In case you didn't hear, today Gmail was down for over an hour and a half. This was a really big deal to the millions of people who rely on Gmail as their main email service both personally and professionally (like me.) Gmail is generally reliable so today's outage was very much out of the ordinary, but thanks to people talking about it on Twitter and a few blogs that were covering the story as it developed, there was no need to panic during the outage.
Here's what every business can learn from this though: stuff happens. You can't be perfect and frankly, nobody expects you will be. The question isn't whether you're going to fail at something, but how you're going to recover when you do. There's a small window of opportunity to clear things up after a failure. Gmail did a great job today of doing just that. After the service was back up and they had some time to assess the situation, they posted an apology and explanation on their blog.
Here are five things the Gmail team did that every business can do after a failure. Incidentally, blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook accounts are great channels to distribute your information to people very quickly. This is yet another reason to be actively participating in the social media space.
- Have a good attitude. Be appropriately concerned but conversational as well.
- Own the problem. In Google's case they could have blamed a bunch of servers or something that would have sounded like passing the buck. They didn't, and neither should you.
- Explain what happened. Tell it like it is. Assume that the people who care are smart enough to understand the basics of the situation.
- Tell how you're going to prevent it from happening again. Once you tell me what happened, tell me how you're going to fix it.
- Be appreciative. The worst thing that could ever happen to any business is that they would go away and nobody would notice. Sure, customers can be annoying at times, but they're still customers and that's kind of what you're in business for, so don't forget that...especially when they're complaining about something you screwed up.