🐿️ Hardening - The IPT Newsletter
Originally published 2nd December 2024
Mending, Memorably
An art-gallery tour and a free strategy event took Lisa and me to London this week, so we stayed in a lovely West End hotel that has everything, including a live-in cat. But I wasn’t saying such nice things about it after our initial night: first, a shower malfunction left my head bruised and ceramic shards all over the floor, and then the television turned itself on at random intervals throughout the night to blare welcome messages at us. The experience was painful and perhaps phantasmal, but the most striking thing about it was the speed and aplomb with which the very attentive and apologetic staff dealt with the issues. A team of efficient engineers hustled in to disassemble, replace, and unplug the offending devices, and once they’d finished, the rest of our stay was blessedly peaceful.
I’m not telling you this to evoke sympathy, but to point out that it’s the fix, not the disaster, that makes the deepest impression on customers. To see this, just scroll through any list of one-star reviews and note that the commenters reserve their greatest vitriol for outrageously ineffective “repairs”: propping up a collapsed bed with a few bricks or offering pliers to turn broken faucet handles, for example. By contrast, the number one Mercedes dealership in North America focusses on quick, effective remedies, not on improving the quality of the car itself—because it’s the patch that makes people brag, not the problem.
That goes double for software, since the increasingly broken World Wide Web has trained users to expect and deal with a constant stream of bugs and dark patterns with no help at all. So if you can offer creative workarounds and access to humans, you’ll stand out from the crowd just by being less terrible. For example, my house doesn’t have a number, my street has no name, and I don’t live in a US state, so I’m furious when websites require that I provide any of these irrelevant data–but I’m delighted when there’s an option to just type in my actual address. And useless AI chatbots are the new scourge for consumers, but clever companies like Zenfetch put real engineers on keyboards to answer online questions and speed users past obstacles to success.
Stop worrying about “hardening” your product to protect fragile users from bugs–even my most risk-averse clients, the ones making safety-critical systems, find that errors are always forgiven if they’re fixed quickly, before they have an impact. Your customers are Zorbers, playing football while encased in giant bubbles; all you have to do is help them get up when a defect knocks them down.
This first appeared in my weekly Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter which is received as part of the Squirrel Squadron every Monday, and was originally posted on 2nd December 2024. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/
