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When things go bad — try praising the vendor you need instead of attacking

June 26, 2009

I love this post from Tom Peters’ blog.

Their site went down. Most of us would have bashed the hosting company. Peters’ team complimented them instead, and thanked them for getting things fixed.

Technical Difficulties

If you tried to visit our site yesterday, you may have noticed that we had a day long outage. This is unusual for us and we were scrambling to fix the issue. Our thanks go out to our trusty hosting service, Joyent, for resolving it and getting us up and running again. We appreciate your patience.

Posted by Shelley Dolley

My nature would be to do the opposite, but I’m going to try this for a while. (Read the comments on the post too.)

Tagged as: Joyent, Sernovitz, Tom Peters, vendor, WOM, word of mouth, word of mouth marketing

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4 comments. Read them below or add one. (Trackback)

{ 4 comments }

Torley June 26, 2009 at 9:57 am

Problems do happen — praise shouldn’t be given out laggardly to a company that is slow to help, but to one that recognizes something went WRONG and is active.
Even if company can’t help technically in the time you expect them to, if they treat you well and earnestly — this includes helping you understand what happened — praise can help as you build a relationship in the long-term.

Christine Morrison June 26, 2009 at 10:53 am

It’s a noteworthy approach, although I’m not sure yet how to think about it. Isn’t it our role as the site “owner” to take blame when things go wrong and handle things with the host privately? It’s been the approach I’ve taken in the past – a little painful in the short run, but in the long run isn’t that what leadership is all about?

Joi June 30, 2009 at 9:45 am

I love this approach – what style!

Shelley Dolley July 2, 2009 at 8:36 am

Thanks Andy!

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