11–20 of 57 posts
This is how you do a public apology. Nicely played.
My theory is that when there is an unfortunate outcome the righteous sub-person in us thinks that blame must be assigned before progress can be made. This is might be true in some cases and not in other cases, but overcoming the mental habit might be harder than playing into it.
Did Zendesk bother to grandfather the pricing on their existing customers and instead charge more for new customers?
no originally existing customers would only be grandfathered in for a year and they had to pay up front.
For other web startups out there who want to change prices, I highly recommend that you grandfather existing customers so you don't piss them off and because you don't have to communicate anything about pricing changes to them.
This is how a startup should handle pricing changes, so long as the old pricing scheme was viable. This is the opposite of what Recurly did a month or two ago when they dramatically raised prices and the same revolt occurred. Their response was a big "F You", and their latest e-mails finally announcing even more pricing changes show they lost enough users in the process that it threatened their viability.
Flat-rate pricing works for the vast, vast majority of internet companies since the day AOL won over CompuServe because they went to the $20 per month unlimited plan back in 1996.
The lesson I've learned from Recurly is that developers find per-use to be less risky than flat fees, which is the opposite of normals.
Interesting to see the "too little too late" comments on their comments. Proof that 1) no matter how hard you try to apologize and make things right, you can't please everybody and 2) unfortunately, these people are the most vocal.
So the customers spent hours comparing the offers of the competition, all the time being frustrated because this jumped on them from nowhere. And then, 2 days later, they hear "Whoops, my bad!". That just doesn't fix the damage, now does it?
If a thousand customers each spend 3 hours worrying about what to do, and these numbers are conservative, then you've created 3000 hours of unnecessary frustration. So the damage will exceed $300.000. Just with one ill considered move!
Whoops, sorry!
When we decided to make a change to the Zendesk pricing structure for our existing customers, we tried to be as thoughtful, transparent, and straightforward as possible. Transparent? Maybe you should've given your customers a warning first..? While the letter is certainly worded very nicely (and carefully), it reeks more of damage control than sincerity. The picture with the puppy dog face puts it way over the top.
When we decided to make a change to the Zendesk pricing structure for our existing customers, we tried to be as thoughtful, transparent, and straightforward as possible. Transparent? Maybe you should've given your customers a warning first..? While the letter is certainly worded very nicely (and carefully), it reeks more of damage control than sincerity. The picture with the puppy dog face puts it way over the top.
How do you get more sincere than, "We failed. We let you down. And we apologize."? I'm asking this in all honesty; I don't really understand where you see this as being insincere. Just curious.
I've noticed with hacker news there is always a few people (different people, not the same ones) that are not satisfied with the apology of the day.
I'm not sure why this is. My initial theory is that the apology didn't address a highly specific issue in the exact manner that person wanted. Apologies like this are (necessarily) non-specific because they address everyone.
Then again, if I want to be cynical, it's possible that that person (not specific to jimboyoungblood) just won't except any apology as adequate.
When we decided to make a change to the Zendesk pricing structure for our existing customers, we tried to be as thoughtful, transparent, and straightforward as possible. Transparent? Maybe you should've given your customers a warning first..? While the letter is certainly worded very nicely (and carefully), it reeks more of damage control than sincerity. The picture with the puppy dog face puts it way over the top.
How do you get more sincere than, "We failed. We let you down. And we apologize."? I'm asking this in all honesty; I don't really understand where you see this as being insincere. Just curious.
The photo really is the kicker. Nobody has a photo like that just sitting around on their computer. Obviously a lot of effort, from a number of people, went into producing and editing this blog post. Do you believe the same, obviously skilled, team that produced this finely crafted apology could have unintentionally introduced a pricing structure that jacked up the bill for many of their customers?
I'm honestly surprised that so many people fell for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you get more sincere than, "We failed. We let you down. And we apologize."? I'm asking this in all honesty; I don't really understand where you see this as being insincere. Just curious.
For the lack of a better answer, it sets off my spidey sense. Everything is too nicely worded- there is nothing spontaneous or "real" about it. Imagine if you were hearing those words spoken in person. I don't think they'd ring true. The photo really is the kicker. Nobody has a photo like that just sitting around on their computer. Obviously a lot of effort, from a number of people, went into producing and editing th…