Vendor Faces Criticism After Failing To Offer Credit For App Outage
A critical app went down for almost two days, causing work to stop, and the vendor never offered a service-level credit. This decision may damage the vendor's relationship with the customer.
Original reporting · saastr.com
Original: “A Critical App We Pay For Went Down for 2 Days. They Never Offered a Credit. I Won’t Forget.”
Read “A Critical App We Pay For Went Down for 2 Days. They Never Offered a Credit. I Won’t…” at SaaStr →
How this was written. Awesome B2B Growth wrote this article with a language model from SaaStr’s reporting (model: @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast); it describes that reporting rather than adding to it. The original, linked above, is the full story.
Key points from SaaStr’s report
- The vendor's failure to offer a credit after a two-day outage has damaged their relationship with the customer.
- Offering a credit proactively can help vendors to build trust with their customers and show that they value their business.
- Vendors should prioritize responding quickly and proactively to outages, rather than waiting for the customer to request a credit.
- Automating the credit process can help vendors to respond quickly to outages and build trust with their customers.
- The cost of offering a credit is often small compared to the potential cost of losing a customer's business.
A critical app recently experienced an outage that lasted almost two full days, according to SaaStr. The outage caused work to stop, and the team had to build workarounds in spreadsheets. Despite the significant disruption, the vendor never offered a service-level credit to the customer.
Outages can happen to any company, and they are often unavoidable. However, what is important is how the vendor responds to the outage. In this case, the vendor's decision not to offer a credit has been criticized as a mistake.
The customer was paying $60,000 per year for the app, which works out to about $165 per day. The two-day outage would have cost the customer around $330. Offering a credit of this amount would have been a small gesture, but it would have shown that the vendor took responsibility for the outage.
The vendor's failure to offer a credit has been seen as a relationship problem. When the customer has to ask for compensation, it can create a negative impression of the vendor. It is better for the vendor to offer a credit proactively, rather than waiting for the customer to request it.
The SLA credit is not just about the money; it is also about showing the customer that the vendor measures its own reliability. If the vendor has an SLA but does not offer a credit after an outage, it suggests that the vendor is not taking responsibility for its actions.
The champion of the vendor's product within the customer's organization will have to defend the vendor at renewal time. If the vendor has not offered a credit after an outage, it can make it harder for the champion to defend the vendor's actions.
Vendors who skip offering a small credit may end up spending much more later on to save the account. It is better to offer a credit proactively and show the customer that the vendor values their business.
SaaStr reported that vendors can take simple steps to improve their response to outages. These steps include calculating the credit themselves, applying it, and telling the customer it is done. Vendors should also provide an honest root cause analysis and thank the customer for their patience.
Automating the credit process can also help vendors to respond quickly to outages. By connecting uptime monitoring to billing, vendors can ensure that credits are issued automatically when a threshold is crossed. This can help to build trust with the customer and show that the vendor is committed to providing a reliable service.
In the end, the vendor's decision not to offer a credit has damaged their relationship with the customer. A simple email with a credit, an honest explanation of what went wrong, and a thank you for sticking with them would have cost less than a nice dinner. Instead, the missing credit is the first thing the customer thinks of when the vendor's name comes up.
The incident highlights the importance of responding quickly and proactively to outages. Vendors should prioritize building trust with their customers and showing that they value their business. By doing so, vendors can minimize the damage caused by outages and build strong, long-term relationships with their customers.
Questions and answers
What happened when the critical app went down?
The app went down for almost two full days, causing work to stop, and the team had to build workarounds in spreadsheets.
Why is it important for vendors to offer a credit after an outage?
Offering a credit shows that the vendor takes responsibility for the outage and values the customer's business.
How can vendors improve their response to outages?
Vendors can improve their response by calculating the credit themselves, applying it, and telling the customer it is done, as well as providing an honest root cause analysis and thanking the customer for their patience.
