Recovering from being wrong
Controversial opinion: being wrong is no fun!
This week let’s talk about something that is relatable to everyone, not just support engineers: admitting when you’re wrong. It happens to all of us, and it sucks, but it’s not something you can just ignore and hope it goes away on its own. In fact, it’s important to share it as quickly as possible to mitigate the damage and maintain your relationship with the customer. The good news, though, is that if you do this right, you can often not only preserve your relationship but make it even stronger. How? Read on.
Trepidation is understandable
It’s hard to admit when we’re wrong! I don’t want to turn this into a psychological study about why, and I definitely don’t have the chops for that anyway, but I think it’s worth talking a little about why this is the case. As I explored some time ago, one of the biggest challenges in a role like support engineering is to convince the customer we know what we’re talking about. Admitting we’re wrong about something risks puncturing that balloon of confidence we’ve spent so much time inflating, and so instead we often try to avoid having the hard conversation that starts with “Sorry, I was wrong when I said last week that we support X.” Instead, we’ll…
Minimize the mistake: “I was only kind of wrong that we support X, and it wasn’t really important anyway since they said they won’t be using X for a while.”
Rationalize it away: “Well, if you look at it from the right angle, I was right about the fact that we support X. Sure, you have to use custom code that someone else wrote, but it works! Mostly.”
Delay the inevitable: “Well, I won’t worry about it until they bring it up again. Maybe we will support X by then—I remember seeing something like that on the roadmap.”
Hope the customer doesn’t notice: “Maybe they’ll forget they asked about X. They did say it was just covering their bases anyway since they may implement X down the road.”
In case you haven’t already guessed, none of these are good ideas. They’re certainly not going to help us keep the the customer’s trust. Even if they work for a while, the truth will eventually come out, and we’ll be having that hard conversation anyway, only this time from a much more defensive position.
“Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news immediately.”
This quote is intensely overused, and in fact I ran across it yet again on LinkedIn the other day, but there’s a reason it shows up so regularly. For all his failings, Don Vito Corleone had a good grasp of something very important in business: accurate information. Now, I’m not suggesting you hop on a plane to share your mea culpa with your customers in person (never mind taking drastic steps to change the outcome) but it’s important to take immediate action when you find out that you were wrong about something or have some other difficult news to share with the customer.
Clearing the air
So given how important it is to share your bad news or your apology as quickly as you can, here are some things to keep in mind when preparing to do so:
Be prepared: Have a plan before you go into the conversation, don’t just wing it. Make sure that you’re sharing accurate information this time around, not just compounding the mistake by speculating. If you aren’t 100% sure of the facts, find someone who is and make sure you understand. Your customer is going to have questions, and you need to be ready to provide answers.
Have a mitigation plan available if you can: If you come prepared with a plan to address the customer’s needs, it will help soften the blow. Maybe you don’t support X today, but that feature is already in development. Maybe another customer has bridged that gap with some clever configuration work, or by leveraging another product instead. Be ready to share these workarounds or alternatives for when the customer predictably asks “Well, what can we do then?”
Bring in assistance: As part of the mitigation plan, it may be helpful to have backup in the form of subject matter experts, product managers, and of course our friends in customer success. Just in terms of optics, it helps show that you’re taking the situation seriously. And having additional expertise with you in the customer discussion will be useful when the customer inevitably has follow-up questions you’re not fully prepared for.
Don’t take it (too) personally: It’s pretty embarrassing to have to admit you’re wrong, as we’ve already discussed at length. If possible, work through those feelings before you sit down with the customer so you can approach the problem objectively: the customer has the wrong information, you’re going to fix it. I don’t mean to be flippant about the situation, or assume it’s not a big deal. It is, and you should be taking steps on your end to understand how the mistake happened and how to avoid it in the future. Just don’t bring this into the discussion unless the customer explicitly asks.
Don’t repeat the same mistake: Following on from the last point, don’t skip the self-reflection! Understand how and why you shared the wrong information with the customer, and learn from it. If you felt pressure to respond to a question when you didn’t have the answer yet, get more comfortable with asking to follow up later once you have learned more. If you let the customer make a mistaken assumption without correcting them, figure out why and don’t do it again. If you relied on your documentation and it was wrong, get it fixed. Sometimes mistakes are completely unavoidable, of course, but look on the bright side: at least you’ll never make this specific mistake again.
As I mentioned in passing above, it’s also worth pointing out that all of the above discussion is equally valid for times when you simply have bad news to share with the customer. Don’t sugarcoat it, come with alternatives if you can, and above all share the news as quickly as you are able. Having tricky conversations like this never gets easy, but it does get a little easier when you meet them head-on, don’t equivocate, and do your customer the courtesy of sharing the truth with them. Done well, you can demonstrate to the customer that you own your mistakes and are committed to getting things right. This can only help strengthen your relationship with the customer, which will be very helpful the next time this happens. Oops.
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