Every business owner knows there’s going to be an occasion when you have to deliver bad news to a customer.
Hopefully not serious stuff, but it’s very often linked to a delay of some sort. It might be entirely your fault, or it might be somebody else in the supply chain.
You can’t usually make bad news a good thing. But what you can do is tell the customer as soon as you can.
I can’t emphasise just what a difference this makes to the news recipient.
Imaginary scenario: ‘Sorry Mrs Smith, I can’t start your job till a week later than I said’. Deliver this news two weeks before you were due to start and Mrs Smith is going to be disappointed. Deliver it on the day before you were due to start…she’s going to be furious and will have lost a bit of trust in you.
Nobody likes delivering bad news, but if you procrastinate about it, it’ll take up your head space and leave you with disgruntled customers.
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