How to apologise to your customers | Hacker News Reader

How to apologise to your customers

blogs.balsamiq.com

105 pointsrevorad27 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I once worked in a company that planned releases for late Friday afternoon. Not only were the vast majority of our (primarily B2B) customers more concerned with their weekends, but if things did go wrong, we could revert to our old version and spend Friday evening debugging the failure/pushing the release again.

Sounds like a pretty crappy thing for morale, hey? Thing is, it wasn't - we used to turn the Friday push into a bit of a party and when we had to stay Friday evenings, we'd take the next Friday off. All in all, some of the best experiences I have ever had in technology were at those Friday afternoon push parties (or alternatively, the Friday evening 'can we please fix this and go home' sessions)...

If you release on a weekend, you're right: you might lead your employees to resent you.

However, if you don't release on a weekend, you might not even have any employees that can resent you if things go bad consistently.

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??

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.

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.

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!

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 :)

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

I agree. A set of sad and perturbed faces aren't exactly part of the explanation, and serve more as an emotional grab.

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.

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.

I think it does a good job of humanizing Peldi.

I do front-line support for many of our products. Partly because we're small, partly because it's important for me to get a real understanding of what users are saying.

What I have discovered is that users come in being theatrically angry. They greatly exaggerate the extent to which they are affected by problems (verified in logs), they say that they are in an emergency situation with a dying relative and need support NOW, they say they will make a bunch of bad press for the product, a few of them openly extort, death threats, etc. Maybe years of AT&T have trained them to behave badly? I'm not really sure.

Anyway, when I respond to support requests as the owner of the company, a person who has both the technical competence and business authority to actually solve the problem, not some support drone somewhere, the tone changes completely. I've actually had customers apologize to me.

So yeah, the pictures probably seem over the top, but you're probably the type of person who is polite and reasonable when they e-mail someone for support :-) Peldi has probably gotten some cranky e-mails before about downtime, and this is probably the "ward off the death threats" page.

Doing an extremely effective job of publicly resolving problems is an really good tactic. Customer service is one of those things that is really only evident when things go wrong.

There are much worse things in the world than for businesses to look at every mistake as an opportunity to pick up points on the customer service front. At the very least, it keeps you from the all-too-common opposite perspective on mistakes: defensiveness.

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