
Slack refunds customers 100x amount paid during outage - loteck
https://prnt.sc/il4h52
======
matte_black
I once had a service where a customer was distraught by the way some features
were implemented, he wanted things to work one way, but the service handled it
in another. He wrote a fiery email about what a waste of time my service was
because of these shortcomings and how he wished he had never bothered using
it.

Determined to make things right, I told him I would refund him 1000% of the
original price he paid, so that the final amount can express how much I really
care about making sure he was happy with his experience.

 _The service was free._

~~~
dingaling
If you didn't care about making people happy with their experience, why did
you offer a service?

To attract them onto a paid tier? Well then you lost that potential customer
by being a smartarse.

Of course he knew it was free. But he took time to express his dissatisfaction
directly to you. Most people would grouse on a forum and never give direct
feedback.

~~~
weixiyen
It's possible other users were happy and this one user was going over the top.

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CobrastanJorji
Anyone else think of Snowcrash and the Pizza Deliverators? In the book, the
mafia-backed pizza delivery company simply guaranteed that your pizza would
arrive in 30 minutes. Or else what? No, it was just a Guarantee. In the rare
event they failed to deliver, they apologized in the form of outrageous
vacations and such. The self-imposed penalty for failure was so great that
recipients actively hope for failure.

Pretty great guarantee for the customer, all in all, although on the flip
side, if your business uses Slack for critical communication in an emergency,
the potential cost to you for a Slack outage might similarly be many orders of
magnitude beyond the price of Slack.

~~~
peterjlee
If Slack was down for 5 minutes in a month that will break the 99.99% SLA. If
you pay $6.67/mo for Slack, 6.67 * (0.01%) * 100 = 0.07

Yea I'll rather have Slack for that 5 minutes than save my company 7 cents.

~~~
startupdiscuss
Peter's point still holds. If the company has 100 employees, that is $7! For
10,000 employees, it comes to $700!

His point is that it isn't really significant. How can "catching" him on the
single employee assumption be the response.

~~~
dwild
7$ for 5 minutes of downtime in a month? That seems good to me. 1 hour would
be a better example I guess, 84$ for an hour of downtime, that seems to be low
for the amount of work that "may" have been lost, but then, that's weird to
depend on a chat software that much.

~~~
Johnny555
I don't see what's weird about that -- before companies relied on chat, they
relied on email -- in my company email can go down and people hardly notice,
but a Slack outage is immediately met with cries of "Hey, are you having
trouble with Slack!?".

Before companies relied on email, they relied on phones. My company doesn't
even provide desk phones for most staff, only Sales and other staff that need
to make a lot of calls have them.

So what's so weird about companies relying on Slack?

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DrScump
This reminds me of Comcast outages. _If_ you catch a failure as it happens,
and _if_ you navigate through the maze that is their phone tree, and _if_ you
wait long enough to actual speak to somebody in their offshore call center,
and _if_ you go through all the unrelated hoops they make you endure (e.g.
"you reset your box wrong"), they will usually, _eventually_ tell you that
they will credit your account for _one day 's worth_ of charges.

And _sometimes_ , the credit actually happens.

~~~
chipperyman573
FWIW you can usually ask for more (I usually get around $20), but you have to
actually negotiate with the person on the phone. It's really weird, you would
expect them to just be reading off of a script, but they actually negotiate
like a trained car salesman or something.

~~~
bearcobra
When I worked in a cable co call center a customer tried to negotiate a bigger
discount by arguing that I couldn't prove the service was working while she
was sleeping. I relented because it was going to cost the company more for me
to stay on the phone than it did to just give her another 2 days worth of
credit.

~~~
DrScump
The downside is that the credit incentivizes her to repeat the process again
and again.

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alexbeloi
If you do the math, your "100x" credit comes out to 13.8% of your monthly
payment in credit per hour of down-time.

That's not terrible or extravagant. The 100x multiplier is there only to make
the credit reasonable, without it you would be getting chump change.

------
wmf
Slack's SLA is 99.99%, so if they _really_ believed in it they would refund
10,000x.

(They'd also go out of business, which shows the futility of SLAs.)

~~~
eli
I don't think that shows the futility of SLAs. If their actual uptime was
99.991%, they'd have met their SLA but still paid a fortune in credits for the
0.009% downtime that did occur.

~~~
abofh
That's not... That's not how any of those contracts are written

~~~
computerphage
I don't understand what you mean. Can you elaborate?

~~~
wmf
SLAs usually pay nothing if the downtime is less than allowed.

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joshfraser
Meanwhile engineers everywhere are wishing Slack had stayed down longer so
they could continue getting work done without distractions!

~~~
iamdave
The 'distraction' thing is one I keep seeing about Slack and I often wonder is
this because individuals just are not managing notifications properly (or at
all) or is it FOMO that causes the individual to habitually check channels?

~~~
codemac
Managing notifications properly?

There is _no_ proper management of notifications. Either you store them
completely out of sight (and thus are not notifications, but messages), or
they interrupt you without taking into account how important the work you're
doing is.

I hate notifications, and is why any time I've been forced to use slack, I use
it through their irc gateway and disable all notifications.

~~~
girvo
Do Not Disturb mode is my saviour. Going deep into the engineering trenches?
Flip it on. Answering emails/doing less important things? Turn it off.

~~~
jon-wood
I have a script that runs in the background on my laptop and automatically
turns on DnD (and sets my status) whenever I'm on Google Meet talking to
someone. That one thing has made calls so much more productive.

~~~
anpat
I know it's a long shot but do you think it's possible to share the script
(gist/GitHub)?

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simonebrunozzi
Amazing. I love this. Slack, you are a great great company.

Compare this with AWS (disclosure: I worked there 2008-2014): you get refunded
of the downtime in proportion to the month - e.g. 1 day of downtime means a
~3% discount on your monthly costs. Absurd. The damage is far greater than
that.

Slack's policy is a great way to respect customers. Well well well done.
Bravi.

~~~
testplzignore
Cable companies are the worst at this. I've had TV and internet outages with
TWC/Spectrum where they've refunded me less than a dollar after I've called to
complain. At least once they've had the audacity to charge me $5 for talking
to a human, thus resulting in a net loss for me. WTF?!

~~~
toomanybeersies
I had an ISP once where the connection had to be down for an entire 24 hour
period before you could get a refund.

It it came up for even 1 minute during the day, you wouldn't get a refund.

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jaksmit
100x the price paid "during the period Slack was down" probably doesn't amount
to much money. E.g. if you're down for an hour, that would likely void the
SLA, but refunding for 100 hours is not much money vs how much a company would
pay each month.

~~~
jsjohnst
> but refunding for 100 hours is not much money

It’s ~14%. Not a significant sum, but still better than nothing.

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dpweb
The typical reaction I guess is, nice thing to do, but I’d be interested in
the economics of the need to keep churn low, that probably makes this a good
move financially.

Also its a credits and not cash rebate? So if I bail I get nothing?

~~~
IAmGraydon
Exactly. Because it's paid in the form of a service credit, this gets the
customer who might be considering leaving an incentive to stay just long
enough to forget/forgive the whole incident.

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hcnews
I am quite surprised at 100x amount. In the enterprise industry, companies
usually have set SLAs and amounts written in the contract for violating SLAs.
Did slack really write in 100x repay in the contract or is it overpaying
enterprise customers (very weird)? Even if the paid amount is small, wording
like 100x amount is bad for the enterprise industry.

~~~
loteck
Good question. Turns out it is spelled out right there in their SLA.[0]

 _If we fall short of our 99.99% uptime guarantee, we’ll refund customers on
the Plus plan and above 100 times the amount your workspace paid during the
period Slack was down._

[0] [https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/204113126-Service-L...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/204113126-Service-Level-Agreements-SLA-)

~~~
dx034
Does that mean they refund the whole outage? Or just the time that exceeds the
0.01%?

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killedbydeath
Interesting approach. Maybe that should be the "real SLA" number: 99% = 100x
refund, 99.99% = 10000x refund.

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socalnate1
Trying to figure out the math on this. Let's say I pay slack $1000 a month and
it goes down for one full day - does that mean I get (1/30 * 1000) * 100 =
$3,333?

(Assume 30 day month and 100% up time SLA for simplicity)

~~~
bri3d
No, it's just Service Credits. So if Slack goes down for one full day, you get
100 free days of Slack in the future.

[https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/204113126-Service-L...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/204113126-Service-Level-Agreements-SLA-) .

Or more realistically, if Slack goes down for 30 minutes, you get 50 hours of
Slack for free in the future.

It's hard to calculate the actual value of these service credits.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
Or less realistically, if Slack went offline for 3.65 days, everybody would
presumably get free Slack for a year.

~~~
FireBeyond
On the Plus plan or higher.

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sergiotapia
Is this $monthly fee * 100 or $monthly fee/minutes in month * minutes of
downtime * 100?

One is different than the other.

~~~
dx034
The latter:

> we’ll refund customers on the Plus plan and above 100 times the amount your
> workspace paid during the period Slack was down.

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hinkley
Good. One of the things that pisses me off about SLAs and the thing I always
have to teach my bosses is that there is almost no tool we pay to use that
isn’t making us 10-30x what we pay for it. It’s just not worth fighting with
the finance people for anything less. So a money back guarantee doesn’t mean
shit to me, except for virtue signaling.

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IAmGraydon
"In the form of a 'service credit'".

~~~
tytytytytytytyt
Would gold pressed latinum be better?

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retox
Pure submarine marketing.

