Missing Features

Seth Godin has a great post today where he talks about how the last impression is far more important than the first impression:

“I recently had some waterproofing done in the basement. The first date was great. The company was professional and had every single element down, from their AdWords to the web site to the way they interacted on the phone and in person.

I think that stuff is pretty important, but I’m way more interested in the last interaction than I am in the first (and if you care about word of mouth, you should be too).

After they finished the job, they left my basement a mess.

Forever, my only memory of the job is going to be the mess.”

Essentially Seth is arguing that his memory isn’t set by the first interaction, but how the closest memory he has — the last interaction — matters most.

This isn’t a new idea. In fact, Seth is touching on a lesson so important to any business that New York restaurateur Danny Meyer was able to build a fine dining empire on top of his complete understanding of this lesson.

What lesson? In this outstanding business-auto-biography of sorts — Setting the Table — Danny talks about the importance of writing your own last chapter.

In a chapter aptly titled “The Road to Success is Paved with Mistakes Well Handled”, Danny tells the story of greeting a Senator one evening. The Senator mentioned to Danny that the night before, at another one of Danny’s restaurants, his salad was served with a live beetle in it.

A free meal or a bottle of wine might be nice way to say sorry, but it won’t change this Senator from telling everyone he knows about the beetle incident. In his own words, Danny instructs the Chef to write a great last chapter:

“Whether or not Senator Kerrey or his guest order a salad during his lunch, I want you to deliver a beautiful salad and garnish it with a small piece of paper. On that piece of paper I want you to write the word RINGO, and when you deliver it, you can tell them, ‘Danny wanted to make sure you knew that Gramercy Tavern wasn’t the only one of his restaurants that’s willing to garnish your salad with a beatle.’”

The lesson here is clear: Everyone screws up, every company makes mistakes. And when a company screws up, a customer has a story worth telling to someone, somewhere, over a beer, about the horror that happened.

But if you take control of that mistake, correct and end it better than expected, you’ve turned a negative story that would have scared patrons away into a positive story that might actual help the bottom line.

Mistakes happen but only you decide how the mistake will end in the customers eyes.

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