Passion is blind

This is not new, but worth posting again.

One of my favourite blogs was Creating Passionate Users before the sad end. Kathy Sierra et al. wrote about users of systems, but substitute the word “user” for “customer”, change some other words where it fits, and the thinking can be applied on practically any company or business. It’s about satisfied customers – so satisfied they will forgive a mistake, keep buying the products and even recommend them to others. More than anything, I loved the illustrations on this blog. So, here is a link to a nice post – Passion is Blind.

Some excerpts:

Having passionate users is almost like a get-out-of-jail-free card.
I say almost, because if you abuse your position as the object of someone’s passion, they’ll eventually figure it out, and the sense of betrayal will make them angrier about your transgression (crashing, lying, running slow, being incomplete, etc.) than if they’d never loved you at all.

….. that’s the beauty of passion–if you can inspire it, by helping your user kick ass–they WILL cut you some slack. They’ll forgive you when you screw up.

….. wouldn’t you rather be the one most likely to be forgiven than the one who can never “catch a break”? And again, I’m not talking about areas where you really do have serious problems that you’d rather sweet-talk your way out of than fix. I’m talking about the inevitable problems you just can’t avoid. The “stuff just happens” events.

So, we have to ask ourselves… what can we do to put ourselves on the side of forgiveness? What can we do to help protect us from the times when we will screw up? What would it take in our product, company, service, whatever…..

Yes, what would it take from you to make your customers willing to forgive you if you made a mistake, still keep buying from you and even recommend you to others?