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Slack refunds customers 100x amount paid during outage
- hcnews 9y agoI am quite surprised at 100x amount. In the enterprise industry, companies usually have set SLAs and amounts written in the contract for violating SLAs. Did slack really write in 100x repay in the contract or is it overpaying enterprise customers (very weird)? Even if the paid amount is small, wording like 100x amount is bad for the enterprise industry.
- loteck 9y agoGood question. Turns out it is spelled out right there in their SLA.[0] If we fall short of our 99.99% uptime guarantee, we’ll refund customers on the Plus plan and above 100 times the amount your workspace paid during the period Slack was down. [0] https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Service-Level-Agreements-SLA- https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Service-L...
- dx034 9y agoDoes that mean they refund the whole outage? Or just the time that exceeds the 0.01%?
- bri3d 9y agoYes, this is really in their SLA: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Service-Level-Agreements-SLA- https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Service-L... . However, it's not a cash repayment, it's just future service credit. For example, if Slack were down for 30 minutes, you'd get 50 free hours of Slack.
- 1123581321 9y agoIt’s not really an overpayment. When we have an outage with a SaaS product during the workday, I usually ask for a one month credit and providers are happy to oblige. That’s 100x if it’s eight hours of downtime, 200x for four hours.
- retox 9y agoPure submarine marketing.
- socalnate1 9y agoTrying to figure out the math on this. Let's say I pay slack $1000 a month and it goes down for one full day - does that mean I get (1/30 * 1000) * 100 = $3,333? (Assume 30 day month and 100% up time SLA for simplicity)
- bri3d 9y agoNo, it's just Service Credits. So if Slack goes down for one full day, you get 100 free days of Slack in the future. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Service-Level-Agreements-SLA- https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Service-L... . Or more realistically, if Slack goes down for 30 minutes, you get 50 hours of Slack for free in the future. It's hard to calculate the actual value of these service credits.
- CobrastanJorji 9y agoOr less realistically, if Slack went offline for 3.65 days, everybody would presumably get free Slack for a year.
- FireBeyond 9y agoOn the Plus plan or higher.
- harryh 9y agoIt's hard to calculate the actual value of these service credits. credits_value = planning_on_continuing_to_use_slack ? value_of_credits_in_dollars : 0; Doesn't seem so hard to me.
- stickydink 9y agoThat's correct (in account credit). Slack is generally very reliable, I'm sure it works out for them comfortably. Over 3 years we've had maybe three of four instances where we've lost availability for 15 minutes or more, never anything even close to a day.
- CobrastanJorji 9y agoAnyone else think of Snowcrash and the Pizza Deliverators? In the book, the mafia-backed pizza delivery company simply guaranteed that your pizza would arrive in 30 minutes. Or else what? No, it was just a Guarantee. In the rare event they failed to deliver, they apologized in the form of outrageous vacations and such. The self-imposed penalty for failure was so great that recipients actively hope for failure. Pretty great guarantee for the customer, all in all, although on the flip side, if your business uses Slack for critical communication in an emergency, the potential cost to you for a Slack outage might similarly be many orders of magnitude beyond the price of Slack.
- peterjlee 9y agoIf Slack was down for 5 minutes in a month that will break the 99.99% SLA. If you pay $6.67/mo for Slack, 6.67 * (0.01%) * 100 = 0.07 Yea I'll rather have Slack for that 5 minutes than save my company 7 cents.
- akerl_ 9y agoIf your company is only paying Slack $6.67 a month, you've either negotiated for an amazing discount or I really hope your chatbots are fun to talk to. But I agree with your assessment: the purpose of the 100x is almost certainly to make it less offensive to receive an SLA credit. The only thing worse than having downtime is getting a credit that doesn't even round up to a dollar.
- dpweb 9y agoThe typical reaction I guess is, nice thing to do, but I’d be interested in the economics of the need to keep churn low, that probably makes this a good move financially. Also its a credits and not cash rebate? So if I bail I get nothing?
- IAmGraydon 9y agoExactly. Because it's paid in the form of a service credit, this gets the customer who might be considering leaving an incentive to stay just long enough to forget/forgive the whole incident.
- IAmGraydon 9y ago"In the form of a 'service credit'".
- tytytytytytytyt 9y agoWould gold pressed latinum be better?
- jaksmit 9y ago100x the price paid "during the period Slack was down" probably doesn't amount to much money. E.g. if you're down for an hour, that would likely void the SLA, but refunding for 100 hours is not much money vs how much a company would pay each month.
- jsjohnst 9y ago> but refunding for 100 hours is not much money It’s ~14%. Not a significant sum, but still better than nothing.
- simonebrunozzi 9y agoAmazing. I love this. Slack, you are a great great company. Compare this with AWS (disclosure: I worked there 2008-2014): you get refunded of the downtime in proportion to the month - e.g. 1 day of downtime means a ~3% discount on your monthly costs. Absurd. The damage is far greater than that. Slack's policy is a great way to respect customers. Well well well done. Bravi.
- testplzignore 9y agoCable companies are the worst at this. I've had TV and internet outages with TWC/Spectrum where they've refunded me less than a dollar after I've called to complain. At least once they've had the audacity to charge me $5 for talking to a human, thus resulting in a net loss for me. WTF?!
- toomanybeersies 9y agoI had an ISP once where the connection had to be down for an entire 24 hour period before you could get a refund. It it came up for even 1 minute during the day, you wouldn't get a refund.
- alexbeloi 9y agoIf you do the math, your "100x" credit comes out to 13.8% of your monthly payment in credit per hour of down-time. That's not terrible or extravagant. The 100x multiplier is there only to make the credit reasonable, without it you would be getting chump change.
- DrScump 9y agoThis reminds me of Comcast outages. If you catch a failure as it happens, and if you navigate through the maze that is their phone tree, and if you wait long enough to actual speak to somebody in their offshore call center, and if you go through all the unrelated hoops they make you endure (e.g. "you reset your box wrong"), they will usually, eventually tell you that they will credit your account for one day's worth of charges. And sometimes, the credit actually happens.
- chipperyman573 9y agoFWIW you can usually ask for more (I usually get around $20), but you have to actually negotiate with the person on the phone. It's really weird, you would expect them to just be reading off of a script, but they actually negotiate like a trained car salesman or something.
- bearcobra 9y agoWhen I worked in a cable co call center a customer tried to negotiate a bigger discount by arguing that I couldn't prove the service was working while she was sleeping. I relented because it was going to cost the company more for me to stay on the phone than it did to just give her another 2 days worth of credit.
- DrScump 9y agoThe downside is that the credit incentivizes her to repeat the process again and again.
- Vinnl 9y agoI believe the customer support people usually have, say, $20 at their disposal to use as they see fit in order to deal with situations in which escalation would be more expensive than those $20. Thus, if it appears you're going to be costing more than that (through your negotiating), they'll probably just hand it out.
- deviantfero 9y ago
- wmf 9y agoSlack's SLA is 99.99%, so if they really believed in it they would refund 10,000x. (They'd also go out of business, which shows the futility of SLAs.)
- eli 9y agoI don't think that shows the futility of SLAs. If their actual uptime was 99.991%, they'd have met their SLA but still paid a fortune in credits for the 0.009% downtime that did occur.
- abofh 9y agoThat's not... That's not how any of those contracts are written
- computerphage 9y agoI don't understand what you mean. Can you elaborate?
- wmf 9y agoSLAs usually pay nothing if the downtime is less than allowed.
- dx034 9y agoSLAs can be very misleading. Assuming that downtime usually occurs after changes/updates, they can push those to Friday evenings and have most downtimes occur over the weekend (not nice for their engineers though). Most clients won't care if they're down for a few minutes on a Sunday night. An outage monday morning is much worse. Therefore SLAs often don't really reflect client needs, which is having a 100% uptime for 40-60 hours a week.
- killedbydeath 9y agoInteresting approach. Maybe that should be the "real SLA" number: 99% = 100x refund, 99.99% = 10000x refund.
- hinkley 9y agoGood. One of the things that pisses me off about SLAs and the thing I always have to teach my bosses is that there is almost no tool we pay to use that isn’t making us 10-30x what we pay for it. It’s just not worth fighting with the finance people for anything less. So a money back guarantee doesn’t mean shit to me, except for virtue signaling.
- joshfraser 9y agoMeanwhile engineers everywhere are wishing Slack had stayed down longer so they could continue getting work done without distractions!
- iamdave 9y agoThe 'distraction' thing is one I keep seeing about Slack and I often wonder is this because individuals just are not managing notifications properly (or at all) or is it FOMO that causes the individual to habitually check channels?
- codemac 9y agoManaging notifications properly? There is no proper management of notifications. Either you store them completely out of sight (and thus are not notifications, but messages), or they interrupt you without taking into account how important the work you're doing is. I hate notifications, and is why any time I've been forced to use slack, I use it through their irc gateway and disable all notifications.
- girvo 9y agoDo Not Disturb mode is my saviour. Going deep into the engineering trenches? Flip it on. Answering emails/doing less important things? Turn it off.
- jon-wood 9y agoI have a script that runs in the background on my laptop and automatically turns on DnD (and sets my status) whenever I'm on Google Meet talking to someone. That one thing has made calls so much more productive.
- anpat 9y agoI know it's a long shot but do you think it's possible to share the script (gist/GitHub)?
- matte_black 9y agoI once had a service where a customer was distraught by the way some features were implemented, he wanted things to work one way, but the service handled it in another. He wrote a fiery email about what a waste of time my service was because of these shortcomings and how he wished he had never bothered using it. Determined to make things right, I told him I would refund him 1000% of the original price he paid, so that the final amount can express how much I really care about making sure he was happy with his experience. The service was free.
- sideproject 9y agoGOLD! :) hahahaha. Resonate a lot with this.
- mali9 9y agoHaha. I also see many such demands being made for small open-source projects (1-2 person(s) in their free time, not company funded) Are there any resources / services where such developers can get paid on request and they work on the issues after that ?
- sammorrowdrums 9y agoThe main one I know of is https://www.bountysource.com/ https://www.bountysource.com/
- dingaling 9y agoIf you didn't care about making people happy with their experience, why did you offer a service? To attract them onto a paid tier? Well then you lost that potential customer by being a smartarse. Of course he knew it was free. But he took time to express his dissatisfaction directly to you. Most people would grouse on a forum and never give direct feedback.
- weixiyen 9y agoIt's possible other users were happy and this one user was going over the top.
- sergiotapia 9y agoIs this $monthly fee * 100 or $monthly fee/minutes in month * minutes of downtime * 100? One is different than the other.
- dx034 9y agoThe latter: > we’ll refund customers on the Plus plan and above 100 times the amount your workspace paid during the period Slack was down.
- johnmax 9y agoHow long where they down? Couldnt find it anywhere.