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Sorry. We Messed Up. (Zendesk responds to pricing criticism)

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Re: Sorry. We Messed Up. (Zendesk responds to pricing criticism)

#51

Post by techiferous »

kristiandupont wrote: post #35
parfe wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for one thing pissing off your customers is not "letting them down." It's pissing them off. Side stepping the fact in the "apology" is like a little kid apologizing for something because he knows it is a required action. Not because he's sorry. This company is sorry that the customers got angry and forced the pricing change. They are not sorry for "letting them down"

Interesting - I never thought of it before, but does it even make any sense to apologize for something that you did intentionally? It is what we force children to do, but mostly because it is a part of a sound upbringing. If you spill coffee on someone, an apology makes perfect sense. You caused someone harm and you acknowledge that, but it wasn't intentional. However, if you steal from someone, saying that you are s…

We use apologies as a cheap substitute for empathy. A wronged party would like to know that you see their hurt and if you could do it all over again you wouldn't because of that hurt.

Re: Sorry. We Messed Up. (Zendesk responds to pricing criticism)

#52

Post by davidu »

jimboyoungblood wrote: post #19
mcantor wrote: post #8

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…

It's a well-written letter followed up with action. Rather than a knee-jerk reaction. That's the definition of sincerity in my book.

Re: Sorry. We Messed Up. (Zendesk responds to pricing criticism)

#53

Post by robryan »

techiferous wrote: post #50
hyperbovine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are apologizing for the wrong thing. "We have also been reaching out to our customers to truly understand the heart of why you are upset" suggests that it never even occurred to them that people would be mad about this. I mean, really? They knew very well what they were up to; businesses don't do this sort of thing on a whim. I'd bet you anything this guy has a spreadsheet showing revenue shooting throug…

So what would an appropriate apology look like?

By apology time it is already to late, they would have lost the trust of many customers. I'm assuming they didn't just come up with these prices overnight.

I think the apology makes them look worse, like they never justified the prices in the first place. Keeping them may have lost customers but would have shown they were carefully chosen and justified prices. Now it just feels like they were trying to bleed there customers for as much as they could get.

Re: Sorry. We Messed Up. (Zendesk responds to pricing criticism)

#54

Post by DenisM »

hga wrote: post #49
kpanghmc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, when Joel made the decision to shaft the Stack Exchange 1.0 testers, they didn't get anything close to an apology. What they got instead was a pitch about why they should be happy to give up their business model.

I also don't recall ever getting an apology for his capping CityDesk without any recourse, open sourcing of the software, whatever. I suppose in both cases the distinction is that Joel decided not to apologize. The original point was about how he does that when he actually does it. And all or nothing is a legit thing to do here.

> he original point was about how he does that when he actually does it. And all or nothing is a legit thing to do here.

yes, that's what I meant.

Re: Sorry. We Messed Up. (Zendesk responds to pricing criticism)

#56

Post by jacquesm »

sachinag wrote: post #15
dangrossman wrote: post #3

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.

I have to defend the Recurly folks here. They made a bet on flat-rate pricing over per-use pricing. Turns out that a flat-rate plan hurts you on the low end (people who won't use you at all, and where the uproar was) and on the high end (you're leaving money on the table from your potentially most profitable customers). Flat-rate pricing works for the vast, vast majority of internet companies since the day AOL won ov…

It may just as well have been that they misjudged the demographic of their prospective customer base to be mostly the larger accounts, but instead they found themselves with prospects a lot smaller than the ones they hoped to target.

Re: Sorry. We Messed Up. (Zendesk responds to pricing criticism)

#57

Post by jacquesm »

The damage is done though, and zendesks competitors are the ones that gained the most from this, even those that didn't switch are now more than aware of who they are and what their offering is.

The last thing you want to do when you have a good thing going is to get your customers to invest a bunch of time in to researching your competition.

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