great point here. We’re in the process of changing a significant number of domains over to a new host just because our current hosting provider couldn’t admit their own mistake. They blamed one of our sites going down on us “changing the password” when in reality, they killed all of the sites on their own server while trying to upgrade php. Once we figured out the real story, they said “sorry, but company policy doesn’t allow refunds or credits in that situation”. This was after our site was down for 3 days…
I’ve worked before with a company that insisted on not admitting it’s mistakes when it made them, it was the entire company policy. They didn’t admit it when they made blatant errors because they didn’t want to be held legally liable, and it was just ridiculous. I ended up leaving from that firm just because of the ridiculous amount of red tape you had to go through to get anything done.
It’s true. In this world, honesty goes a long way. Hell, in some cases it might even be to your advantage to have a mistake so you get to show off that honesty.
The very fact that your proposing this level of honest makes me smile, I think in the next few years people are going to have to be (and will want to be) a bit more honest about their mistakes, which will (hopefully) lead to better working environments for everyone