When something goes wrong, how it’s resolved says a lot about the person or business.
It can mean the difference between being perceived as not caring about your customers or users, or showing that you recognize your userbase is a key part of your success.
Evan Carmichael and team fall squarely in the latter category.
I recently became an author over at EvanCarmichael.com. It’s a well-respected resource centre for small businesses and entrepreneurs, and offers a ton of great advice for anyone from these fields.
I had set my account up to automatically share any articles I posted via the Evan Carmichael Twitter account. This worked fine until a couple of weeks ago, when the tweets went out with the article title but not the links to the pieces.
I got a couple of tweets from people that received notification, but couldn’t follow a link (since there wasn’t one). I replied that it may be a quirk with the @EvanCarmichael account so it could be checked.
Within about 20 minutes, Evan had replied, apologizing for any issues and advising that his marketing manager, Marija Sekularac, would look into it. Lo and behold, I got a great email from Marija shortly afterward apologizing and saying that she would keep an eye on things for me.
But this isn’t the best part (as great as that service is).
A few days later, a parcel arrives for me at Bonsai Interactive’s office. Inside are four really – and I mean REALLY – delicious brownies, and a card apologizing again for the mishap. The message (which is pictured below) made me chuckle too.
What really impressed me about this whole thing was that it was based upon a really small technical hiccup. It may have been an issue with Twitter’s API, which is never the most reliable. Or it might have been a feed-to-Twitter issue (which I’ve had numerous times elsewhere).
The level of follow-up from Evan Carmichael and his team on this makes me wonder what would happen if something really big crashed – maybe they’d send a jet! I’ll have to look into that…
In all seriousness, though, I just wanted to say a big thank you to the team. And now, because of that service, I’m far more likely to recommend Evan’s site if people are looking for small business resources than I am something like MarketingProfs or similar.
Which just goes to reinforce the fact that great service stands you apart from your competitors. And the best thing? You don’t even have to send out brownies and a card to show you have great service – just acknowledging and trying to help works wonders too.
Something a lot of businesses seem to forget…
