I don't know anything about balsamiq or their product, but this seems to be another instance of "authentic apologies" becoming a standard startup tactic. In terms of one-upsmanship this is a pretty pointless arena. Don't do shitty stuff. If your product breaks, explain it and move on.
Stuff's always going to go wrong and break, it happens. Their site went down for 3 hours on a random tuesday and now this guy is throwing himself to the wolves. Come on.
There seems to be this idea that you can get away with anything, accidental or not, and so long as your rake yourself over the coals harder than the last guy everything will be okay.
Doing an extremely effective job of publicly resolving problems is an really good tactic. Customer service is one of those things that is really only evident when things go wrong.
There are much worse things in the world than for businesses to look at every mistake as an opportunity to pick up points on the customer service front. At the very least, it keeps you from the all-too-common opposite perspective on mistakes: defensiveness.
You may be right. But I really find it difficult to see the harm in one-upsmanship over apologizing to customers. I've seen much worse ways of one-upping others.
I mean as you say, things are always going to break, whether you do shitty stuff or not. What's wrong with making an effort to make the most sincere apology you can in that case?
There's a difference between being honest and saying: "we fucked up, here's what we've done to prevent this from happening in the future, here's a credit for some free stuff" and posting pictures of yourself at the verge of tears. We're past diminishing returns and into theatrics.
I do front-line support for many of our products. Partly because we're small, partly because it's important for me to get a real understanding of what users are saying.
What I have discovered is that users come in being theatrically angry. They greatly exaggerate the extent to which they are affected by problems (verified in logs), they say that they are in an emergency situation with a dying relative and need support NOW, they say they will make a bunch of bad press for the product, a few of them openly extort, death threats, etc. Maybe years of AT&T have trained them to behave badly? I'm not really sure.
Anyway, when I respond to support requests as the owner of the company, a person who has both the technical competence and business authority to actually solve the problem, not some support drone somewhere, the tone changes completely. I've actually had customers apologize to me.
So yeah, the pictures probably seem over the top, but you're probably the type of person who is polite and reasonable when they e-mail someone for support :-) Peldi has probably gotten some cranky e-mails before about downtime, and this is probably the "ward off the death threats" page.
There's also a difference between lying and fiction. Fiction serves a higher purpose. Lying doesn't.
In this particular case, I agree that the company is probably overstating their concern. And you're probably correct that this is bordering on theatrics, but the theatrics serve a higher purpose: to show that they really do care for their customers. I suspect that someone put a lot of effort into creating these theatrics. Would someone who didn't care for their customers do that? No. They'd probably use a platitude like "The customer is always right" as their slogan, and ignore their customers.
My impression was that the photos accurately reflect how the team felt during the outage. We'd all feel pretty awful during that sort of event, and it was a quick and effective way to get across that these guys did too.
Stuff's always going to go wrong and break, it happens. Their site went down for 3 hours on a random tuesday and now this guy is throwing himself to the wolves. Come on.
There seems to be this idea that you can get away with anything, accidental or not, and so long as your rake yourself over the coals harder than the last guy everything will be okay.