Failing fast is a common mantra in tech and digital media – moving through a lot of wrong approaches in order to learn the lessons and get the experience needed to work through to the right approach. In particular, it’s great advice not to be afraid to plunge into ambitious projects and to deal with the issues that come up without being fazed.
However, it’s not enough just to fail. Failing is an art in itself.
Let’s say you’re working PR for a consumer tech company that uses online documentation as the first line of support for customers struggling to install and use a new product. But your product has gone through a lot of reworking, and your online support is far out of date.
So the question is – is the brand experience worse for:
- A customer who goes to the website and gets no help at all?
- A customer who goes to the website and gets the wrong answer to their problem?
Partially, the answer depends on in what way each support document is wrong – perhaps one has a button whose name has changed and another mis-addresses a critical functionality issue – but customers’ experiences with each of them reflect on your brand in different ways.
Or, if you’re coordinating with the engineers reworking your product as they try to update its software, there are similar questions to face: if you reset all customers’ software to fix an problem that only some customers are facing, will that be worse than letting the pre-existing issue continue?
No one’s perfect. One way or another, you’re going to fail some customers. How do you want to fail them?
Image is “IMG_1624” by Neal Jennings, available under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. ©2014