Customer Support: When We Screw Up

I had planned on writing a blog post today about Microsoft Azure and the fact that it had crossed over the $1B revenue line.  But I stopped abruptly when I logged into WordPress (the blogging platform we use) and saw a comment on a previous blog post “Customer-Obsessed Service: Insanely Great Support for Backup“.  One of the employees at one of our partners had written in and was strongly disappointed in Unitrends – his comment is best summarized as “You guys suck…”

It was painful to read.  My next steps were pretty simple.  I wrote him a note, apologized for what we had done that was wrong, and copied our VP of Support (Dan Wixon – whose e-mail address (written out to try to avoid spam)  is dwixon with the at sign and then unitrends.com.)  Dan and I then talked, and he said he’d quickly research what he could find, and then call the person who is unhappy.  He also promised to get back to me later today after he talks to the distressed person and let me know what both he and I, and the entire company can do to turn things around.

I bring this up because I want to stress something I said in that earlier post, to wit:

Does all of this mean Unitrends does support perfectly?  Hell no.  We make mistakes.  While our customer satisfaction rating (as measured by NPS – or Net Promoter Score) is the best in the industry at between 98% and 99%, that still means that most days we make a mistake.  We’ll never be perfect.  But we can sure as heck pursue perfection – every call, every e-mail, every interaction, every day.

Mistakes aren’t theoretical – they actually hurt real live people.  We’re committed to not only trying to delight our customers, not only to minimizing mistakes, but to come hell or high water trying to fix the mistakes we make.