Remember when the “sharing economy” was going to overhaul old business models, make life and work cooler, and enable us to rely on each other for rides, places to stay, and livable incomes?
Remember when we didn’t get a new data breach notification from have i been pwned? every week?
As a consumer, it’s gotten awfully hard to trust companies these days.
Some companies have intentionally gone over to the dark side because it’s massively lucrative. But other companies just make inexplicably bad choices that will erode revenue and consumer trust in the long run.
Earlier this month I witnessed a couple of incidents of companies experiencing serious technical outages affecting pretty much all customers, but then handling the issues in ways that wouldn’t just erode trust, but frankly torpedo it.
I’m going to dig into one of the incidents, but for a deep dive into the broader issue of companies and trust, this recent episode of Your Undivided Attention also has some excellent discussion: Episode 12, “Trust Falls”.
A couple of weeks ago, domain registrar and web host Gandi had a massive technical failure and outage . In addition to investigating and working to fix the issue, they put on a master class in how to ruin trust between the customer and the company.
The outage was more than just a temporary glitch. They actually lost customers’ data – for the second time in 10 years, apparently – and announced it was unrecoverable. They instructed customers that they’d have to restore from their own backups. It was really bad.
And then they made it so much worse.
The employee who was managing their social media during this debacle tried to make something of a “whadda ya want me to do about it?” joke . Cuz everyone loves a good meme… right? It went over about as well as you’d expect with already irate customers.
What Julie should have done was acknowledge the severity of the issue, provide information about what was being done to investigate and fix it at intervals when possible, and apologize. Period.
Now, I get that being the communications point person would be really hard during an event like that, even for senior staff, which I suspect Julie is not. (Did they have a crisis communications plan?)
You’re getting hammered by people demanding information you probably don’t have. Updates may be both sparse and technical, but have to be translated to layperson terms and forwarded to customers nonetheless. All while you’re endlessly being yelled at by really angry people you can’t help.
I really do get the sanity-saving value of gallows humour in a situation like this, but not in public. No one else will find it funny. It won’t dissipate tension.
Once the crisis passes and the company claims it’s all fixed and will never happen again, why should anyone trust them if they were so flippant about customer concerns during the issue?
Ensure all relevant resources are widely available, but beyond that, don’t try to just fill the awkward silence. Some people will be working long and hard to fix this issue, but not everyone in the company can help. That’s just the way it is.
Now, you’d think that the company’s CEO would be a great resource in such a situation, right? They’d know exactly what happened, what the status is, and have enough experience with customers to say just the right, authoritative, calming thing.
Yeah… not so much. An “apology” loses a certain something when you pretty much accuse customers of being too dumb to follow instructions. So data losses that could, y’know, ruin your small business – pretty much your own fault. The best defence is NOT a good offence in this case.
Here’s the thing. Yes, we should all run regular backups, eat our veggies and floss twice a day. But at the end of the day, until the company’s systems broke down, even the most negligent customer’s data was there. Their websites, etc. were working.
As any support person can tell you, people can break, misuse or neglect critical things no matter how often or in how many ways you communicate with them. No system, interface or documentation is foolproof.
Companies’ core responsibility is to damned well try to make it that way, but if things do break down, it’s not the customers’ fault.
Keeping customers’ stuff safe and functional is kinda the biggest thing that customers pay companies like Gandi for. And most people don’t want to know about or deal with the nuts and bolts. It’s what customers trusted the company to do. And then the CEO basically tells you you should have relied on yourselves.
After the outage was publicized, but before the data recovery was announced, the company sent customers an email. It reiterated that there’d been an outage, that they were (at that time) unable to recover the data, and apologized.
But then the wording got very strange. It was either hastily written and poorly vetted, or else the company was actually trying to draw attention to the fact that they had a disaster (again) that doesn’t happen to other companies. But you should still trust them…
At the end of the email they provided customers with a promo code for one free month of hosting… with the same host that just lost all their data. One month. And of course the customers would need to do all the legwork themselves regarding any backups, migrations, etc. (if even possible).
Making jokes during a crisis. Losing customers’ data, insulting them and telling them it’s their own fault if they can’t recover it themselves. Offering a pittance in exchange for all the extra work and misery. Shunting responsibility and providing nothing in the way of information about improvements or future guarantees.
What incentive would anyone have to entrust their business to this company?
The company did announce that they’d recovered the data (Some of it? All of it? Who knows…) But that was a full four days later. Damage was done, horse was long out of the barn.
Was anyone even paying attention by that point? Those who had backups had already fixed things themselves. Would you have been even remotely confident that everything was okay and would continue to be in the future? Yeah, me either.
These days, consumers have endless options. Your company has ravenous competition. Additionally, it’s hard enough earning consumers’ trust, given how often we get screwed over, and how little we truly understand the full scope of the business of companies we deal with.
Companies need to work harder and more consistently than ever to build and maintain consumer trust. Because destroying it is far easier than cutting a data centre’s fibre optic cable, and way harder to fix.
M-Theory is an opinion column by Melanie Baker. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Communitech. Melle can be reached at @melle or me@melle.ca.
