Betterific rose to the occasion
Recently, I was on idea crowdsourcing site, Betterific, gaining insight into some of the amazing inventiveness the community has, when it began to fail. I refreshed the page five times and couldn’t get it to load. I immediately left, because after two refreshes with nothing on the page, I’ve already passed my threshold.
Perhaps it was automated, perhaps it wasn’t, but within seconds, I got the following email:
Hi Lani
I’m Brad, CTO of Betterific. I saw that you hit a bug on the site a few minutes ago. Sorry about that! That should be resolved for you now.
Cheers
-Brad
Anatomy of why this is so brilliant
We all have glitches on our websites, at our company, on the phone, and the like, and the standard response is to say nothing and hope your customer will come back.
Betterific is set up to answer to glitches by email, which is still the most proven method of communication. Had they tweeted me, I probably wouldn’t have seen it until later, and if they Facebooked me, I might have been annoyed.
Not only did they use the most universal form of communication, they literally resolved an issue I barely cared about in the first place within seconds. So what did I do? I went right back to the site and spent another hour perusing. That’s a big win for them, and all they did was send a one line customer service email.
The final two reasons that this email was so effective:
- The email was written by someone high up – it wasn’t the tech support assistant to the regional manager, entry level V in India, it was the CTO.
- The email was concise, used a human tone, was humble and apologetic, and was not pushy. They didn’t tell me I should go check for them to see if they did their job of fixing a bug, and they didn’t tell me to come back to them with feedback, in fact, they didn’t give me any homework. Do you know how rare that is?
When something goes wrong at your business, be as fast as possible, respond by email when you can, use a human tone, and have it come from the C-suite. Most would have allowed a glitch like this to fall through the cracks, but Betterific didn’t, and with this one tiny simple humble email, they won a fan for life.
