5 ms·

Are you in any way affiliated directly or indirectly with MailChimp ? Reason for my concern is that this is not a exemplary practice to do victim bashing either

by acd10j 8y ago

Are you in any way affiliated directly or indirectly with MailChimp ? Reason for my concern is that this is not a exemplary practice to do victim bashing either. Even if OP is "free" customer , He has some right to complaint. Companies usually don't provide "free" tier by goodness of there heart and have legitimate business plan to do so.

sfifs 8y ago
Nope, no connections whatsoever. In fact I work at a place a few orders of magnitude bigger than what MailChimps of the world would handle... Shit happens from time to time in business and the normal approach is you connect and discuss by whatever SLAs you align to. You don't scream publicly sullying reputations unless you've given resolution a reasonable shot. Waiting less than 1 business day doesn't seem like giving resolution a reasonable shot. If it were my business, I'd fire this poster as a client.
- gizmo 8y ago
  > Shit happens from time to time in business This the kind of apologetics I can't stand. These things happen because businesses knowingly take actions that negatively affect a small percentage of their user base, but they just don't care if the percentage is small enough. Software businesses enjoy extremely high gross margins, which means they can afford first-rate customer service. "Bad things happen" isn't an excuse.
- foxX 8y ago
  Oh my god, so salty! But here's the deal, and this might be directly aimed at you, since you say you're in the field. As a home-user who works in the industry and with some interest for tech, I generally only get access to the free-tiers of services offered by players working at world-magnitude. Based on my experience with those services I may or may not advertise them to my friends, colleagues, employers. Especially to employers, because there's a good chance that if there's bad-blood between me and the service provider personally, I might be impaired in my professional activity. This word-of-mouth type of adversiting is crucial to "2.0" companies, that function based on things such as scale, transparency, growth, reach, efficiency. There's also the different type of provider, the "old business" world, with more business-y and less tech-y practices, such as "call us for a quote" deals, "license per year per seat pe server core", etc. Dealing with them often times involves whole departments (legal + technical) with specific training and paid-for support channels. If you release and roll perpetuum-beta services and software ("2.0" practice), build your brand on word-of-mouth advertising, on try-for-free honeypots for hobbyists (also "2.0"), don't act "old business" if it comes down to support for a puny user and don't push the "well, it was free, what would you expect?" button. The whole deal of your "we are awesome and scale as opposed to <brand that existed for more than 20 years and sucks just because of that>" is the fact that your machinery doesn't do politics and doesn't discriminate between your users based on estimated pocket girth. It's useless if your solution elegantly "scales" to billions of users, if your business can't secure and treat with dignity the first, lonely user.
- pdonis 8y ago
  > Shit happens from time to time in business and the normal approach is you connect and discuss Which is exactly what MailChimp failed to do, and what makes this an issue worth the treatment the OP has given it.
ahje 8y ago
There are a couple of lessons to be learned from this: * Make sure to have a plan B for all service providers that you use for critical services. * Make sure you have a secondary copy of critical data, and that you store it responsibly in case a provider does something. That still doesn't excuse not informing the account holder, but given the short time that has passed, it is possible that task has ended up in someone's backlog.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
  If it ended up in someone's backlog, then MailChimp still screwed up because the "suspend account" button should automatically send a notification (even if it only said that more information will follow). I'd also add one item to your list: Proper monitoring (which is extremely difficult and time-consuming to set up). A plan B is useful if you know that you need to enact it. Here, the third party provider had silently caused an outage, possibly because they consider shadow bans more effective without considering that the same thing that makes them effective makes them extremely damaging when they're handed out incorrectly.
  - ahje 8y ago
    Good point! Monitoring is also one of those critical things one should always have.

by acd10j 8y ago

sfifs 8y ago

Nope, no connections whatsoever. In fact I work at a place a few orders of magnitude bigger than what MailChimps of the world would handle... Shit happens from time to time in business and the normal approach is you connect and discuss by whatever SLAs you align to. You don't scream publicly sullying reputations unless you've given resolution a reasonable shot. Waiting less than 1 business day doesn't seem like giving resolution a reasonable shot. If it were my business, I'd fire this poster as a client.

gizmo 8y ago
> Shit happens from time to time in business This the kind of apologetics I can't stand. These things happen because businesses knowingly take actions that negatively affect a small percentage of their user base, but they just don't care if the percentage is small enough. Software businesses enjoy extremely high gross margins, which means they can afford first-rate customer service. "Bad things happen" isn't an excuse.
foxX 8y ago
Oh my god, so salty! But here's the deal, and this might be directly aimed at you, since you say you're in the field. As a home-user who works in the industry and with some interest for tech, I generally only get access to the free-tiers of services offered by players working at world-magnitude. Based on my experience with those services I may or may not advertise them to my friends, colleagues, employers. Especially to employers, because there's a good chance that if there's bad-blood between me and the service provider personally, I might be impaired in my professional activity. This word-of-mouth type of adversiting is crucial to "2.0" companies, that function based on things such as scale, transparency, growth, reach, efficiency. There's also the different type of provider, the "old business" world, with more business-y and less tech-y practices, such as "call us for a quote" deals, "license per year per seat pe server core", etc. Dealing with them often times involves whole departments (legal + technical) with specific training and paid-for support channels. If you release and roll perpetuum-beta services and software ("2.0" practice), build your brand on word-of-mouth advertising, on try-for-free honeypots for hobbyists (also "2.0"), don't act "old business" if it comes down to support for a puny user and don't push the "well, it was free, what would you expect?" button. The whole deal of your "we are awesome and scale as opposed to <brand that existed for more than 20 years and sucks just because of that>" is the fact that your machinery doesn't do politics and doesn't discriminate between your users based on estimated pocket girth. It's useless if your solution elegantly "scales" to billions of users, if your business can't secure and treat with dignity the first, lonely user.
pdonis 8y ago
> Shit happens from time to time in business and the normal approach is you connect and discuss Which is exactly what MailChimp failed to do, and what makes this an issue worth the treatment the OP has given it.

ahje 8y ago

There are a couple of lessons to be learned from this: * Make sure to have a plan B for all service providers that you use for critical services. * Make sure you have a secondary copy of critical data, and that you store it responsibly in case a provider does something. That still doesn't excuse not informing the account holder, but given the short time that has passed, it is possible that task has ended up in someone's backlog.

tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
If it ended up in someone's backlog, then MailChimp still screwed up because the "suspend account" button should automatically send a notification (even if it only said that more information will follow). I'd also add one item to your list: Proper monitoring (which is extremely difficult and time-consuming to set up). A plan B is useful if you know that you need to enact it. Here, the third party provider had silently caused an outage, possibly because they consider shadow bans more effective without considering that the same thing that makes them effective makes them extremely damaging when they're handed out incorrectly.
- ahje 8y ago
  Good point! Monitoring is also one of those critical things one should always have.