Learn to Say "We're Sorry" a Lesson From Google

If you are a gmail user you may have noticed the several hours during the day where you were not able to access your gmail account.  Turns out there was an error on the Google back end (obviously) but it should all be fixed now.  I think it’s important to look at how Google handled the situation.  First off, folks all over the web were quite irritated that their gmail accounts weren’t working, twitter was buzzing and blogs we’re written expressing frustration.  So what did Google do when they finally fixed the problem?  They apologized.  That’s right, Google said “we’re sorry.”

Keep in mind that gmail is still technically in beta, and Google could have easily used that as an excuse as to why gmail was not working properly, but instead, Google acknowledged their mistake and made no excuses.  Many of you are also familiar with twitter and it’s frequent downtime’s, however when twitter was down not too long ago what did they do?  They blamed the popular followers for overloading the servers.  There is a lesson to be learned here and that is, the user doesn’t care about why your product or service is not functioning, all the user cares about is that the outage doesn’t happen again and that you have acknowledged the error on your part.

In Google’s blog they mention that they have been following the twitter conversations and the frustrations of many users, in fact the title for the recent post is “We feel your pain, and we’re sorry.” Here is the text from the post:

“Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we’re really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. (We also heard from plenty of Googlers, who use Gmail for company email.) We never take for granted the commitment we’ve made to running an email service that you can count on.

We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly. We don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted. In general, though, if you spot a problem with your Gmail account, please visit the Gmail Help Center and user group, where the Gmail Guides are your fastest source of updates.

Again, we’re sorry.”

Now that is how to handle an outage.  Don’t blame anyone and don’t make excuses, acknowledge that you screwed up and that you are working to make sure that error does not happen again, because in the end that’s what matters.  We all love gmail and twitter and we want both of them to work all the time.  We understand that every now and then something may wig out and cause an error and that’s fine.  It’s how you address the users during this time that matters.  Lesson from Google, learn to say “we’re sorry.”

Thanks for reading