This is the first post in an ongoing series where we'll explore how other companies handle customer service and what we can learn from them.
It’s a classic story: website offers big sale, customers flock to website, website crashes. In a perfect world, this would never happen, but the world is imperfect. Technical malfunctions are an unfortunate reality of doing business online, and it’s happened to some very high profile businesses. How your business handles a slip up can make all the difference in your relationship with your customers. Bonobos.com took a massive technical failure and turned it into an opportunity to grow relationships.
What Bonobos.com did right:
1. They apologized for their website outage and provided clear and regular status updates.
2. They kept the customer engaged and entertained with personal messages, playlists, and videos.
3. They communicated through multiple channels to maximize reach, including Facebook, Twitter, RSS, and email.
4. They extended their holiday offer after the outage was resolved.
I actually saw the whole thing play out first-hand. I purchased some new threads from Bonobos.com a few months ago, and I’ve stayed subscribed to their email list and Facebook feeds. I was pretty fired up to hear that they would be featuring 60% off the very same handsome slacks that I had already purchased for Cyber Monday (side note: this is a great example of how you add value to your newsletter). Having slept off my tryptophan hangover, I fired up my machine and prepared to do some serious fiscal damage. But the website was down. Real down. And it stayed down.
So, over to Facebook I go, where they’ve updated their status to ensure customers that they are aware of the issue and working to resolve it. In their own words, here’s what went wrong:
We are currently hosted on Rackspace Cloud. In short, we experienced 10x more traffic than we planned for. And we planned for a ton. The incredibly high volume revealed several major issues with our infrastructure, the worst of which resulted in charges to customers' credit cards without an order being placed. (Jon Schlossberg, UX Lead at Bonobos.com, on quora.com)
They posted regular updates on the outage on Facebook, Twitter, and their blog. They built a public Spotify playlist so that customers could send moral support to their dev team, and they posted funny YouTube videos and links to entertain customers. This went on for days. Every communication expressed humility and humanity, letting us, the grumpy customers, know that there were real humans on the other end of this series of tubes working to make sure that our discount gingham would not be unduly delayed.
And then, in the ultimate gesture of customer service, they extended the Cyber Monday priving after the website was restored. Bonobos followed that up with a personal apology from CEO Andy Dunn and his assurance that they were expanding their site infrastructure and support personnel to avoid this problem in the future. I appreciated the message, I’ve stayed subscribed to their email list, and I plan to purchase from them in the future.
How does your company respond to negative customer experiences? Share something we can all learn from below.
Company Blog
Subscribe
Log in