By now, Everything that needs to be said about the Gmail outage has been said. Maybe not, until I have added my 2 cents. Haha. I was curious what Google would say in this matter and how they would react. Similar to my earlier post on the Anatomy of a customer service email, here are my thoughts on Google’s well written blog post:
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Say, sorry, straight up. Not wishy washy, not the “We apologize for any inconvenienced this may have sort of caused” kind, but a straight up one human to another kind. Sorry!
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Now give them the good news on how you have rectified the issue. Provide details on how many were impacted, what the impact was and so on.
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Then, provide an explanation. Many people may just care about the first two items (the fact that they are apologizing and why it is ok now). If you do need an explanation, provide a meaningful one.
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Provide a concrete timeline on when the issue will be resolved. This is one missing component from this post.
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Talk about why this won’t happen again. The post only alludes to it, it could have done a better job on this front.
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Apologize again and end on an empathetic / positive forward looking comment.
How have you communicated bad news to your customers? Do you think Google’s response is adequate? Does it convince you?