Your service goes down. Customers are angry. The community is demanding answers. What do you do?
Here are five tips for community managers:
1.) Be transparent
Lay it all out there. Let the community know exactly what is going on. Rumors travel fast in a community. Better to stop those rumors before they start by being open and honest from the very beginning. Holding back will simply anger your members and make you appear deceptive.
2.) Own up to the problem
Take responsibility for what happened and apologize. Avoid phrases like “mistakes were made” or “due to circumstances beyond our control.” If the problem was truly caused by a vendor or other third party, it’s OK to explain that to the community. But steer away from the blame game. It looks unprofessional.
3.) Keep the community updated
People are far more likely to cut you some slack if you keep them informed about the nature of the problem. Post regular updates with any information you have and an estimated time of repair. If you don’t know when things will be fixed, let the community know that you’ll be posting regular updates until you do.
4.) Make it right
When things are fixed and everything is back to normal, apologize again. Let the community know exactly what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what’s being done to prevent it from happening again. If yours is a paid service and there was downtime, offer refunds or some other way to make it up to your customers.
5.) Move on
If you follow the first four steps, most members of your community will be understanding. They’ll appreciate your candor and the fact that you’ve made an effort to set things right with them. But once that’s done, it’s time to put your problems in the past. Naysayers may want to engage you in endless debate about what happened and why. Don’t fall into that trap. Point them to the updates you posted and be done with it.
Photo credit: Rupert Colley
Great post Dave – I think point number 1 is the most important.
Members are invested in their community, either literally through subscriptions but also the sense of ownership they derive as a member. While complaints may be hard to deal with when you’re dealing with site down or other issues, remember that if your members didn’t care, the community wouldn’t exist 🙂
Where possible, communicating via other outlets such as your facebook or twitter feeds may allay some of their concerns.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Absolutely agree on all points.