So Zendesk (more on them here) had a bad day. Their Worst Day Ever. CEO Mikkel Svane’s face paints a picture:
To quote from his post:
…a planned hardware maintenance with our service provider exceeded the one hour service window with a whopping three hours. Monday morning we experienced unusual high email traffic, which tipped over as a client decided to push a backlog of emails to our system. More than 10,000 emails hit our servers within a few minutes. We should have been resilient to that, but weren’t…
So yes – in an ideal world problems like this wouldn’t happen. But we don’t live in an ideal world Sometimes things come unstuck.
Compare the Zendesk response with another couple of situations I’ve experienced of late, poor mail order service and terrible web hosting service. There’s an iconic chain of electronic retail stores here in New Zealand and the founder, the late Alan Martin, used to go on national television with his advertisements which were always closed off with his saying:
It’s the putting right that counts.
And indeed it is – the world is (broadly speaking) accepting of problems providing an organization:
- Communicates the existence, cause and estimated duration of a problem as early and as frequently as possible and,
- Communicates exactly what is being done to stop the problem recurring
In my two examples above that did not occur, in Zendesk’s case it did.
So well done Mikkel, oh and go home and have a gammel dansk.
I beg to differ…. 🙂
@Paul About the post or the gammel dansk?
Oh yea, I guess you guys have had a few bad weeks of admitting your failings….
Thanks for the post, Ben. Although this wasn’t our finest day, we do feel that transparency around these things are pivotal for a young but aggressively growing company like Zendesk.
I think the real amazing paradigm change here is the customer buy-in. All of our customers are on pay-as-you go plans and we’ve made it very easy for them to switch provider if they want to or need to. So we are basically all in the same boat. That gives us no other options than to play with open cards and do our utter best. And our customers appreciate that contract.
Zendesk’s infrastructure is maturing vigorously as we now support thousands of businesses and millions of users. We will do better because we love our customers just as much as we love our help desk.