By : Liam Eagle
By now you've probably read a thing or two about the typing error at DreamHost that caused the company to accidentally bill customers for roughly $7.5 million earlier this week.
DreamHost, characteristically, was quick to own up to the mistake, and let customers know what happened, through its blog. Of course, with a mistake of this magnitude there's really no alternative to the honest-apology approach. I can only imagine that trying to keep something like this from getting out would at best cost the company its customers' trust, and at worst make the whole incident indistinguishable from credit card fraud.
But I wonder how much damage DreamHost might have done to its reputation with this particular gaffe, and more specifically with the form and tone of its apology.
This is particularly interesting to me because of DreamHost's successful past work in the areas of apologies and their tones. I've held up DreamHost in the past as an example of how to go about apologizing for mistakes. After a 2005 outage, it was precisely the way the company blogged about the outage that earned it, in many cases, the appreciation and respect of its customers.
(We ran a story about that situation and its outcome here)
This time, though, the company might have taken the wrong tone in its apology.
It's a tricky thing, being glib. Particularly in the context of an apology. And there's a world of difference between informal/forthright, and jokey and (as I've seen it described in several places) condescending.
Specifically (and I'll keep this brief, since this point has already been made elsewhere) the offenses here are: the title "Um, Whoops" and tone ("Ha, the joke is on you! I guess. Um, okay, no, not really, I'm sorry."), as well as the picture of Homer Simpson accompanying the post seem destined to be taken badly by customers who are understandably upset to find their bank accounts missing considerable sums of money.
This time, it seems, DreamHost's personal and transparent mode of interacting with customers appears to have misfired.
Customer reaction, even the reaction revealed in the blog's comment section, served to illustrate the affection DreamHost's customers had for the company and its methods following its previous problems. The more than 600 comments on Monday's apology post paint a different picture. While not every comment is negative, and certainly some are supportive and appreciative, the usual DreamHost feel-good atmosphere is decidedly absent. And a good portion of the posts are of the "Jokes are NOT APPROPRIATE in this situation" variety.
It remains to be seen just how significant the impact of this error is on DreamHost's business, and how many of its customers actually set off in search of another service provider. But it's certainly a change for me to be pointing out DreamHost as an example of a company doing a bad job of handling a volatile situation.
I can't even think, off the top of my head, of who I'm going to use next time I need an example of "here's how you should have done it" from a customer service standpoint. Will I really have to look outside the Web hosting business.
I hate to be glib myself, given the subject matter, but is it really that hard to get this right? Customers appreciate your candor. But they're not your buddies. Especially when you're messing with their money.
[Note: and here we're just talking about the effectiveness of the apology. Of course, there's the entirely separate issue of just how many major catastrophes necessitating large-scale public apologies are acceptable from a single service provider, and in what span of time.]
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