Mistakes occur sometimes in any business, despite best efforts at quality control. The results can range from merely embarrassing to inconvenient to costly to dire.
On the other hand, serendipitous mistakes also can happen. Hard pretzels were supposed to be soft but accidentally got overbaked. Chocolate chip cookies were born when the chocolate didn’t melt into the batter as expected when the baker was making chocolate cookies. Post-it® Notes resulted from a researcher’s failed attempt to make a superstrong adhesive.
- How can you eliminate or minimize the occurrence of errors?
- What do you do when they happen anyway?
- How do you make it right?
- How do you wipe the egg off your face?
Avoiding mistakes in the first place.
At Fryed Egg, our quality-assurance processes include hiring skilled specialists and following a multi-level process of chicks and balances. (Whoops! That should be checks and balances.) We scramble to make quick adjustments when typos, computer-gremlin glitches, process inadequacies or human errors are detected.
To ensure our products are as error-free as possible, after they are created, they are proofread by their creators and several other team members. Only then are they sent to our clients for review, after which we make any requested revisions, and the team proofreads them again before they are published or distributed.
We make a concerted effort to become subject matter experts for each of our clients, and as part of that process we require their input to confirm that our work is technically as strong and as accurate as possible, down to the choice of individual words and punctuation. We learn from every interaction.
Some mistakes are worse than others.
In any industry, some errors are more troublesome than others, so respond accordingly. Blunders can either render something ineffective, or, as in the case of a wonky social media message, can be reframed with humility and humor as something positive. Just ask NPR #Ramona.
At Fryed Egg Productions, in our commitment to excellence and to producing mistake-free marketing collateral, we get as many eyes as possible on every project before sending it out. We aspire to make the best impression for our clients and, quite honestly, also for ourselves.
Nevertheless, as several astute readers of our April 9 Weekly Skillet noticed, mistakes happen. We are glad our readers are so engaged!
It’s not what you did, it’s what you do next.
When any trouble, challenge or issue arises, it presents an opportunity to talk things over and build a deeper relationship with your audience of customers, donors, constituents or potential clients. Let people know they are important to you and that you value their feedback and your partnership with them.
Depending on the seriousness of an oversight or misunderstanding, some things simply need to be corrected, while others need to be redesigned, repaired, reprinted or resent. By acknowledging the issue and working together, you can achieve agreeable, sunny-side-up outcomes.
Fryed Egg strives for 100-percent accuracy — with regard to facts, grammar, spelling, design, layouts, color, uniformity, audio and visual excellence, presence and timeliness — in order to create the best possible presentation to lead to strong engagement for your business.
Protecting the brand and reputation of our clients (and of Fryed Egg) is fundamental and of the utmost importance, so we are transparent and forthcoming, whatever happens. We hope you will give us a chance to show you what we can do to advance your brand! Contact us today at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected].