Good Service and Writing Mistakes

What’s on the iPod: Beautiful Day by U2



Writers: Join me this Thursday at Noon ET for a FREE, informal call on whether specialty writing is for you. Free, 30 minute chat: Bring your questions! Register here for access

Interesting day yesterday. Tell me something — why do customers have to push and argue just to get companies to do what the hell they promise to do anyway? Take my trash company — please, dear God, take them. I sent them an online request for a special pickup. We have a ton of packing material and a few shipping pallets that need to get recycled. I made the request.

I get back this answer:

Per
our records you receive 1 bulk item pick up a week , xtra items will be charged
per item.

Uh, and?

So I respond:

Thanks for your response. Is that a yes then?

The answer:

We
do not recover construction debris, however the boxes you have to break down
and they can be place in recycling bin for recovery . We cannot take the
pallets 


Wait. This is a trash company — a waste management company, not to point fingers or anything. They can’t take debris?

My husband comes home. He gets on the phone. Within minutes, they say yes.

The difference? Couldn’t tell you. But it happens Every. Single. Time. He got off the phone last night laughing, and said, “Those sexist bastards.” Because every time a female from this house makes a request, they say no.

If I delivered customer service like that, I’d be out of business. So would you.

I was talking with another writer offline and she was commenting on an e-book she’d read recently. It was a compilation of various authors, and she said she giggled a bit (with respect, she added) at how many mistakes she’d found in their writing. We all make those mistakes, don’t we? We forget to connect our modifiers, we produce haphazard parallelism, or we mix our metaphors. I’m not immune — thanks to a Twitter tweep with better eyesight than I have, I have now corrected a long-standing mistake on this very home page. It was there for months. Ugh.

It happens. How we recover from it and improve our skills going forward? That’s the real trick, especially if a client has found the mistake. It happens to all of us.

Here are some ways to deal with your own mistakes:

Thank the client. It’s great to be able to say “Oops!” and not have it ruin a relationship. One small misstep should not bring the walls crumbling down. If it does, rethink why you want a client like that. But when they find an errant letter, period, or other issue, thank them for catching it. Own the mistake and be gracious about it.

Slow down. Reread, print it out and read it, go over it from the bottom up (helps me to find mistakes in spelling, such as “from” when I meant “form”), and make sure you’ve said what you intended. Allow yourself time to look things over, even if the client is shouting for it.

Don’t take yourself so seriously. I know people who can’t handle it when someone points out a mistake. The back-peddling, the excuses, and the defensiveness are signs of someone who can’t laugh at themselves. It’s okay to say “Must have been reading that from another state” or other self-deprecating, disarming things. Don’t be flippant, but don’t go on the defensive if someone points out an error.

Do unto others. I could have started this thread with the millions ways in which I never make a mistake, blah blah blah…. First, it’s not true. Second, that’s inviting trouble. I’m sure there are errors in this or other blog posts. It happens. If I start getting all preachy on you, sure as I’m sitting here I’m going to make a mistake and guess what kind of treatment I’m going to get? Not the forgiveness I want, that’s for sure.

Don’t be a douche about it. That do unto others? You may find some kind of immense boost of superiority when you publicly point out someone’s mistakes. That does one of two things — it embarrasses the person you’re correcting, which may be your goal, and it paints you as a colossal douchebag, which I’m sure isn’t your goal. Sorry, but you can’t have one without the other.

Use Spell Check. Seriously, that I will rip you apart about. It’s simple to hit that button and let the computer do to work. You can tell instantly the people who are too lazy to do even that much “editing.” In our profession, there’s no excuse not to.

How do you handle your own mistakes? What about the mistakes of others?