THE STARTUP CHAT

Steli Efti:

Hey, this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah:

And this is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti:

Today’s episode of , we’re gonna talk about how to communicate with your customers during  a crisis. This could be down time, your app is down, your app is crashing,  you have a massive bug, there’s some security error, something was exposed, some fucking crisis  that impacts all your customers. And we’re talking major event, not just a minor thing.  These things happen in companies, they probably will happen in your company sooner or later,  so learning how to communicate in those moments of crisis can make a difference. And  I wanted to chat with you about this. One, it’s because I think it’s super  valuable and not really talked about that much. But two, because we had to go  through this shit recently.

Hiten Shah:

What happened?

Steli Efti:

What happened is that one of the technology providers that we are using to power  the telephony aspect of our app, had major down time. And then basically affected a  massive amount of our customers. It’s even worse then when we fuck up because somebody  else fucks up that we are relying on, and we’re not in control of fixing  this issue, right?

Hiten Shah:

Right.

Steli Efti:

We are at the mercy and the competency of that technology provider. And if they  get their shit together and they do a great job, cool, if they do a  bad job, we’re just sitting here … Like, we cannot fix it ourselves, so we  are waiting for somebody else, we’re relying on somebody else, which is just a shitty  situation to be in. But it happens. It’s very rare, as a technology business, as  you grow, to be completely independent from anything. Even the cloud. Somewhere you’re hosting things,  and even big cloud providers have issues. There’s all kinds of problems that can arise  in today’s technology. We had to go through this recently, which brings up the point  … It was funny from two perspectives. One is observing how that technology provider was  communicating to us, right? And let’s just say we were not happy, and I’m not  really like … I’m gonna use them as a bad example of how not to  do this, and then how we were trying to communicate to our customers and at  least trying to do the best. I’m sure you’ve gone through lots of these examples  yourself as an advisor with your own company, so just want to chit-chat and share  some of the do’s and don’ts when you have a crisis, how do you deal  with this?

Hiten Shah:

Yeah. Love it. I’ll kick off with one. There’s thought around this, which is …  the interesting thing that companies run into when they have a crisis like this is  one, it’s rare. The first time you have it, even the second time, even the  third time, even the fourth time, you might not really have a process for it  until you get really good at managing it. But ideally, you don’t have that, I  think, because this is a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It impacts customers,  service outages, things like that. I’m gonna talk about a time when actually we had  a ton of these at Crazy Egg. So Crazy Egg was built in Ruby on  Rails, when Ruby on Rails was really early, and what we had to do is  we had to go fetch a ton of data to be able to pull up  a heat map for your website and all the click data. And the technology raising  Ruby on Rails wasn’t what you call multi-threaded. What that means is you can only  run a single process, and this is technical stuff, but it’s interesting, you can only  run a single process and that made it very challenging for us to actually keep  certain parts of the site up because of what we were doing. And this all sounds silly today if you’re an engineer listening to this because these problems are solved  now, for the most part. We had this thing called a Flash Loader, that would  be in between when people clicked on a button to view their report and then  could view their report. And there’s all kinds of other issues, because again, Ruby on  Rails was very and we were using it. And we were using it on purpose  for a bunch of other advantages we got because of it, and it was a  hot thing and it was easier to find some engineers and this and that and  the other. The site would go down. And we were also doing some challenging things  and we had a free product at the time. And so our scale was also  pretty massive. Even Twitter, a couple years later, and had lots of issues with Ruby on Rails and having the hit scale. Because we were tracking every click on a  website and these things weren’t trivial at the time. And at that time, even Amazon  Web Services was very early and a lot of things that they have today didn’t  exist. Our site would go down regularly. The tracking on people’s websites, thankfully, wouldn’t go down, but our website would go down, meaning you couldn’t look at your reports and  stuff like that. In the beginning we had an error message, or we would just  take down the site and there was this little mini-figures and there was a picture,  said that our site’s down or whatever and then this picture with mini-figures running around circuit boards trying to fix the problem. And that was what we had. One thing  I would say is when it’s down you can use humor, but not in your  copy necessarily, unless it’s very good. But we used an image that wasn’t humor but  it was cute, right? And then one day, the site just kept going down so  much and we couldn’t do anything about it. We had to … It took work  from the engineers to keep it up. Again, some of this sounds silly because this doesn’t happen to sites anymore like it used to. And then, one of the engineers  is like … He’s actually kind of like a game designer and had built Mac  games back in the day, he’s a lead engineer. And we basically built an egg drop game that only showed up when we went down. We would drop eggs on  people. You could drop eggs on people’s heads and it was a game. These were  people that looked like they were in suits and there’s some funny stuff around it.  At the end of the day, what I want to say about this is you  want to make the experience, especially if it happens a lot, which usually it doesn’t,  very engaging. But really, in a way, and I know this is going to sound  bad, but almost distracting. That’s if you actually have your site down and you can’t  do anything about it. And that’s not about communication, but it’s about lightening the load  of the problem without getting to the point of being stupid or silly. And so  we made it a game because it kept going down. I use that strategy every time when things happen that are a crisis in my messaging. And what I mean  by that is don’t be so dry and say, “Oh, it’s down. It’s not working,  and it’s this provider. And blah, blah, blah,” right? Instead, just be human about it and start by actually talking about “We don’t expect this to happen. We use a  provider. They happen to be down. I’m sure they’re working diligently to solve their problem  and we will keep you updated regularly about this. And by the way, check out  this funny thing while you wait.” And the reason for this is I see a  lot of people lying about it. I see a lot of people dry about it.  And I lying meaning … I don’t mean lying, but they’re making promises they can’t  keep. Don’t tell someone it’s gonna be up in an hour if it ain’t gonna  be up in an hour.

Steli Efti:

Oh, shit. Don’t do that.

Hiten Shah:

Right. Anyways, those are my little rants.

Steli Efti:

This is cool.

Hiten Shah:

Back in the day.

Steli Efti:

This is good. And I think I can continue on that thread, because yes, please  don’t lie and make promises because you feel the pressure. Don’t be like, “Oh, I’m  sure in the next hour it’s gonna be done.”

Hiten Shah:

Don’t be hopeful.

Steli Efti:

Don’t be hopeful.

Hiten Shah:

That’s probably what it is. Don’t be hopeful.

Steli Efti:

A crisis is not a time to be making promises you don’t know that you  can keep. So don’t be telling people it’s gonna be “We’re fixing it. It’s gonna  be fixed soon.” Fix it and then tell people it’s fixed.

Hiten Shah:

If it isn’t.

Steli Efti:

That’s one. The other one is the dry one, the corporate one. This is the  one I see the most, which is “Motherfucker, don’t write me an email or talk  to me and say that you are a massive bank and a team of a thousand lawyers went through that email to make it as protective as possible.” Just talk  to me like a human being. So don’t say things like, “We apologize for any  inconvenience.” No, just say, “We’re sorry.” Just say … I literally, in my quote-unquote “CEO”  email to everybody, I emailed all our customers that we impacted by this. From my  personal email. And I literally had the word in there, “This sucked.” Because that’s what  I thought and that’s what our customers thought. And that’s the-

Hiten Shah:

I love it.

Steli Efti:

That’s the words people would use talking to me and that’s the words I used  talking to them. So when I send an email, I’m not gonna write, “I apologize  for any inconvenience this might have caused,” because I don’t speak like that. That’s bullshit.  That’s how a lawyer writes something. I want to be real. “This sucked. I’m sorry.  Here’s what’s gonna happen next.” Just using honest language, being real about it, makes a  big difference. I think the one big message that I’ll give is that the natural  tendency when things are going bad, is that people want to hide. You don’t want  to … Your site goes down and you start getting incoming emails, you don’t want  to take those. You know what those calls are about. And especially if you don’t  have anything smart to say, like “This is down time. It’s our technology provider. We  are currently in communication with them. We’ll keep you up to date. Here’s a page  you can subscribe to to get an SMS once the site is up. I’ll let  you know once we know more, but right now all I can do is I  can ping that technology provider and wait to learn more and help you with any  kind of workarounds. But I cannot solve the problem this very moment myself.” When you’ve  said this ten times, the 11th call is coming in, you don’t want to pick  up. It’s the most natural thing in the world. You just want to hide. Because you don’t want to keep saying, “I cannot fix this problem or listen to people  that are upset or angry.” The most important thing is to fight that urge. I  find when there’s a crisis, one of the most powerful things you can do, is  to just show up. Be available. Don’t hide behind your desk, behind an email, behind  a status page. Just be available. Even if all you can tell people is “I  get it. You’re right. This sucks. And here is it. I’m giving you your two minutes to scream at me so you feel better.” Even that can make a big  difference. People truly appreciate that. What they don’t appreciate is when things are down or  there’s some kind of a crisis, and they are trying to reach you to figure  out what is going on and they can’t. You’re not responding to the support ticket  they sent, the email they sent, you’re not responding on social media, or you’re responding  with some super corporate, “Thank you. We are aware of that issue. We are currently  diligently working on a solution. Stay tuned.” Just being there, being real, and being honest  can make a big difference to people. Because most companies aren’t. Because most companies hide,  they run, they don’t pick up the phone, they don’t answer the emails because it  sucks. It sucks to be in a crisis. It sucks to let down customers and  you don’t want to hear the 20th person complaining about this same thing. Show up.  It doesn’t matter it sucks. It’s not about you. It’s about your customers and it  helps them just to even be able to vent or to hear that you are  there. Even if you’re just telling them something they already read on your status page  that you are currently working on the problem or something. Just knowing that somebody’s responding  to their issues in email or on the phone or whatever format they use can  make a big difference. So don’t hide. Don’t use corporate speak. Tell people what happened  once you know, tell people the problem is fixed once it’s really fixed. So don’t  lie, just like Hiten just said, don’t make promises you can’t keep, and in crisis  you’re gonna be tempted to make promises that you’re not fully in control of, even  if it’s an issue, like you’ve caused and your engineering team is like, “We know  what the problem is. We’re currently in the process of fixing it. This should take  30 minutes.” Please don’t reach out to your customers and tell them, “The problem is  gonna be fixed in 30 minutes.”

Hiten Shah:

My advice on that is actually don’t ever give them a timeline unless you’re 100%  sure you can meet it. Which essentially means don’t tell them a timeline until it’s  solved.

Steli Efti:

Until it’s solved. That’s it. Yes. Don’t tell them a timeline.

Hiten Shah:

I’ve seen the worst there.

Steli Efti:

When there’s a crisis and you tell me it’s fixed in 30 minutes and then  in 30 minutes it’s not, oh my God, people are gonna lose their mind over  this. Because you’re letting them down and now they feel like you’re lying to them.

Hiten Shah:

I think the terminology is they lose their shit.

Steli Efti:

They lose their shit. Thank you for helping me here.

Hiten Shah:

They literally lose their shit. It’s your fault. Because you told them something … You  told them a promise that you couldn’t keep. It’s pretty simple.

Steli Efti:

People’s translation of this is these assholes, they’re not just is not just not working,  but they are also lying to me.

Hiten Shah:

Yeah.

Steli Efti:

“They told me 30 minutes ago it’s gonna be done in 30 minutes. I turned  around and told my team ’30 minutes, take a break, when you come back it’s  done,’ and now we’re all sitting here and I don’t know what to say and  I’m embarrassed all because you lied.” People lose their shit. Don’t do that. Only give  a timeline … Only tell them when it’s fixed that it’s fixed. You can tell  them you’re working on it, but don’t give a timeline. Really, this is something companies,  again, get wrong all the time because it’s so hard not to give a timeline.  You really want to give a timeline.

Hiten Shah:

And there’s a way to say this. You say “We don’t know, but people are  actively working on solving this problem right. That’s why I’m getting on the phone with  you.” Or “That’s why I’m emailing you,” or “That’s why I’m responding to you, because  I’m confident this problem will get solved because people are working on it. But I cannot tell you a timeline.”

Steli Efti:

That’s the way to do it.

Hiten Shah:

And communicate what happened. That’s another thing I would add. If you have this urge  to tell them a timeline, instead tell them what happened. Whatever you know, I don’t  mean tell them everything if you can’t yet, but just tell them happened. Just like  in your case, “A provider we were using, we are using, that’s been consistent so far, the whole time, had an outage. And it’s affecting us. And we are in  communication with them to do our best to figure out when this will get resolved  and get it resolved. But at the current moment, there is nothing we can do  to solve this problem.” Also, I know this sounds weird, do not apologize.

Steli Efti:

Tell me more.

Hiten Shah:

It doesn’t help you to apologize, because that means you’re admitting you did something wrong.  Only apologize if you truly believe you did something wrong. This is a life lesson.  This about it.

Steli Efti:

This is a life lesson.

Hiten Shah:

Don’t apologize because the second you apologize you’re admitting fault. You’re admitting guilt. You’re admitting that you did something wrong. And I’m not saying that to be mean, I’m saying  that because … Or to hide anything. Find language that is not apologetic, but yet  it’s empathetic. The easiest thing to do is apologize to be empathetic. “I’m sorry this  is happening.” “I don’t give a crap that you’re sorry, dude.” You know what I  mean?

Steli Efti:

Yeah.

Hiten Shah:

It turns the whole thing negative. Just be factual and just say, “Obviously, we don’t  expect things like this to happen. We understand how much of an impact this is  having on your job right now. And we are doing everything we can to understand  what’s going on and make changes. We plan on keeping you updated every hour.” If  you need to update them every hour and just say, “We don’t know anything yet.  We don’t know anything yet.” You know what I mean? Whatever it is, but don’t  apologize. Apologies … And I’m not one who never apologizes, I’m not saying that. I’m  not one of those people. What I’m saying is only apologize if you’re willing to admit fault and blame and don’t be lazy and use it as a way out,  because it actually pisses people off.

Steli Efti:

Yes, it does. I love that. Don’t be apologetic, be empathetic. I think that’s the  money quote. That’s powerful shit. Yes. Okay, the other thing, I think, and we’ve talked  about the value of this, which is once you resolve the problem, the work is  not done. In crisis mode you have to over communicate. Now you solved the issue,  you let them know, but then you have to do a post-mortem and let them  know what exactly happened in detail, for those that want to know.

Hiten Shah:

Oh, yeah.

Steli Efti:

How it happened, what the root cause was, how you resolved it, and then, what  you’re planning to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Hiten Shah:

This is just hygiene. If something bad happens, even if … You should definitely share  this with the customers, but you have to do this internally anyways. Because if you  can’t prevent problems like this or have solutions, guess what? It’s gonna happen again.

Steli Efti:

It’s gonna happen again. The other thing about this is that people … The moment  you have a crisis, and you’re going through them, it is actually … It is  both a risky situation, you might lose customers, you might build a bad reputation. There’s  lots of potential loss and risk there, but it’s equally an opportune time. You can  build your brand, you can build … Just standing out and doing things differently and  better than the customer would expect in a crisis, you can actually turn the moment  around. And the problem is that a crisis will shake up somebody’s trust in you.  How much can I truly trust this software provider? How much truly can I trust  that this company has their shit together? How much truly can I rely my business  on using their software? People are gonna be a shook by a crisis and they’re  gonna be thinking about how much they can truly trust you moving forward, so it’s incredibly important to do the things necessary to maintain trust or build trust. One thing  is transparency and over communicating. You showed up when the problem was there, you were  picking up the phone, you were answering the support tickets, you were communicating and over  communicating, and then when it’s done you’re not just like, “It’s done. Problem fixed, and  you’ll never hear us talk about this again. We’ll pretend this never happened.” No, you  go beyond what was expected and you shoot them an email and you provide and  in-depth transparent post-mortem that tells them what happened, why it happened, how you fixed it,  and what you’re doing to prevent this from happening moving forward. I remember one time  … This is actually … I just remembered this. I think in a very year  in close, we had some hiccup, I don’t even remember what it is. It was not even something big, but it was something that touched a good amount of our  bigger customers, and what we did is actually … Back in the day the number  of customers and the number of bigger customers we had was a few hundred, and  we spent a week after that happened and we fixed it, calling every single one  of the bigger customers and kind of, again, saying, “Hey, this is what happened. We  sent you an email about it. How do you feel about it? How’s the team?  How did you manage,” I think it was like a 40 minute period where we  had some issues. And then when people were really upset, we would allow them to  vent, and we would take time to listen and we would just turn it around.  And sometimes they would tell us other things they didn’t like and we would try to find solutions and fix things and make … Use this as an opportunity to  understand them better and make sure we really invest in them the right way. There  were a lot of our customers that were like, “You guys are awesome. I love  the fucking the product. Yes, it sucked, but the way you handled it was really  amazing.” And then we used all of these conversations, every single call that was positive,  we pitched them on our annual contract, believe it or not. We used a crisis  to upsell them on pre-paying for the whole year. And the pitch was very simple.  It was like, “Hey, we’re so appreciate of your business.” You can have an idea  of what the relationship with somebody will be and the partnership between a vendor and  a customer. When times are good everything’s always good, but a crisis is really a  great opportunity to see what kind of a quality of relationship we have. “You’ve been  an amazing customer during this time. We tried to do anything and everything to go  beyond to show you that your business really means a lot to us and we  want to invest in this relationship long term. And you know what we want to  do? I want to offer you an additional discount. All that we would have to  do is for you guys, instead of paying month by month, to make a pre-payment,  we’ll be able to give you a good amount of savings back.” And also, this  is another way of us investing in the relationship and showing them that we’re in  it for the long-term. “It’s a way for you to show us that you’re really  in it for the long term.” And people were laughing at me, going “I can’t  believe that you are asking me to do this,” and then they would go on  and do it.

Hiten Shah:

Yeah.

Steli Efti:

I would not say do this at all times, and in all circumstances, all depends.  But I just want to open people’s minds that a crisis can really be an  opportunity to learn, to grow, to build a reputation that you are a company that  can be trusted, that’s transparent, that fixes … Whenever they fuck up something they take  responsibility to fix it. Or a crisis can be a time where you run and  you hide and you make excuses and you under communicate and that’s the moment people  decide that they’re gonna leave you, they hate you, and they’re gonna tell everybody else  to never use your software. It can be either or and it’s up to you  what it is and we try to do our best with our customers, but looking  at the vendor that we had, honestly, they basically did a very poor job communicating with us, and they were not honest in the hindsight. Even funny things, I’ll give  you one quick example of this before we wrap this up. The reason why you  should not lie, other than it’s the ethical … You want to be an ethical person, yada, yada, yada, all the ethical reasons. The reason you don’t want to lie  is that a lie just creates so many more problems than the truth. It really  is. Here’s the problem. We have this vendor and they’re giving us a fucking excuse.  They’re pointing the finger at somebody else being at fault here. And I’m pretty certain,  our team is pretty certain that that’s not true. That is not what happened. Actually  we have a pretty good idea what happened, and we think it’s completely their fault.  And it’s even an embarrassing fault. And I call the founder and I go, “Hey,  I read the post-mortem. You explaining that this, this, and the other happened. Are you  really sure that that is what happened?” He’s like, “Absolutely. Not our fault. Da, da,  da, da. This and this.” I’m like, “Help me, how did you communicate that with  that other technology provider? What has been the back and forth communication?” He’s like, “Well,  you know, when that happened, we sent them an email and they sent us an email back,” and he’s explaining to me how they are going back and forth in  email and that that provider … I asked literally, “Did that provider admit fault? Are  they in agreement with you that that’s what happened?” He’s like, “Yes, but they’re still  trying to figure out this and that. But they said that it is …” all  that. And you know what my simple ask was at the end of that conversation?  I was like, “Dude, I’m gonna be honest with you. I have a really …  I want to believe you, and I want to trust in this relationship, but right  now, I’m shook. And I have a difficult time believing this, but since all this  happened and since you have an email thread documenting this, can you do me a  favor, just click forward on that email thread so I can see it. It’s just  gonna make me feel much better and it’s gonna help rebuild the trust in us,  should be fairly simple for you. Can you do that while I’m on the phone?”  And you know what the response was? “Uhh, yeah … I’m not in front of  my computer and I need to see where that email thread is and …” He  was scrambling. I’ve not even that email thread to this day. I’ve followed up multiple  times.

Hiten Shah:

Damn, dude.

Steli Efti:

Doesn’t this suck? Isn’t this shitty?

Hiten Shah:

Damn. Damn. I mean you had me at the edge of my seat, dude. That  was good. But like, wow. Nice work. Look, you want to feel comfortable with a  vendor like that. Especially because your business relies on that vendor.

Steli Efti:

Yeah.

Hiten Shah:

Core functionality of your product. In your case that even makes your product more unique  than others, relies on that thing working.

Steli Efti:

Yeah.

Hiten Shah:

I think that’s a tip also, not even a tip, more than that, a process  of really making sure you can trust the other parties when they’re the ones that  fail. Especially if it’s a smaller company versus a larger one. Larger companies have a  lot more process around communicating this stuff. Like Amazon, for example. I’m not saying they’re  the best or anything, but they definitely are communicative in the proper ways. Maybe a  little too … Maybe a little less than most people would like, but still, they  communicate when things happen, and historically, things have happened with Amazon take down not even  half. Pretty much all the Internet. And in this case, it’s like, I’m damn sure  you’re looking for an alternative.

Steli Efti:

Oh, yeah. We’ve started … The moment the crisis wrapped up and fixed, we started  working on our transition and alternative and fall backs. We’re investing massive resources in not  relying on them anymore and we are going to take our business away and they’re  gonna suffer from that, and it’s that moment where I’m like, “Why are you just  not owning up to your shit?”

Hiten Shah:

Why don’t you just tell me the truth? Just tell me the truth.

Steli Efti:

Why don’t you tell the fucking truth? Don’t try to lie to me. It’s gonna  come out. It’s gonna make everything worse.

Hiten Shah:

And it sounds like a made-up story. Even worse, it’s like a made-up story.

Steli Efti:

So stupid.

Hiten Shah:

And that you can verify easily. So then it’s like, “All right, I’m good. I  can’t deal with this.”

Steli Efti:

His problem is that, like most people, he didn’t think that I was leading down  the path, so … Almost every lie, the longer you have to live with it,  the higher that chance is that you’re gonna stumble over that fucking thing. It’s just the nature of lies. No matter how smart you are, you’re gonna stumble over it.  Just don’t lie. Life is much simpler. Anyways, that’s my little rant on this. We’re  gonna wrap on that fairly note of just don’t lie. Be honest, show up, have  some humor if you can, like lighten up the mood. I think that’s a good  one after all the dark shit that I just shared. Make sure that you use  a crisis to learn and grow and to build your brand into something more powerful, because I don’t think most people realize that it can be an opportunity. It’s not  just risk, it’s also an opportunity if you handle it the right way.

Hiten Shah:

Totally agree.

Steli Efti:

All right, this is it from us. Bye-bye, guys.

Hiten Shah:

Bye.