Every small business has been in this situation. A client or number of clients, is (however temporarily) unhappy with your service or product. Maybe it’s your doing, maybe it’s a bad supplier or partner. Either way, it’s your responsibility. In my opinion, how a CEO or business owner handles these situations is the best measure of a company’s customer service attitude.
Here are two letters we received from CEOs after their companies had damaging outages that affected us and our customers.
The first letter (pdf) is from Intermedia (an e-mail provider) CEO Serguei Sofinski.
The second letter is from Intuit (the makers of Quickbooks) CEO Brad Smith.
Both letters have the same format, namely an apology followed by an explanation. One dissipated my anger, while the other did nothing. Please read them – and let me know what you think. In a follow-up post, I’ll explain which I liked – and why.
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Interesting post.
At first glance, I thought they were both similar, and didn’t feel one went further than the other. And sadly, I think that’s how most people react to such a letter — it’s a quick glance, and then, frustration.
Re-reading, I thought the Intermedia was a more appropriate tone with a proactive tech approach (after all it was addressed to Tech Team) for what was a technical failure. The Intuit one seemed more addressed to media, with a trickle down approach that didn’t go beyond the “okay, we are really really sorry. we get it.” It’s unfortunate that Intuit didn’t think of addressing BOTH tech/non-tech audiences in the email.
As someone who understands server redundancies a bit, I think it’s goofy that Intuit had this type of issue during a routine maintenance exercise.