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ProTip: When Life Gives You Clownshoes, Start Making Apologies

By crooky | February 13, 2008

On the odd occasion that I make a mistake while running a research project (cough cough), I find that the best policy is to admit your mistake, apologize and try to make ammends. Early this morning, I sent out a survey via a campaign management tool to about 900 some-odd senior executives at large multinational companies. I made one small mistake in the wording of my form letter that was used to send out the e-mails to this large recipient list that led a few people to believe that I was sending this survey out as part of an internal reserach project that they should have but didn’t know anything about. One company even had their lawyers call me. Whoops! Now, only three of these 900 some-odd companies mis-interpreted my message and called me about it but they were large, important companies that I didn’t want to piss off.

So, when the shit hits the fan like this, what do you do?

1. Call them on the phone immediately. It might not be obvious to them that the note you sent is part of a CRM campaign. Replying via e-mail is only going to aggravate the situation because it can lead to even more mis-interpretation. All of the people I talked to were very appreciative of the fact that I took their call or called them. This helps when you need to do some apologizing, which brings me to:

2. Get down on your knees and beg for forgiveness. Okay. Don’t beg but make sure that you apologize for inconveniencing them in any way and be sincere. You should be embarrased at this stage. Don’t make excuses. Explain to them how the mis-communication occured and make sure to take them off the list if you can’t recover the relationship.

3. Don’t miss the opportunity to market yourself. One of the calls I got this morning ended in the previously-irritated senior executive asking me to send him a package on my firm’s services. We got talking about why I had contacted him, who I was working for and what our firm does and it led to a good call overall. Just because a conversation starts off on the wrong foot doesn’t mean it has to end on the wrong foot.

That’s about all I can tell you for now. I’m sure I’ll get more calls and e-mails in the next few days so I may have more enlightening experience to share for next week’s research methodologies post.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Research Methodologies |

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