How to turn a mistake into an opportunity
I wanted to start blogging with a piece of advice I consider really important for businesses, as it’s the fact of turning a mistake the company has made into an opportunity to fix it, giving the customer something valuable and unexpected for him.
To understand this better, I’m going to present an example of a real case that I listened to a while ago:
A father planned, in detail, a trip to DisneyWorld (Orlando) to celebrate the birthday of his little daughter.
This man had previously talked to the hotel they were going to stay in to set up a surprise to his child. When she got to the room, it was supposed to be full of balloons, and also a birthday cake should have been on top of the bed.
As they were walking along the hallway, the happy dad was saying to his daughter: “I think you have something special in the room”, while looking at her running to the door.
What a bitter surprise when they finally got in the room, because nothing of what he had set up with the staff of the hotel was there, not even a lousy balloon.
When the father found a moment, he went to talk with the manager, who inmediatly apologized and justified the mistake as a communication problem between his workers, committing to have the room ready for the next morning.
The father accepted, but he was still quite upset because the surprise had been completely ruined.
The next morning, coming back from having breakfast, they went in the room and couldn’t believe what they saw: a ceiling full of balloons, a big table with every single kind of sweet, a huge birthday cake and lots of little Disney toys. In addition, they were given the possibility of staying one more night with no extra cost.
After this, the opinion of the father changed drastically and the annoyance turned into satisfaction when seeing his kid’s joy.
With this real story, I want to show you the radical change in the client, who went from being a detractor of the company to being a promoter of it, something really difficult and valuable for any company.
This is why when a business makes a mistake, it must try and be capable of turning it into an opportunity in a short time.
As a last remark, I want to underline that nowadays, with social networks and all the technology we have available, this is even more important because everything spreads so quickly and can reach millions of people in a matter of minutes, being able to damage a company terribly if it isn’t sorted out in time.
