Marketing Technology

Imagine you created one of the most successful blogging platforms in history, used by millions.
Imagine your service was so successful that your infrastructure simply couldn’t cope with your existing customers, let alone new ones.
Imagine that you needed time to put new infrastructure in place and that your service was still going to be patchy.
Imagine you were facing a major customer service crisis and the potential collapse of your business as a result.

What would you do?

Traditional crisis management techniques would probably include interviews with newspapers, TV and radio channels explaining your company’s concern, what action you were taking, but trying to put everything into perspective.

Not SixApart, the makers of Typepad.

Their business is online, their service is delivered online, their customers interact with them online. So when faced with the exact situation described above, they communicate online. It’s the same concern, action, perspective message, but the internet is both their intermediary and their communications channel.

Job done. Well, not quite.

They clearly realise they need to offer some kind of compensation, but each of their customers has been inconvenienced in different ways. So here’s where it gets interesting – they only go and give each customer the choice to decide how they should be compensated! They even include a “Thank you for your offer, but please don’t credit my account” option.

I hope they will eventually publish the details of how many customers chose each option – now that would be very cool.

Welcome to Crisis Management 2.0.