

How to turn a technical screw up into a "delighter" feature - petenixey

I received this recently from Xero.com. Because they reached out honestly, pro-actively and generously I ended up actually feeling happy as a result of their (initial) failure. Kudos.<p>----------------------------<p>Hi Peter,<p>We have found an error in our billing system which caused your credit card to be charged twice for your monthly subscription to Xero.<p>This occurred twice on the same day, 30 November 2009.<p>We’re really sorry about this. We have investigated how this error occurred and are making system changes to ensure that this cannot happen in the future.<p>We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused your company.<p>We want to rectify this error for you as quickly as possible and would like to offer you two choices:
1.    We can make an immediate refund of this amount directly to your credit card
2.    Or we can apply the overpayment to your next invoice.<p>Regardless of which option you choose, we’ll also give you one month’s subscription for free as our way of saying ‘Sorry’.<p>Please let us know which option you would prefer, however if we don’t hear from you we will apply the overpayment to your next invoice.<p>Once again we apologise for any inconvenience caused.<p>Kind regards
Ben
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jstraszheim
It is nice, those rare moments, when a company has a clue.

