One of the interesting things about putting any work out into the public domain is getting  feedback from people experiencing it for the first time. My latest book ‘ Why Didn’t They Tell Me?  99 Shameless Success Secrets They Don’t Teach You At Eton, Harrow Or Even The Classiest Comprehensive’ was published last month, and as always, the wait for the first reactions  was a tense one.   You always think it’s going to be okay – why the heck would you publish something if you don’t  think it’s any good? – but you can never really be sure.

Why Didn’t They Tell Me? is my seventh book, and  people have been very kind about the other six. I have letters on file comparing them  with the work of  such diverse luminaries  as Napoleon Hill,  Matthew Parris and Jeremy Clarkson. I have others crediting them with transforming lives and personal fortunes. One guy even said he’d made £10 Million with what he learned in one of my books. And then there are the hundreds of others who just write to say how much they’ve enjoyed the read.

I’m not sure how much of this is warranted, but I’ll  happily soak it up like a sponge. I was hoping for the same sort of response to my new book, but I was  to be disappointed. The day the first few  hundred copies arrived with customers, I received three emails from buyers. None of them were happy! The next day a couple more emails arrived. Those people weren’t happy either. They’d all got to page 16, turned over and jumped straight to page 48. A whole section was missing. Further on in the book, sections were repeated. It seemed like the whole thing had been compiled wrongly. This is not news you want to hear when you have thousands of copies in your warehouse!

I dashed downstairs to check the stock. To my relief, it all seemed fine, so concluded that it must be  a fairly isolated problem. But how ‘isolated’? I’d already had five people  contact me, so I knew there were probably more faulty copies out there somewhere. Not everyone dives straight into a book they’ve just bought – even one as irresistible as mine! So I had a choice – leave people to discover the problem individually, or contact everyone who had bought a copy and ask them to check. No choice at all really. If you’ve messed up, you have to sort it out and take the consequences.

As I sent out the email, explaining what had happened, I was half expecting  a crowd of angry customers descending on my office with pitch forks. Here’s what happened instead:

1. About a dozen people emailed back to say their copy was fine and then said how much they were enjoying and benefiting from the book. They gave a testimonial, in other words.
2. Eight people ordered an additional copy.
3. Around 30 people replied to say they did indeed have one of the faulty copies. All were polite, none were angry, and many of those expressed how much they’d enjoyed what they’d read so far.

Many of those thirty also expressed how much they appreciated our speed and efficiency in resolving the problem.  I gained the impression that paradoxically, they would be more likely to order something else from us in the future because we had made a mistake with this order – and dealt with it.

We’re all human (well I know I am!) and there’s always a temptation to try to hide mistakes and foul-ups – to sweep them under the carpet, but I think what my experience here shows, is that this is rarely the best approach.  It’s an unusual customer who doesn’t respond well to someone who says “Look, we messed this up. Let us put it right.”

I hate to put a positive spin on things (It goes right against my inner Yorkshireman!) but maybe if we look on mistakes as opportunities to show customers how quickly and effectively we can put things right,  they can be transformed from potential disasters to long term profit making events.

Oh, and if you don’t have a copy of  ‘ Why Didn’t They Tell Me?  99 Shameless Success Secrets They Don’t Teach You At Eton, Harrow Or Even The Classiest Comprehensive!’  order one today. I promise to make sure all the pages are in the right order!

Go to www.streetwisenews.com/why for full details.