6 ms·

How to apologise to your customers

105 points by revorad 15y ago

ckluis 15y ago
Awesome apology. We screwed up in every concievable way. If it affected you let us know and a 3 hour downtime will give you 3 months credit. Bravo for honesty!
Tim-Boss 15y ago
I know this apology has only ended up being as thorough and all encompassing as it has because of the other recent PR screw-ups from YC/tech related startups (wont name them here), but I'm not sure I care! This should go down in the annuls of history as the defacto "OH SHIT! Sorry guys, our bad, srsly, really sorry! It wont happen again for these reasons.... oh and as a gesture of our sorrow, here's some free stuff!" style apology! I don't currently use balsamiq, but after seeing this apology and reading their attitude to customer service, I will definitely be finding out more about them!
- marcamillion 15y ago
  Not to be a Balsamiq fan-boi, but you clearly don't know Balsamiq based on this comment. Peldi and Balsamiq has been pretty straight up and transparent with everything (including their revenue & profit figures) from day 1. So this doesn't surprise me. As a matter of fact, if he DIDN'T do this....THAT would surprise me, based on the expectations he has set for his company (for better or worse). Go read up about how he gave away free licenses to non-profits and educational institutions in the early days before 'Balsamiq' was 'Balsamiq'. That being said, they are pretty awesome. P.S. Small spelling correction, I think you meant 'annals' of history :)
  - Tim-Boss 15y ago
    yes, yes I did....and I will be uninstalling the auto-spell-correct asap ;)
jdp23 15y ago
Excellent all the way around: taking responsibility, explaining what happened without making excuses, describing what they're doing to keep it from happening again, making up for it with 3 months credit. The photos are a great touch too. Balsamiq and Peldi continue to be a great example for all of us to emulate.
pgrote 15y ago
The Balsamiq team is incredible. We use it for our specification process and they have never let us down. The one thing I truly love about working with them is their transparency. If we ask about a feature they don't have available, they offer a workaround and offer to put it on a future dev list. It doesn't end there. They let us know the likelihood of the feature being added. I cannot tell you how important that is. We can then make a decision on how to proceed knowing that feature X is way down the road if ever.
citricsquid 15y ago
It's a sad state of affairs when this sort of apology is a surprise and so wonderful. I've been a customer of companies that openly blamed issues on customers and would fake announcements saying that maintenance was planned weeks in advance to save face. Really great to see someone take responsibility for the problems they caused and explain how it's going to be improved for the future.
sunir 15y ago
I would like to share the relevant part of my comment here as well. I want to caution that it is still better to update on Tuesday morning in case the update fails. Updating before or on the weekend can lead to your releases spiraling out of control with no staff monitoring or just a skeleton crew. It is better to have your whole team available and awake. I also worry that you might forment resentment by making everyone work every release weekend. Releases will likely become more infrequent, and lead to bigger changes and bigger failures. Please consider that Balsamiq did recover. May be harder to do so on Saturday.
- pgrote 15y ago
  In our B2B environment we pretty much have to do weekends. Our clients have little system usage during this time and I am more secure knowing we have more time to recover. I will tell you, though, that weekend updates are planned ahead of time and schedules adjusted to ensure no one is caught off guard.
  - medinism 15y ago
    I agree. you can get around the skeleton crew issue by asking everyone to be at hand, nearby in case shit hits the fan. no biggie if all take turns manning the update.
    - v21 15y ago
      If you're releasing frequently, which you probably want to be, then that's a lot of weekends you've just ruined.
  - hluska 15y ago
    I once worked in a company that planned releases for late Friday afternoon. Not only were the vast majority of our (primarily B2B) customers more concerned with their weekends, but if things did go wrong, we could revert to our old version and spend Friday evening debugging the failure/pushing the release again. Sounds like a pretty crappy thing for morale, hey? Thing is, it wasn't - we used to turn the Friday push into a bit of a party and when we had to stay Friday evenings, we'd take the next Friday off. All in all, some of the best experiences I have ever had in technology were at those Friday afternoon push parties (or alternatively, the Friday evening 'can we please fix this and go home' sessions)...
MattBearman 15y ago
I bet hardly anyone (maybe even no one at all) will request the 3 months credit, even if they were inconvenienced. I know that if I were a paying customer of Balsamiq, this apology would be more than enough. It's a shame to say most of our industry are not this open and honest, and that this is a breath of fresh air. Hopefully other companies will learn from this, I know I will.
jeffdechambeau 15y ago
I don't know anything about balsamiq or their product, but this seems to be another instance of "authentic apologies" becoming a standard startup tactic. In terms of one-upsmanship this is a pretty pointless arena. Don't do shitty stuff. If your product breaks, explain it and move on. Stuff's always going to go wrong and break, it happens. Their site went down for 3 hours on a random tuesday and now this guy is throwing himself to the wolves. Come on. There seems to be this idea that you can get away with anything, accidental or not, and so long as your rake yourself over the coals harder than the last guy everything will be okay.
- j_baker 15y ago
  You may be right. But I really find it difficult to see the harm in one-upsmanship over apologizing to customers. I've seen much worse ways of one-upping others. I mean as you say, things are always going to break, whether you do shitty stuff or not. What's wrong with making an effort to make the most sincere apology you can in that case?
  - jeffdechambeau 15y ago
    There's a difference between being honest and saying: "we fucked up, here's what we've done to prevent this from happening in the future, here's a credit for some free stuff" and posting pictures of yourself at the verge of tears. We're past diminishing returns and into theatrics.
    - Tipzntrix 15y ago
      I agree. A set of sad and perturbed faces aren't exactly part of the explanation, and serve more as an emotional grab.
    - j_baker 15y ago
      There's also a difference between lying and fiction. Fiction serves a higher purpose. Lying doesn't. In this particular case, I agree that the company is probably overstating their concern. And you're probably correct that this is bordering on theatrics, but the theatrics serve a higher purpose: to show that they really do care for their customers. I suspect that someone put a lot of effort into creating these theatrics. Would someone who didn't care for their customers do that? No. They'd probably use a platitude like "The customer is always right" as their slogan, and ignore their customers.
Yahnz 15y ago
Personally I think this one is over the top. Much prefer a more clinical version of these: - technical explanation of the timeline & events - what we're doing to make sure this doesn't happen again - how we're compensating customers who were affected - brief mea culpa/ personal apology (proportional to degree of inconvenience!!) Keep the first three language-neutral and easy to read, and reserve emotional stuff to the end. People know you had a bad day, and how you went about resolving the issue will convey the effort you've put in. Balsamiq will have other outages in the future, it's the reality of IT. What sort of pictures will they need for when the next outage is 3 days??
- furyofantares 15y ago
  I totally agree. I want to hear what went wrong, how it was fixed, what can be learned about it. I don't really want an apology at all, I just want an understanding of why something happened and what can be done to prevent or mitigate it in the future.
goronbjorn 15y ago
Transparency is key in apologizing, unless you're not well-intentioned.
- puppybeard 15y ago
  Yep. What makes this apology convincing, compared to some others, is that they were improving their system, rather than fucking with people's data without their consent.
DHowett 15y ago
I don't have anything against Balsamiq or their product (nor do I know what it is,) but why are we lauding a company for doing what any human with some basic modicum of morals would do? We forget that companies are staffed by human beings, and those companies might forget the same sometimes, but lauding people for doing the appropriate thing or taking the appropriate moral route, saying what needed to be said to the people to whom it needed to be said, encourages people to do that for the wrong reason: peer acceptance. You shouldn't be apologizing because people will like you more for being honest. You should apologize because you did something wrong.

105 points by revorad 15y ago

Awesome apology. We screwed up in every concievable way. If it affected you let us know and a 3 hour downtime will give you 3 months credit. Bravo for honesty!

Tim-Boss 15y ago

I know this apology has only ended up being as thorough and all encompassing as it has because of the other recent PR screw-ups from YC/tech related startups (wont name them here), but I'm not sure I care! This should go down in the annuls of history as the defacto "OH SHIT! Sorry guys, our bad, srsly, really sorry! It wont happen again for these reasons.... oh and as a gesture of our sorrow, here's some free stuff!" style apology! I don't currently use balsamiq, but after seeing this apology and reading their attitude to customer service, I will definitely be finding out more about them!

marcamillion 15y ago
Not to be a Balsamiq fan-boi, but you clearly don't know Balsamiq based on this comment. Peldi and Balsamiq has been pretty straight up and transparent with everything (including their revenue & profit figures) from day 1. So this doesn't surprise me. As a matter of fact, if he DIDN'T do this....THAT would surprise me, based on the expectations he has set for his company (for better or worse). Go read up about how he gave away free licenses to non-profits and educational institutions in the early days before 'Balsamiq' was 'Balsamiq'. That being said, they are pretty awesome. P.S. Small spelling correction, I think you meant 'annals' of history :)
- Tim-Boss 15y ago
  yes, yes I did....and I will be uninstalling the auto-spell-correct asap ;)

jdp23 15y ago

Excellent all the way around: taking responsibility, explaining what happened without making excuses, describing what they're doing to keep it from happening again, making up for it with 3 months credit. The photos are a great touch too. Balsamiq and Peldi continue to be a great example for all of us to emulate.

pgrote 15y ago

The Balsamiq team is incredible. We use it for our specification process and they have never let us down. The one thing I truly love about working with them is their transparency. If we ask about a feature they don't have available, they offer a workaround and offer to put it on a future dev list. It doesn't end there. They let us know the likelihood of the feature being added. I cannot tell you how important that is. We can then make a decision on how to proceed knowing that feature X is way down the road if ever.

citricsquid 15y ago

It's a sad state of affairs when this sort of apology is a surprise and so wonderful. I've been a customer of companies that openly blamed issues on customers and would fake announcements saying that maintenance was planned weeks in advance to save face. Really great to see someone take responsibility for the problems they caused and explain how it's going to be improved for the future.

sunir 15y ago

I would like to share the relevant part of my comment here as well. I want to caution that it is still better to update on Tuesday morning in case the update fails. Updating before or on the weekend can lead to your releases spiraling out of control with no staff monitoring or just a skeleton crew. It is better to have your whole team available and awake. I also worry that you might forment resentment by making everyone work every release weekend. Releases will likely become more infrequent, and lead to bigger changes and bigger failures. Please consider that Balsamiq did recover. May be harder to do so on Saturday.

pgrote 15y ago
In our B2B environment we pretty much have to do weekends. Our clients have little system usage during this time and I am more secure knowing we have more time to recover. I will tell you, though, that weekend updates are planned ahead of time and schedules adjusted to ensure no one is caught off guard.
- medinism 15y ago
  I agree. you can get around the skeleton crew issue by asking everyone to be at hand, nearby in case shit hits the fan. no biggie if all take turns manning the update.
  - v21 15y ago
    If you're releasing frequently, which you probably want to be, then that's a lot of weekends you've just ruined.
- hluska 15y ago
  I once worked in a company that planned releases for late Friday afternoon. Not only were the vast majority of our (primarily B2B) customers more concerned with their weekends, but if things did go wrong, we could revert to our old version and spend Friday evening debugging the failure/pushing the release again. Sounds like a pretty crappy thing for morale, hey? Thing is, it wasn't - we used to turn the Friday push into a bit of a party and when we had to stay Friday evenings, we'd take the next Friday off. All in all, some of the best experiences I have ever had in technology were at those Friday afternoon push parties (or alternatively, the Friday evening 'can we please fix this and go home' sessions)...

MattBearman 15y ago

I bet hardly anyone (maybe even no one at all) will request the 3 months credit, even if they were inconvenienced. I know that if I were a paying customer of Balsamiq, this apology would be more than enough. It's a shame to say most of our industry are not this open and honest, and that this is a breath of fresh air. Hopefully other companies will learn from this, I know I will.

jeffdechambeau 15y ago

I don't know anything about balsamiq or their product, but this seems to be another instance of "authentic apologies" becoming a standard startup tactic. In terms of one-upsmanship this is a pretty pointless arena. Don't do shitty stuff. If your product breaks, explain it and move on. Stuff's always going to go wrong and break, it happens. Their site went down for 3 hours on a random tuesday and now this guy is throwing himself to the wolves. Come on. There seems to be this idea that you can get away with anything, accidental or not, and so long as your rake yourself over the coals harder than the last guy everything will be okay.

j_baker 15y ago
You may be right. But I really find it difficult to see the harm in one-upsmanship over apologizing to customers. I've seen much worse ways of one-upping others. I mean as you say, things are always going to break, whether you do shitty stuff or not. What's wrong with making an effort to make the most sincere apology you can in that case?
- jeffdechambeau 15y ago
  There's a difference between being honest and saying: "we fucked up, here's what we've done to prevent this from happening in the future, here's a credit for some free stuff" and posting pictures of yourself at the verge of tears. We're past diminishing returns and into theatrics.
  - Tipzntrix 15y ago
    I agree. A set of sad and perturbed faces aren't exactly part of the explanation, and serve more as an emotional grab.
  - j_baker 15y ago
    There's also a difference between lying and fiction. Fiction serves a higher purpose. Lying doesn't. In this particular case, I agree that the company is probably overstating their concern. And you're probably correct that this is bordering on theatrics, but the theatrics serve a higher purpose: to show that they really do care for their customers. I suspect that someone put a lot of effort into creating these theatrics. Would someone who didn't care for their customers do that? No. They'd probably use a platitude like "The customer is always right" as their slogan, and ignore their customers.

Yahnz 15y ago

Personally I think this one is over the top. Much prefer a more clinical version of these: - technical explanation of the timeline & events - what we're doing to make sure this doesn't happen again - how we're compensating customers who were affected - brief mea culpa/ personal apology (proportional to degree of inconvenience!!) Keep the first three language-neutral and easy to read, and reserve emotional stuff to the end. People know you had a bad day, and how you went about resolving the issue will convey the effort you've put in. Balsamiq will have other outages in the future, it's the reality of IT. What sort of pictures will they need for when the next outage is 3 days??

furyofantares 15y ago
I totally agree. I want to hear what went wrong, how it was fixed, what can be learned about it. I don't really want an apology at all, I just want an understanding of why something happened and what can be done to prevent or mitigate it in the future.

goronbjorn 15y ago

Transparency is key in apologizing, unless you're not well-intentioned.

puppybeard 15y ago
Yep. What makes this apology convincing, compared to some others, is that they were improving their system, rather than fucking with people's data without their consent.

DHowett 15y ago

I don't have anything against Balsamiq or their product (nor do I know what it is,) but why are we lauding a company for doing what any human with some basic modicum of morals would do? We forget that companies are staffed by human beings, and those companies might forget the same sometimes, but lauding people for doing the appropriate thing or taking the appropriate moral route, saying what needed to be said to the people to whom it needed to be said, encourages people to do that for the wrong reason: peer acceptance. You shouldn't be apologizing because people will like you more for being honest. You should apologize because you did something wrong.