New Way To Recover From Customer Service Problems

Jason Fried from 37signals points out a really fantastic approach to dealing with service problems.

Last month blogging ASP TypePad had some service issues where the growth of the service made access to some blogs very slow. There was widespread criticism of the service at the time and it seems that Six Apart has not only resolved to make things right they’ve given us a great new approach to providing customers with recourse.

image lost to link rot

As you can see in the image above, they are positioning the credits you can request almost like a survey, forcing you to consciously think about the impact their scaling issues had on your specific blog.

My guess is that many people will look at this goodwill gesture and take a small discount or none at all because they’ve done this in good faith. The alternative for them would have been to give everyone a credit that would have kept most users happy, but that would likely have been the highest of the bunch offered here anyway, so they can only gain from this.

Has anybody seen this voluntary credit request pattern seen before? I really like it.


Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on November 14, 2005.