Spent 3 months chasing a customer complaint that was actually a typo in our email template

I kept getting complaints about late shipping confirmations, and I redesigned our whole fulfillment process... Turns out the email template just said "3-5 days" instead of "1-2 days". A five minute fix. Anyone else waste time on something this dumb?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_oliver2mo ago

Oh come on, you can't really think that three months of redesigning a fulfillment process is a waste. That sounds like a great excuse to finally clean things up and make sure everything runs smoother than before. Maybe the typo was a blessing in disguise to get you to look at bigger picture stuff.

jesse_cooper1mo ago

100% agree with you, @the_oliver. That line about "a blessing in disguise" is exactly how I see it too. I've had stuff like this happen before where a small mistake forced me to step back and actually fix the root problem instead of just patching things over and over. @troy_wilson8 mentioned the email parser thing and that's the same deal - you don't realize how bad things are until something breaks and you're forced to rebuild. Three months sounds like a lot but if you're cleaning up the whole fulfillment flow, you're probably saving way more than that in lost orders and support tickets down the road. Plus you get to document everything properly this time so the next person won't have to guess how it works.

troy_wilson82mo ago

@the_oliver gets it - sometimes those little screw-ups end up helping you fix bigger stuff you didn't even know was broken. Swapping out a janky email parser for something cleaner saved me a ton of headache later when we scaled up.