People make mistakes. But companies - highly organized machines comprised of processes, layers of management and entire departments dedicated to quality assurance - should not. At least, that's how most of your customers think, and how you think when you're a customer yourself.
Here's where an effective content strategy can be a lifesaver. If you publish content not as a company, but as people within a company, your customers start thinking about you as a group of people instead of a soulless machine. Here's what I love about this approach - it's the truth, not a trick. Mistakes happen in a company because people actually are fallible. Pointing a finger at an individual perpetrator only when something goes askew isn't a candid content strategy - it's scapegoating. Scapegoating is not an effective customer engagement or loyalty strategy.
Let me give you a real-life example I just experienced. One of the businesses I work on is called November Bicycles, a new company that supplies high-end racing wheels and bicycles through an innovative model designed to strip out as much expense as possible (to sell at lower prices, not reap higher margins). We made a mistake with an order about to go out to a customer, and because of the nature of our supply chain, fixing it would take about 3 months. So we sent an email to the customer expaining the mistake we made (actually pointing out which part was our mistake and which was a supplier's mistake), and offered a reasonable temporary solution until we'll be able to fully fix the situation.
I need to back up a bit here. This customer knows us - the November Bicycles people - as people. Everybody in contact with the company does, owing to an aggressively candid content strategy where we identify ourselves personally and go to great lengths to explain the business, its economics, our decisions and the reasons we make them. If we had a velvet rope, everyone would be inside it.
So when we apologized for screwing up to our customer, it wasn't the customer service department sending a form letter. It was the guys our customer already knows, explaining what had happened in the way that one person would talk to another person. If it were the first time the customer had heard our voices, his instinct would be not to trust them. But he recognized our voices from the site and other emails and elsewhere, and he knows us as people, not a soulless company. And people, he knows - we all know - make mistakes. So his exact response was, "No worries. Many thanks for the explanation."
The right content strategy gives a company license to screw up (which every company could use). And when you do screw up, the contact you have with your customer(s) as a result strengthens the engagement, instead of straining it. A company that works hard to dehumanize itself would have to respond to this situation entirely differently, likely by lying or at least burying their own responsibility for the mishap. That might preserve the customer's business, but would begin the erosion of the customer's trust. Which would your brand choose? I'll take trust over business any day.
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