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Comment by Sukotto | Hacker News Reader

Thank you telling us about what happened. I am sorry to hear that [paraphrase complaint]. We want all our customers to have a great experience and we let you down.

I have [refunded / free upgrade / given some other bonus] your account. We will also make it a priority to [describe how we will improve] to make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else.

Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to make this right or if you have something else to tell us. You can contact me by email me@example.com or phone $phone_number. Those are direct to me personally, not to our helpdesk.

Best regards

$me

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I have 3 seconds thinking this is a spam lol

It's a response to a problem the customer has raised. In that context it won't look like spam.

I'm not keen on the conciliatory tone and going straight to a 'bribe' of a refund/offer/etc, but in some markets that could work. If I had it as a response I'd feel like I was getting a brush-off rather than someone was trying to engage with me and fix my problem. If someone is willing to go to the effort of making a complaint without asking for a refund then they're expressing an interest in continuing the relationship; a refund is often seen as "we don't want your custom so we're paying you to go away." Like I said though, it's very dependent on the market.

I think they meant the post looked like automated HN spam, until it 'clicked' that it was just a dump of an email template :)

I once used the built-in contact form in a webapp to tell the creators that one of the ads they were showing was malware. They thanked me, and I got a couple of free months' premium service out of it. I was very happy with that - it was a relatively minor complaint on my part, I was a free user, and they got a paid customer for a few months after their gift expired out of that.

Generally I think that'd work for the majority of free users of a service. For paying customers, though, you sort of have to triage between minor complaints and ones that will lose you a customer quickly if you don't look like you're solving it.

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