Editor’s Note: The following apology email, sent by GoDaddy CEO Scott Wagner after customers lost service for some six hours earlier this month, is the second seriously high quality piece of online reputation management that we’ve shared with you recently. His plain language, paired with a more-than-generous full month’s credit for GoDaddy’s web hosting services, far surpassed stakeholder’s expectations and stopped complaints from upset customers in their tracks. While it may not be entirely surprising coming from an innovative firm like GoDaddy, fact is that millions of dollars in revenue are lost every year by companies who refuse to take the steps necessary to protect their most valuable asset – reputation.
Dear XXXX,
We owe you a big apology for the intermittent service outages we experienced on September 10 that may have impacted your website, your email and other Go Daddy services.
We let you down and we know it. We take our responsibilities – and the trust you place in us – very seriously. I cannot express how sorry I am to those of you who were inconvenienced.
The service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented a series of immediate measures to fix the problem.
At no time was any sensitive customer information, including credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised.
Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level of performance we expect from ourselves. Monday, we fell short of these expectations. We have learned from this event and will use it to drive improvement in our services.
As a result of this disruption, you will receive 30% off any new product or renewal.* This offer will be available to you for the next 7 days. Simply place source code Apology4a in your cart or mention the code when you call 480-505-8877.
It’s an honour to serve you. As always, please call us 24/7 at 480-505-8877 – anytime, for any reason.
Sincerely,
Scott Wagner
CEO
GoDaddy.com
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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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Jonathan L. Bernstein, president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. has more than 25 years of experience in all aspects of crisis management – crisis response, vulnerability assessment, planning, training and simulations.
Erik Bernstein is vice president of Bernstein Crisis Management. Erik started with BCM in 2009 as a writer and subsequently became social media manager for the consultancy itself as well as for a number of BCM clients before moving to the VP position.