There are things that I will never compromise on or apologize for; defending the livelihoods of all the stakeholders (directly or indirectly influenced by Woo) is one of those.

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If you purchased something for $100 last week, you did so because you believed that it was worth $100 to you. If it wasn't, you would not have spent the money.

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Everyone knows that word-of-mouth marketing represents a significant competitive & business value. Such is this value that word-of-mouth & viral marketing has almost become an exact science in recent years.

Customer testimonials forms a big part of such a marketing strategy and this evidenced by almost every online product / service's homepage where you'll see a fair share of customer testimonials.

So when I read a recent case study & testimonial from a WooThemes customers, it just this home to me again: you really can't buy anything else that represents similar marketing value.

That case study just communicates so many great things about WooThemes: passion & love for the product(s), the flexibility of the product(s), the maturity of the product(s) (which allows the customer to use it for a big, commercial project) etc. Not even the best marketer in the world could conceptualize a campaign that communicates those values as efficiently & authentically as that customer testimonial.

So how are you enabling and empowering your customers to write a similar testimonial about your company and products / services?

If there's one thing that I've been tolerating less & less in recent years, it's the bullshit excuses that companies sometimes offer up, disguised as customer service. Let me explain with a recent experience:

Two days ago, I quickly stop at the little shopping center on my way home after work to pick up some flowers for my wife (I know, so romantic). I'm in & out within 5 minutes, only to find that I lost my parking ticket (the center has paid parking, but the first 30 minutes is free). I go to the management office, where I'm told that I will need to pay a penalty fee for my lost ticket, which is the equivalent of being parked there for 24 hours. Not only that, but I need to complete an "application" form of sorts and they need a copy of my ID.

Trying to determine the rationale behind this, I was told repeatedly that he - as manager - can't do anything about it and that he was only applying the "rules". I thought it was daylight robbery of course.

So here's my issue with that: why have a manager in the first place if he is not allowed to manage the situation correctly. Surely common sense should prevail here and good customer service would dictate that they should've helped me, instead of man-handling the whole situation.

In fact, I was being a good customer. I go there often and I went there again to spend more money there. Why should I be punished for a silly mistake? I understand that rules exist for a reason, but business owners & managers need to be able to bend those rules from time to time; especially if that means you're delivering happiness to your customers. In my opinion, there's just no excuse for this bullshit handling of such situations.

By offering bullshit reasons for your even more bullshit actions, you are only alienating your customers.

On Monday we launched a brand-new user dashboard at WooThemes (which felt like suicide at the time) and it's not been without the expected launch bugs.

I've learnt in the last 3 days that the best way to fail is to fail fast & fail publicly. Since launch, I've been personally answering every single e-mail from an user with an issue on their WooThemes account. This has given me so much insight into the kind of bugs that exist in the system and has empowered the team to prioritize the bugs accordingly.

Failing publicly also means that we've got some great motivation for fixing this sooner rather than later: our whole user base is watching us. I'm sure we'll be judged not by the bugs that were present, but our ability to deal (or not deal) with this situation.

At this stage, we're just being as transparent & honest as possible with regards to everything that is going on and must say that 99,9% of WooThemes users that I've interacted with have been very kind about this. I guess we could've delayed the roll out to do more testing beforehand, but that would've just delayed the project and it would not have guaranteed a bug-free launch. So we would've had to deal with this exact situation regardless.

If you're gonna fail, do so fast & publicly. And don't forget to react transparently & honestly; your customers will love you for that!