41. When Your Tech Fails: How to Recover Without Losing Your Mind (or Your Clients)

Welcome to Thriver's Ed, the podcast that's all about giving you the practical, no-nonsense advice you need to level up your life and business. I'm your host, Marcy Rossi, success coach, business strategist, and alcohol-free enthusiast. If you're ready to crush your goals, optimize your productivity, and live your best, most authentic life, then you're in the right place. Each week, we'll dive into topics like the psychology of success, practical strategies to boost your performance, and the unexpected ways living alcohol-free can elevate your life. Whether you're looking to boost your business, improve your health, or simply become a better version of yourself, Thriver's Ed is here to help you do just that. So grab your iced coffee, buckle up, and let's get thriving. All right, today's episode is a little different because instead of sharing advice or, you know, some of my experiences in doing what I do and helping business owners build their business, I wanted to talk about some fails. I just wanted to share some stories about things not working out the way they should. So I have a lot of experience in building my own business and building businesses for other people, and in that, not everything always works out the way that it's supposed to. And I have a couple examples for you, and I hope by the end of this, first of all, I hope that none of these things ever happen to you. But if they do, just knowing that you're not alone, the same thing has happened with a lot of the business owners that I know, I don't really know of anybody who's never had a tech fail or two going on. So I hope that you feel that you're not alone, and it gives you some kind of strategies and the right headspace to take that next step, whatever the next step needs to be. And apologies in advance, I was in Europe for three weeks, and I came back home with a cold as a souvenir. So I'm a little bit nasally today, my apologies, but we're going to get through this. And I hope today's episode is a little reassuring and maybe entertaining. So tech fails, I've talked about some of these before, but I'm going to pull them all together to kind of give you a picture of, you know, things that can and eventually will go wrong in business. So on the top of my head, just because I'm working on the summer right now, and no, I'm not going to shut up about the summit, I'm obsessed with it. And I think it's one of the crazy, the most crazy valuable thing I've produced aside from the shortcut, of course, where I'm literally doing it for you. But in this summit so far, I have had, let's see, so there is a speaker page, every speaker gets a page. And on that page, I have a place to leave feedback. I want to hear what people thought of these presentations. And I want to share that with the speakers because they spent a lot of time in prepping and going back and forth with me and creating these amazing sessions. And so I wanted to share the love with them afterwards. And there is one speaker, bless her heart, that I cannot for the life of me get that form to work. I have tried creating, duplicating pages from other speakers where it works perfectly fine, that doesn't work. I've tried creating a page from scratch. I have tried creating a different form and putting it on there, you know, something that asks the same questions, but is technically a different form. And nothing, there is just no way to get around it. And I cannot for the life of me figure it out. So I just decided to put a button that links to the form. Is it ideal? No, is it the exact experience I want to have? No, but I needed to have some kind of solution. And there's a limit to how much time I'm willing to invest in figuring this out. But I tried everything I could think of and it is just not going to happen for this poor speaker. So that was a smaller issue that I had another bigger couple bigger issues that I had was when I made the VIP pass live, I forgot that I had turned on some of the lessons or modules in order to take the screenshots and videos that I needed for my promotional materials. And so when people purchased, it, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't like days and weeks later, but within a few hours, I had realized that some of those modules are on. And so I was like scrambling to get in there and turn them off. And no one said anything or apparently seemed to notice. But one of those like, Oh, this isn't the kind of experience that I want people to have. So fortunately, that was fixed. But a bigger issue that I had was it I realized pretty early on into promotion that when people were paying with PayPal, it wasn't recording it as a VIP pass purchase. And I had done the testing of this pass you making sure that if someone purchases, they get tagged with the tag VIP pass, they get added to my email marketing platform, which is MailerLite. And then they get that automated email saying, Hey, here's your VIP pass, here's how you log in. Thank you so much, et cetera. Right. But when they paid with PayPal, instead, that tag was not being applied. So obviously the purchase went through, but they weren't getting the automation email that said like, Hey, thank you so much. And they would have got an email that said like, here's the access to the course. That's an automated one. But the email that comes like from me, the one that I wrote out and I sent through my marketing campaign, that is through a web hook that wasn't actually being sent. So it only happened to like one person. I think they end up waiting like 45 minutes, which is way longer than I want anybody to have to wait after they purchase something from me. But I got in there and I think I fixed it. And hopefully everybody's getting exactly what they need. But keeping an eye on things that when we have these automation set up on our business, that doesn't mean that we should just blindly trust that they are going to work 100% of the time, like doing spot checks, making sure that things are still functioning. A lot of the times we can get alerts, right? So if you have a zap set up and the zap fails, the Zapier will email you. Same thing with Pavley. Pavley is another service like Zapier, where they'll email you saying, Hey, I tried to do what you told me to do. I tried to send Person A over to platform B and it didn't work. And so we get that heads up. But this one, it didn't, it didn't fail necessarily. It just wasn't going through wasn't created correctly to say if someone purchases with a credit card or with PayPal, make sure that they get added in the proper place. And just a side note on PayPal. So I've never used PayPal to take payments before because in my head, like who uses PayPal, right? I had set up PayPal early in my business and I kept getting emails all the time like, Hey, here's that login code you requested. Hey, here's that login code you requested. And I looked and they were actually from PayPal. So they weren't spam emails trying to get me to click a button. And of course, I never clicked the button any, I would go into to PayPal. But they happened so frequently that I was like, obviously this platform is like massively hacked or like attempted all the time to be hacked. So I don't want to be a part of it. And I closed my account. And then eventually I opened it up again, because when I started to make payments to affiliates, I wanted to be able to send it through PayPal versus like, you know, having them pay with a credit card or pay with it was just a little bit complicated that way. PayPal was the easiest way for me to send money. So I opened it again. And I was listening to someone and apologies, I can't remember who, but they said that they turned on PayPal for maybe it was a summit as well. And they got some pretty good turnover. And I thought, you know what, let me just try it. If no one purchases with PayPal, there's no skin off my nose. Because like I said, I already had that PayPal account again. And if they do, then those are sales that may not have gone through without it. And I'm surprised I have, I know I should have looked at the exact numbers before starting it, but I would imagine that 30 ish percent, if not higher of people have been using PayPal to check out. And that's 30% of my sales that I possibly might not have had if people are like, Oh, I have to get my credit card, forget it, or I'll come back later. And then of course, not come back later. So small tangent there. But if you have an option to offer different ways to pay, don't assume that people won't use it. Maybe your people love to pay with Apple pay or Google pay or whatever the different things are there. And if we can make it as easy as possible, we're more likely to get the yes. Yeah, so that was my fail there is PayPal payments not showing up. And fortunately, we got that fixed as well. And then I wanted to pass you over to one of the amazing speakers at Automagic. She is doing a session on how to get your Facebook group members into your email marketing campaigns and actually be sending them emails, which is brilliant. And I wanted you to hear from her one of her tech fails. Hi there, I'm Shelby Dennis, and I'm an ADHD coach for freelancers, entrepreneurs and service providers who have ADHD. My main thing is I run a school community full of courses, resources, discussions and live calls to help people build businesses that work with their neurodivergence rather than against it. And oh my gosh, do I ever have a tech fail to share. In fact, it relates to the Automagic summit that's going to be happening later this month. So I made sure that all of my contributions to this summit, my video walkthrough and my PDF resources were good to go. I even took the time to go into my email service provider software and set up all of the various automations and tags so that I could easily deliver everything to the summit attendees and help them feel welcome. So once everything looked perfect, I finalized my details with Marcy, which of course included sending her links to access all of the goodies I contributed. So the very next day, which of course was a Friday at 4pm, pretty much the end of business and support hours for most software services, there was suddenly a catastrophic failure with my domain host. We started working on it right away, but it meant that the immediate solution was that I had to create new links for everything and send Marcy an email with urgent all caps in the subject line, explaining that the original links absolutely were no longer functional and asking if it was at all possible to use my new live links instead. And honestly, I was so anxious about sending that email. I love being part of summits and retreats and my biggest fear is being a burden or making things complicated for the host. So yeah, I was not thrilled about having to notify her and the host of a few other summits coming up about this change to the links. But you know what? Like Marcy said, she had her own tech snafu with putting all of this together, and it all worked out in the end for both her and for myself. To me, this really just goes to show that these things really do happen to everyone. When tech fails, pop up, and that is truly a matter of when, not if, because they happen to all of us. The best thing we can do is give ourselves a moment to have a little venting session and feel our feelings, that's important of course, and then work on solving the problem while giving ourselves grace. There's always a solution, even if you, like me, are not a tech whiz. Poor Shelby, I saw that email and I could feel the like, oh, I'm so sorry, like, you know, not wanting to have to tell you this and not wanting to stress me out. It was really no big deal at all, right? I'm just going in there, clicking a button and changing the link that it links to. But of course, if everybody's doing this all at once, it can get a little overwhelming. But I've had those moments where it's like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. And it's, it's not a big deal. But, but still, it's not a great look either. It's, we're already stressed out because of the actual event of our website going down. And this is probably my biggest tech fail that I've had. And honestly, one of the big reasons that I run my business now, you may have heard me talk about this before. But essentially, when I started my business, I built my website from scratch. I was learning CSS and coding on how to create this website. I had it on WordPress, like you did exactly the way I wanted. I spent so much time perfecting the colors and the fonts and the layouts, et cetera. And then I decided to launch my coaching service. I was calling it Leap at the time. And it was for women trying to change the relationship with alcohol. And I did this big launch. I had everything planned. I had all of these posts and emails. And then I ran a week of Facebook, I think it was a week of Facebook ads, sending people to this event. Actually, it was maybe a masterclass that was going to be selling the coaching package on the, on the back end. But it didn't matter. I was in a launch and my website goes down like completely. I don't know if you're familiar with WordPress, but it was essentially trying to log into the back end and I couldn't even log in. Like I was completely blocked. There was nothing I could do. I was on the phone with tech support. I spent I think 13 to 14 hours on the phone tech support over the course of two to three days. And for a week, I couldn't get my website up. There was nothing that I could do. And you know, when you're planning an event and you're saying X, Y and Z is happening on this day, like it would have been impossible for me to turn this around and build a brand new website. So I was just at the mercy of the tech gods and this hosting, this website hosting platform, which I do not use anymore to make this happen. And the most frustrating part was I would call somebody and someone would say, you know, the problem is A, B and C. And someone else would say it's E, F and G. And it just, I couldn't get a solution. I couldn't make it work. And that launch did not go as well as I wanted it to. Now, well, is that the only reason that probably not, you know, your first launch is never going to be your best launch, but having your website completely inaccessible, not people not able to register, not able to sign up by whatever for an entire week is definitely going to put a damper on your bottom line on your revenue on your results. So after that result, I ended up switching website platforms. So I had spent about a year perfecting my website, making it beautiful, figuring out all the coding tips and tricks to make things look exactly the way I wanted. And I had to start from scratch to move it to another platform. It's generally as a general rule, if you're going to move over to another platform, a lot of the times you're basically going to have to start from scratch. There's not like an easy import. And of course, they don't really want you to do that, right? They want you to stay wherever you are. They don't want to make it easy for you to export all of your information. That's general rule. So I had to start over. I had to start completely over after all that time, that time was essentially lost. And this is where I realized that I had been wasting so much time in my business, figuring out how to do the coding, figuring out how to build this all myself, when I could have hired someone to do it or just bought a good enough template and left it alone, and spent the rest of my time having conversations, spent the rest of my time talking with people, telling them what I do, getting my face out there, not just a quick Instagram post that I slapped together in 30 minutes and then the rest of the time tried to figure out which type of twirly font I want to use for my signature, right? It was essentially a form of hiding. And that's why basically the shortcut was built to say, you know what, I'm going to take all of those years of learning how to build and set up and choose the right platform and all the testing and trying to get everything quote unquote perfect and use that knowledge to save other people the time. Because with all of that exploration and you know, trying to figure out and make things work, I learned a lot, but it's also still not the best way for someone to build a business like spending time trying to fix all of these tech snafus is not going to be the way that you're going to take off because this can prevent you from what actually leads to sales, which again is these conversations, it's building trust and relationships. So that was probably the biggest tech fail that I've had just my website being completely down for a week. And as a result, moving to another platform, I didn't have to move, but I definitely wasn't going to take full me once man, like I'm out, right? This was something too big of an issue for me to continue. And then of course, another issues, I mean, literally as I was about to record this, Canva went down, Canva was unavailable. And then when you go to log in, it's like, oh, click here to contact support to let us know that it's broken. And when you click, what it would do is it would take you to the login page to, you know, log into your account so they can tie the problem with your account. But the problem is what was down about Canva was the login page. So they had this system set up where if there's a problem, you need to log in. But the problem was you can't log in. So you can't report the problem. And I'm in this loop of just like, let's hope they figure it out. Now Canva is an incredible company. And so of course, the issue was resolved with, I checked maybe a couple hours later and everything was fine. It was probably up way faster than that. But sometimes your tech is going to fail. And sometimes it's going to fail at the most inopportune times. But the important piece is how you navigate that, like how you respond when something happens. If your website crashes in the middle of launch, part of that response is probably going to be crying and screaming and, you know, being on the phone all day along with tech support. But more importantly is how you respond to that public facing the people that are purchasing from you, the people that you're hoping to build no like and trust with. So I've had a couple of examples of this. I've seen a couple of examples actually very recently where I went to go purchase an offer and then I was taken to a 404 page instead of a thank you page. And if you're not familiar, 404 pages are websites that don't exist. So for example, if you go to marcyrosi.com/a4296 whatever and just like make up some numbers there, that's not a real page on my website. So it's going to take you to a 404 page which says, oops, sorry, that page can't be found. Like, you know, search here, I think it says that you can find what it is that you're looking for. And so the same thing happens basically when someone types in a website that doesn't really actually exist. It says error. Now that was supposed to be the thank you page. Fortunately, the emails came through, the course access came through, like everything technically worked. But you can imagine the panic there of like, okay, if I'm going to give you my credit card, and then instead of like just a basic confirmation that says like, thank you, or we got it, or your product is on its way, I just get error. It's like, okay, but did you get my credit card information? Am I charged for this? I'm actually going to get what I purchased, etc. And then I think even the same day, I had another offer that I was claiming. And this one, I got the thank you page, I got the email, but the email was for something I did not order. It was a digital course that I was ordering. And the email said like, hey, thanks, here's your ABC product. But I didn't order ABC, right? I ordered XYZ. And so I reached out to this woman and she was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. And she actually gifted me the ABC product and then, you know, actually delivered what it was that I ordered that XYZ. The letters are starting to get confusing for me, probably for you as well. But the moral of the story is I bought something, I was delivered something else. And instead of her just saying like, oops, and then, you know, revoking my access to one and giving me the one that I actually ordered, she was like, hey, you know what, my bad, here's an extra gift for you. And I know another business owner who does this too, you know, she she says her inbox actually lights up when she sends out these like oops emails because she always rewards people when something goes wrong, she finds a way to reward them with like a coupon code or a free gift or whatever that is. And I think that's really smart because it builds trust, it builds like ability shows that we're humans. Like, again, as someone who builds a business on helping people set up their tech, even my tech fails, even my client's tech is going to fail from time to time because that's just the nature of technology. But you get to choose how you respond to that fail, you can be a really generous person and acknowledge it, you can push the blame off to someone else and say oh, too bad, it was my web developers fault whatever. Or you can own up to it. And you can just say my bad, I'm so sorry for that experience. And here's how I'm going to make it right. And part of this too is recognizing that you don't have to necessarily be the tech expert. And I don't actually recommend it as someone who spent, you know, a year building her website, that was a year wasted. I would be so much farther along if I were focusing on things that were involving having conversations with people building an audience and building relationships. But it is what it is. And here's where we are now, right? But when it comes to delegating and handing off some of these pieces, you don't have to be able to do it. You don't have to be able to go in and fix that 404 page. You can have someone whose job is to manage that thing. But you actually should understand how these things work so that you're not at the mercy of someone else. So if tech is going to go wrong, it doesn't mean that your job should be the day to day managing of that tech. But you should at least be able to understand how that tech operates and formulate some kind of solution. Because it's your face at the end of the day. It's your business. It might even be your own name, like my business is my own name. And so it's going to reflect on you, you know, passing the buck to a tech support person or in your VA or something else, doesn't actually matter to your audience at the end of the day. I don't really care why or whose fault, quote unquote, it was that that offer that I purchased, you know, I was delivered the wrong thing. What I care about is I was made a promise that I was going to get this certain offer and that promise wasn't delivered on. And I needed that solution fixed. And like I said, I got it fixed and I got a bonus out of it, right? There was no need to pass the buck. And because she knew her systems and knew what she needed to do, she was able to make that change. So that's a really big reason why my clients, it's not just that I'm setting the tech up for them. They get tutorials and walkthroughs and SOPs and all of these pieces to make sure that they know what it is they're doing. Because again, the tech is going to fail on you. It might be your own tech. It might be, you know, platforms that you're using like Canva, which I really needed yesterday in order to create some graphics, things are going to happen. And you need to make sure that you're not giving away your power to fix them to make things right. So I would love to hear your tech fail stories. If you have any things where things just went terribly horribly wrong, hopefully you're able to look at them and laugh these days. Please send me a message. You can text the show or reach out on email or come to my website and come say hi. There's a chat box on there that you can chat with me. It's not a bot. I almost said bot. It is me. I don't have any bots on my website. You can chat with me. So it may take me a minute to actually get back to you. But yeah, I would love to hear what's going on. And you know, remember, it's happening to everybody. It happened to me. It's happened to the incredible speakers that are in my summit have had their own tech issues. Tech will fail. So the best thing that you can do is make sure that you have a plan on how to rectify it if and when something happens and handling it with grace so that those relationships stay strong with these new customers and leads or even existing customers and leads that you're maintaining those relationships in a way that nurtures them. So I hope you enjoyed this. If you want to go watch how to set things up correctly and hopefully all the tech will work magically next week, come join me at the automatic summit. It is absolutely free to attend October 21st through the 23rd. See you there.