On September 10, 2012 GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest web hosting companies experienced a technical glitch – websites they hosted could not be accessed including OilReset.com.   Although a nuisance, the outage was solved a few hours later and chalked up to a glitch and in turn a learning experience of how to ensure it never happens again.  Satisfied that my site was up and running again it was business as usual.

On the morning of September 15 I received an email from GoDaddy apologizing for the service disruption and offering me a free service to compensate for my lost productivity – great right?  As a customer, this felt like the right thing to do but hang on a moment.  The compensation was generically worded so it not only could be sent to me but to all customers, on top of this, it gave me a whole list of products I have never used that I could be compensated for.

I wasn’t looking for compensation from GoDaddy and I was not very impressed with their generic compensation strategy.  The lesson here for your business is very simple – not all customers are the same.  I understand GoDaddy must have millions of customers but each of us is unique and has our own needs.  In this situation, maybe a more crafted email message should have been sent to customers based on what subscription they had or better yet – just an apology would have sufficed for me.  I realize this strategy may not have worked for all customers; hence the need for a more tailored approach to each customer.