Screw Up, Say You're Sorry, Be Funny, Win Over Your Customers [YC08] | Hacker News Reader

Screw Up, Say You're Sorry, Be Funny, Win Over Your Customers [YC08]

thinkjose.com

48 pointsbradgessler21 comments

That human touch is always really nice for any customer service. It sucks when it feels like you're talking to a robot.

It sucks even more if you are talking to a robot... I've been trying to contact Xbox Live support lately and I cannot seem to get any "person" to respond to me that isn't clearly a classifier.

I have to say Jeff and the polleverywhere guys are some of the funniest guys I've ever met.

After observing a similar pattern at my last startup, I thought it might be a good idea to intentionally screw up something minor. Then we could apologize for it like this and maybe offer some small reward to make up for it.

My theory was that it would endear our customers to us that much more.

I still haven't tested that theory, but I'd really like to some day.

Customers are endeared by this sort of thing because it's genuine. Simulating this effect with a fake trick may work, but it is not cool.

And don't excuse it with "companies everywhere do this all the time" either. Everywhere and every time that kind of stunt is pulled, it is not cool.

And that's why I've never done it! I've never heard of anyone actually trying this, but I bet you're right that it's been done.

You're really likely to screwup someday, somehow unintentionally anyhow. Even if your the nice guy(company) that takes responsibility for your actions, they'll still go somewhere else if you screw up too much, so don't try to up your screw up rate on purpose!

Most companies I know screw up enough that they aren't lacking for genuine opportunities. That and people can usually smell a fake.

My question is this: If you run a company and you caused this (I am in no way calling them out or anything). If you realized you just did this, how do you react? 1) Email the entire list again saying you apologize for that or 2) handle the email on a one-to-one?

EDITED: tsondermann points out they used option 1. I am not a member, so I did not know. I edited this to be more general.

3) wait until the next mass mail and intentionally poke fun at your previous mistake. address mails to "Dear [FNAME] -- Err, Jose,"

"...how do you react?"

I don't think there's an easy answer to this. Humor can be a double edged sword. If the recipient "gets it", you're a hit. If not, you look like an idiot. In print the risk is magnified.

I once had a vendor ask me what my 3 most important "business values" were. Aside from the fact that it was a stupid question, I knew I had to answer it to compete for the job. So I took a chance and said something like, "1-Quality, 2-Ethics, and 3-Taking the customer to a Chinese buffet every Wednesday". They loved it and I got the gig. It could have easily backfired, but I was in a "what the heck" mood.

What mood are you in?

They did email the whole list immediately. I received the same exact apology email minutes after the first came out.

Despite the fact that it was clearly a (now properly formatted) form email, it was still nice to see that they had realized the mistake and quickly took action in a self-effacing manner. Good on them.

I think OP has stumbled onto a great start-up idea: "recipient modifiable email" Just mail merge parameter data from your own client to get the message you want. Never get bad news again.

Use the API to extend to forum comments:

Thanks all, |LINK_SITE| is my favorite place to get my |CONTENT_NICHE| news.

I'm with edw519, I think email MadLibs would be a blast.

Must say that many companies outsource email campaigns and it may not be the company's fault (directly). Just sayin' :)

Nope, we screwed it up. We renamed the FNAME field in our mail app to FIRST_NAME and forgot to change that field when we sent out that email to all of our customers. Oops!

BTW, we use Mailchimp for our emailings. Too bad they don't have an idiot checker before a message is sent out :)

That kind of integration error is very easy to make, and the attention spent on it by in taking the extra care to avoid it probably really adds up, when aggregated over everyone who uses this kind of tool. e.g. I noticed today that ant does the same thing: it will output a literal "${filename}" if filename isn't defined.

In this specific case, Mailchimp could check for non-existent fields.

It would be even better to have a way for the fieldname to be automatically modified when you changed its name elsewhere... but because the naming is itself used to define the binding, there's no way to do this automatically (unless all the components were in a giant all-seeing IDE that automatically refactored all related components, wherever they be).

BTW: What I got from this story was that it's OK to screw up - I think productivity can soar if we don't spend endless attention checking things because we live in terror of making a mistake.

I don't think its OK to screw up, but in the event that you do screw up, step up and take accountability for it. This all boils down to being honest with your customers.

Of course, to screw up is to err (by definition), but I meant it's OK in the sense of it not being the end of the world. Your humour is an illustration of this. It's possible to get hung up on avoiding mistakes at all costs - indeed, at greater expense than the mistakes themselves.

* you're

I love companies that actually send a thought out response! +1 for their great sense of [emotion]

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