
How to apologise to your customers - revorad
http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2012/04/03/sorry/
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citricsquid
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.

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sunir
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.

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pgrote
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.

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medinism
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
If you're releasing frequently, which you probably want to be, then that's a
lot of weekends you've just ruined.

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Yahnz
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??

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furyofantares
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.

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jdp23
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.

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Tim-Boss
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
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
yes, yes I did....and I will be uninstalling the auto-spell-correct asap ;)

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DHowett
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.

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ckluis
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!

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pgrote
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.

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MattBearman
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.

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

~~~
puppybeard
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.

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jeffdechambeau
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.

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j_baker
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?

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jeffdechambeau
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.

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j_baker
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.

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lancewiggs
My impression was that the photos accurately reflect how the team felt during
the outage. We'd all feel pretty awful during that sort of event, and it was a
quick and effective way to get across that these guys did too.

