Every businessperson makes mistakes, but how do they make up for them?

Today 37 Signals had a major outage on all of their websites. These websites are used by thousands of people every day to run their business, including me. I found out about the outage when I tried to lookup the phone number of a customer I was about to call. Luckly for me I had a copy of the number some place else.

It turned out that the outage wasn’t 37 Signals’ fault, but it did impact their customers. These customers pay to have access to their websites, and to use the data they have stored in them. Once the services were back up 37 Signals issued a great apology and even offered to go the extra mile for their customers:

… While we don’t have a formal service-level agreement (SLA), we still want to compensate anyone who felt they were negatively affected in their work because of this outage. Please write support@37signals.com and we’ll get that taken care of. …

Any business that didn’t provide a SLA like 37 Signals could have just said “Yep, we had downtime. Sorry, deal with it”. Instead they are offered to help the people who were affected, even though they have no obligation to. This is how a business should deal with a mistake, even if it isn’t their fault.

It even appears they took the same action in the past and tried to do their best to make it up to people.

So how does your business handle mistakes? Are you proactive and try to go the extra mile to please your customers?

Eric