A Typepad User, and Proud of It

A Typepad User, and Proud of It

SixApart showed huge corporate courage today when they emailed their entire blog user base, apologized (for the second or third time) for service interruptions the past month, then announced a cash remedy.

As a default, they’re giving everyone half a month of service for free.  This is obviously a huge hit to the company financially and probably more of a gesture than anyone expected.  But better than that, they allowed users to click through to their web site and automatically get a full month for free — or a month and a half for free — if they felt in good conscience that the service outages were more harmful to them.  They also quite intelligently allowed users to click through and decline the service credit if they weren’t inconvenienced by the outages.

This is everything that customer service is supposed to be.  Prompt.  Proactive.  Generous.  Allowing customers to be in the driver seat about remedies.  After a HORRENDOUS weekend of customer service gaffes by United Airlines (a story for another time), I couldn’t be more struck by the contrast.  And SixApart isn’t even an employee-owned company teetering on the edge bankruptcy.  Way to go, SixApart!