121–130 of 278 posts
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Email only is not even close to best effort. I know it’s standard to only do email for tech companies, but all other types of companies usually do physical mail and phone calls on top of emails for important notifications. I am not a customer, but it’s really annoying me how tech companies repeatedly think sending emails is somehow anything but the absolute minimum, most lazy option.
Why do customers believe that they don’t need to read their emails?
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As a buyer I have come to expect good vendors to design systems so mistakes (my team or yours) don't cost me sleep or you business.[3] i.e. - they do soft-deletes before hard - have robust access control systems and partitioning - so we don't have to give access to everyone in the org to object model with full r/w - don't instantly nuke the account if a payment goes astray or delayed - try to reach out before to a po…
> don't instantly nuke the account if a payment goes astray or delayed Hetzner deleted my server just one week after my payment due date. My credit card failed the payment for some reason. I didn’t notice this because I was ill with Covid. They sent me one email (or at least, I received only one email) as a warning. I only realized the server was gone when my services stopped working. I’m not sure if such a short war…
After 5 years, they deleted everything 2 weeks after the first payment failure.
Sure it was the cheapest VPS. But still, you don't just delete your customers' data.
I was away from emails and the service during those two weeks. As far as I can tell it might have been some race condition in their payement processing system. They couldn't figure it out. They had no backup. They refused to reinstate the service anew to restore my own backup.
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You can't turn system off if customer paid for it. That's the breach of contract. If you keep customer data after payment period, you're losing money. So scream test will cost you money. They decided that this cost is not appropriate payment to compensate for possible reputation loss. Whether that's a good business decision or not, time will tell.
Good customer service costs money. It takes years to build a good reputation and minutes to destroy it.
I can understand the outrage about deleted data, but has anyone figured out why they are shutting down in Belgium?
I know ap-southeast tends to be pricier, I'm assuming Belgium was the same.
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As a CTO, you should make yourself aware of what a scream test is https://www.v-wiki.net/scream-test-meaning/ Basically, you just turn stuff off, and make people scream, while they can turn it back on. You could have did this a month ago, as a critical warning of impending termination of systems. You didn't do that. Instead, you sent a few emails, which itself isn't even a guaranteed delivery. Again, as a CTO, you sh…
You can't turn system off if customer paid for it. That's the breach of contract. If you keep customer data after payment period, you're losing money. So scream test will cost you money. They decided that this cost is not appropriate payment to compensate for possible reputation loss. Whether that's a good business decision or not, time will tell.
It sounds like they did turn the system off for paying customers though, why would it be any worse to do a scream test a few days before they pulled the rug out?
If it's just a matter of billing cycles (does everyone's billing cycle end on the same day?) , it seems like they could've handled it better. Just give impacted users a prorated and shortened final month (or even given it out for free for goodwill)
It seems this probably happened due to some regulation or other. The sunset date for the service should have been a month prior so that influx could have kept the data legally until the 30th in case of this situation happening. They wanted to have the euros flowing in right until the last minute. 1. Flash messages on all user facing consoles. 2. No new resource able to be created for 6 mo this. 3. Emails. 4. Service…
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Email only is not even close to best effort. I know it’s standard to only do email for tech companies, but all other types of companies usually do physical mail and phone calls on top of emails for important notifications. I am not a customer, but it’s really annoying me how tech companies repeatedly think sending emails is somehow anything but the absolute minimum, most lazy option.
We get an email address because we need to contact our customers. After that we make best efforts but if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss. I realize that shutting down a region isn’t good. It’s not what we would have preferred, but we had to do it for the business. And we made an honest effort to contact all customers to help move them.
Hi, cofounder and CTO here. We notified everyone via email on February 23, April 6 and May 15th. We also offered to help migrate all users. I realize that it's not ideal that we've shut down this system, but we made our best efforts to notify affected users and give them options to move over to other regions. If you've been impacted by this, please email me personally and I will do my best to help out: paul at influx…
You call three emails (the last of which was almost 2 months ago) "best efforts"?
I had to read your message three times because this is so reality-defying preposterous I just couldn't believe I didn't miss anything. How about warnings on the dashboard? How about an intentional error (or limited service interruption) so that people would log in to their dashboard?
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Paul: I'm surprised you didn't do a scream test. Not everyone is going to see those emails and even those that do may not understand what they are reading. Internally at my company we always do scream tests as part of our EOL process because we know we can't reach everyone, even our own employees. https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/microsoft-uses-a-... Fun story: my mortgage got sold last year. Not the first…
> I was like: you guys should've FedEx'd me this in the first place. For all they knew, I wasn't getting their emails or letters in the first place because nothing had been sent signature required. I love the scream test, but the analogy you bring up actually - this seems unfair. The cost of Fedex'ing everyone is astounding (for many businesses). But I like the concept. Definitely a sort of "shut off the server for l…
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We get an email address because we need to contact our customers. After that we make best efforts but if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss. I realize that shutting down a region isn’t good. It’s not what we would have preferred, but we had to do it for the business. And we made an honest effort to contact all customers to help move them.
Should get a phone number too. Shit like that happens. Next time lay down the law to the marketing drones from UX that want to "reduce friction". Explain carefully so their thick minds will understand that NOBODY is lazy enough to quit subscribing to your service just because you added an additional field to your onboarding.
Which most people would be reluctant to provide because everyone hates sales spam, and what else would a SaaS need your phone number for in regular times (impeding data deletion is a good one)? On HN making a phone number for a signup is regularly criticised.