4 ms·

Is this an apology? "you feel".... " we thought" You are not really taking responsibility here. You are good guys. Just say "I am sorry" and ask how you can ma

Is this an apology? "you feel".... " we thought" You are not really taking responsibility here. You are good guys. Just say "I am sorry" and ask how you can make him feel better. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of-outage-language http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of-outage-l...

fredoliveira 16y ago
Isn't "I'm sorry" the very first thing he says after "Hi Anthony"? And as if that wasn't enough, he goes on to say "Our apologies" later in the paragraph.
- javery 16y ago
  He said he was sorry that you feel we did x. So he is apologizing for for the fact that Anthony feels a certain way, not the same as saying "I am sorry.".
  - sprout 16y ago
    He has nothing to apologize for. You use features clearly marked 'unsupported,' you are going to get burned.
    - gommm 16y ago
      I was also planning on using twilio for a project and when looking at their faq for the initial research, it wasn't very clear that it was something completely unsupported that could be disabled at any moments...
    - javery 16y ago
      This is why programmers make horrible customer support people, it doesn't matter if you have nothing to apologize for. You say your sorry because no matter what the circumstances the person is unhappy with your service and your company - saying your sorry and fixing the problem keeps a customer. Sticking to your guns and saying you have nothing to apologize for just loses you a customer.
    - mariorz 16y ago
      the features were not clearly marked as unsopprted. there were even price quotes for international SMS.
edash 16y ago
I like Twilio and I'm a customer. It seems they did the best they knew how with this situation. But that was a really terrible apology and seems more insulting than assuaging to anyone affected. It's like there's a rule that once you have more than 10 employees all written communication needs to be jargon filled, passive-aggressive business drivel. Better would have been: "Anthony - We're glad to have you as a customer, sorry we screwed up here. We posted notices to the status API and support email - but if you didn't get it, we didn't do our job! I definitely gained some perspective from reading your post. We'll work even harder on future product updates to get notice to all our customers. If there's anything I can personally do to make the situation right, email me: jeff@twilio.com. Again, very sorry. Thanks for being our customer and letting us work to earn back your confidence. Jeff Lawson - Twilio CEO P.S. Task.fm looks really cool. Best of luck!" Danielle from Twilio wrote a much more sincere and helpful apology in the thread above...she should probably handle the "responding to blog rants" duties from now on.

fredoliveira 16y ago

Isn't "I'm sorry" the very first thing he says after "Hi Anthony"? And as if that wasn't enough, he goes on to say "Our apologies" later in the paragraph.

javery 16y ago
He said he was sorry that you feel we did x. So he is apologizing for for the fact that Anthony feels a certain way, not the same as saying "I am sorry.".
- sprout 16y ago
  He has nothing to apologize for. You use features clearly marked 'unsupported,' you are going to get burned.
  - gommm 16y ago
    I was also planning on using twilio for a project and when looking at their faq for the initial research, it wasn't very clear that it was something completely unsupported that could be disabled at any moments...
  - javery 16y ago
    This is why programmers make horrible customer support people, it doesn't matter if you have nothing to apologize for. You say your sorry because no matter what the circumstances the person is unhappy with your service and your company - saying your sorry and fixing the problem keeps a customer. Sticking to your guns and saying you have nothing to apologize for just loses you a customer.
  - mariorz 16y ago
    the features were not clearly marked as unsopprted. there were even price quotes for international SMS.

edash 16y ago

I like Twilio and I'm a customer. It seems they did the best they knew how with this situation. But that was a really terrible apology and seems more insulting than assuaging to anyone affected. It's like there's a rule that once you have more than 10 employees all written communication needs to be jargon filled, passive-aggressive business drivel. Better would have been: "Anthony - We're glad to have you as a customer, sorry we screwed up here. We posted notices to the status API and support email - but if you didn't get it, we didn't do our job! I definitely gained some perspective from reading your post. We'll work even harder on future product updates to get notice to all our customers. If there's anything I can personally do to make the situation right, email me: jeff@twilio.com. Again, very sorry. Thanks for being our customer and letting us work to earn back your confidence. Jeff Lawson - Twilio CEO P.S. Task.fm looks really cool. Best of luck!" Danielle from Twilio wrote a much more sincere and helpful apology in the thread above...she should probably handle the "responding to blog rants" duties from now on.