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Comment by david90 | Hacker News Reader

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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