I got an email today, it’s from Go Daddy. If you’re familiar with them this week it’s because human error, somewhere in the system, caused many, many websites to break. And, by “break,” I mean: stopped delivering your customers to your website. It happens, just usually not on this large of a scale.
I’m sure their customer service representatives heard more than an earful from their customers. And, I know their customer service representatives could do nothing in the interim regarding the outage.
I’m still a GoDaddy customer for two reasons, one – It’s really hard, and expensive, to move an Italian domain (Schnik.it) many of your great hosting companies do not deal with international registry. Two – I’m not uber technical, I really just need somewhere to register those domains that I use, GoDaddy fits that bill.
Now, I got this email (pictured below) this morning. It’s GoDaddy’s official apology for their whoopsiedoodle the other day. There are a couple of notable things I caught in the email.
First, in no uncertain terms, they apologize and again in the first and second paragraphs. Three apologies in the first three written items. That’s apologizing done right.
Second, they explained the problem, issue, or defect, in layman terms. They didn’t say “The Flux Capacitor Experienced a Ground-Shift Failure and we let the horses out of the playground to wiggle the chain and rattled some widget plugins.” They said: “The service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.”
As a customer, I don’t really want to know why, I want to know what’s being done to fix it. That’s covered in the same paragraph.
Third, it’s the very last line that caught my attention the most:
It’s an honor to serve you. As always, please call us 24/7 at 480-505-8877 — anytime, for any reason.
How many people in customer service ever say, it’s an honor to serve you. And, call us “anytime, for any reason.” How does that make you feel? I think, companies spend far too much time trying to get their customers to stop calling them. I’m pleased when someone encourages it.
I said this before, I’m a GoDaddy customer out of convenience, but, their customer service in this experience really goes directly to the right tone, the smart response and it makes me quite pleased as a customer service representative. So many companies I’ve worked for in the past really liked saying “We’re sorry, but…” instead of “I’m Sorry.” We often see apologies from big companies done really wrong, it’s nice to see one done right.
Sorry Seems Like the Hardest Word.
