214: How to Communicate With Your Customers During Crisis

The Startup Chat with Steli and Hiten

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how to communicate with your customers during a crisis. Hiten shares how Crazy Egg handled a crisis with humor and how Steli used his recent crisis as an opportunity to become more transparent with his customers and build trust. Tune in to find out the importance of staying truthful to your customers during a crisis, why it’s not the time to make promises, and the art of being empathetic, not apologetic in handling a crisis.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:09 – Today’s episode is about how to communicate with your customers during a crisis
• 00:44 – Crises happens in any company
• 00:51 – Learning how to communicate in times of crisis creates a huge difference
• 01:00 – It is valuable to talk about a crisis and one just happened to Steli and Hiten recently
  • 01:08 – One of the technology providers of Steli’s had major downtime that affected a massive amount of their customers
  • 01:28 – Steli wasn’t in control of fixing the issue because they relied on the provider
• 02:06 – For Steli, it was funny from 2 perspectives
  • 02:08 – First, it was amusing how the tech provider communicated with Steli
  • 02:20 – Second was how Steli communicated with their customers
• 03:00 – Hiten had a crisis with Crazy Egg which was built on Ruby on Rails
  • 03:18 – The technology on Ruby on Rails wasn’t multi-threaded
  • 03:28 – It was challenging to keep certain parts of the website up
  • 03:40 – They had a flash loader that let people view their reports
  • 03:55 – They were using Ruby on Rails because of its advantages
  • 04:03 – The site would go down while they’re still doing some challenging things
  • 04:12 – Twitter also had issues with Ruby on Rails
  • 04:41 – Every time the website went down, they would flash a message
  • 05:07 – The website went down more often than usual and their engineers had to do more work

• 05:29 – One of the engineers who was also a game designer, thought of putting a game on the website when it went down

• • 05:45 – When there’s an issue, you want the experience to still be engaging and almost distracting
  • 06:03 – Having the game isn’t about communication, but about lightening the load of the problem
  • 06:20 – Don’t be so dry; be humorous about it
• 06:55 – People tend to lie and be dry in answering about issues or a crisis
  • 07:20 – Don’t lie and make promises because the pressure will be on you
  • 07:31 – A crisis isn’t a time to make promises you can’t keep
• 07:52 – Don’t write to customers like you’ve consulted a lawyer before replying
  • 08:03 – Talk to your customers like a human being
• 08:21 – Steli would email their customers personally, like he’s talking to them personally
• 09:11 – People tend to hide when there’s a crisis
  • 10:05 – The most powerful thing you can do during a crisis is to show up and be available
  • 10:33 – People won’t appreciate someone who doesn’t reply
• 11:38 – Don’t use corporate speech and tell people what happened
• 12:09 – Don’t give your customers a timeline unless you’re 100% sure you can beat it
• 12:44 – People will lose their sh*t when they realize you’re lying
• 13:35 – There’s a way to say politely how you are working on the problem
• 13:56 – “Communicate what happened”
• 14:33 – Do not apologize because it doesn’t help you, only apologize if you truly believe you did something wrong
  • 15:03 – Find a language that is not apologetic, but empathetic
  • 16:00 – “Only apologize if you’re willing to admit fault and blame and don’t be lazy and use it as a way out”
• 16:26 – Once you resolve the problem, the work isn’t done yet
  • 16:34 – You have to let your customers know what happened in detail
• 17:14 – Being in a crisis is a risky situation, but is also an opportunity
• 17:40 – A crisis can shake up trust and customers will be shaken
• 18:11 – Transparency and communication is a way to keep building that trust
• 18:25 – Go beyond what is expected
• 19:00 – After a crisis, Steli spent a week to call each of their big customers asking for a feedback and allowed people to vent
• 19:50 – Steli used the crisis to upsell his customers
• 20:11 – A crisis is an opportunity to see the relationship that you have with your customers
• 21:34 – Steli always try to do their best by their customers
• 21:52 – The reason why you don’t want to lie is that it creates more problems
  • 22:14 – The vendor was lying to Steli
  • 23:20 – At the end of the conversation, Steli asked for the email thread but the vendor was scrambling and didn’t send the email thread
  • 24:17 – You would want to be comfortable with your vendor especially if your business relies on them
• 24:36 – Make sure you can trust your partners and vendors
• 25:38 – Don’t try to lie because it will come out in the end and make everything worse
• 26:48 – End of today’s episode

3 Key Points:

1. In times of crisis, do NOT hide or lie, be transparent about the issues you’re facing.
2. Take a crisis as an opportunity to build a better relationship with your customers.
3. Don’t be apologetic unless you KNOW you’ve done something wrong; instead, be empathetic, kind, and personable.

Steli Efti:

Hey, this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah:

And this is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti:

Today’s episode of , we’re gonna talk about how to communicate with your customers during a crisis. This could be down time, your app is down, your app is crashing, you have a massive bug, there’s some security error, something was exposed, some fucking crisis that impacts all your customers. And we’re talking major event, not just a minor thing. These things happen in companies, they probably will happen in your company sooner or later, so learning how to communicate in those moments of crisis can make a difference. And I wanted to chat with you about this. One, it’s because I think it’s super valuable and not really talked about that much. But two, because we had to go through this shit recently.

Hiten Shah:

What happened?

Steli Efti:

What happened is that one of the technology providers that we are using to power the telephony aspect of our app, had major down time. And then basically affected a massive amount of our customers. It’s even worse then when we fuck up because somebody else fucks up that we are relying on, and we’re not in control of fixing this issue, right?

Hiten Shah:

Right.

Steli Efti:

We are at the mercy and the competency of that technology provider. And if they get their shit together and they do a great job, cool, if they do a bad job, we’re just sitting here … Like, we cannot fix it ourselves, so we are waiting for somebody else, we’re relying on somebody else, which is just a shitty situation to be in. But it happens. It’s very rare, as a technology business, as you grow, to be completely independent from anything. Even the cloud. Somewhere you’re hosting things, and even big cloud providers have issues. There’s all kinds of problems that can arise in today’s technology. We had to go through this recently, which brings up the point … It was funny from two perspectives. One is observing how that technology provider was communicating to us, right? And let’s just say we were not happy, and I’m not really like … I’m gonna use them as a bad example of how not to do this, and then how we were trying to communicate to our customers and at least trying to do the best. I’m sure you’ve gone through lots of these examples yourself as an advisor with your own company, so just want to chit-chat and share some of the do’s and don’ts when you have a crisis, how do you deal with this?

Hiten Shah:

Yeah. Love it. I’ll kick off with one. There’s thought around this, which is … the interesting thing that companies run into when they have a crisis like this is one, it’s rare. The first time you have it, even the second time, even the third time, even the fourth time, you might not really have a process for it until you get really good at managing it. But ideally, you don’t have that, I think, because this is a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It impacts customers, service outages, things like that. I’m gonna talk about a time when actually we had a ton of these at Crazy Egg. So Crazy Egg was built in Ruby on Rails, when Ruby on Rails was really early, and what we had to do is we had to go fetch a ton of data to be able to pull up a heat map for your website and all the click data. And the technology raising Ruby on Rails wasn’t what you call multi-threaded. What that means is you can only run a single process, and this is technical stuff, but it’s interesting, you can only run a single process and that made it very challenging for us to actually keep certain parts of the site up because of what we were doing. And this all sounds silly today if you’re an engineer listening to this because these problems are solved now, for the most part. We had this thing called a Flash Loader, that would be in between when people clicked on a button to view their report and then could view their report. And there’s all kinds of other issues, because again, Ruby on Rails was very and we were using it. And we were using it on purpose for a bunch of other advantages we got because of it, and it was a hot thing and it was easier to find some engineers and this and that and the other. The site would go down. And we were also doing some challenging things and we had a free product at the time. And so our scale was also pretty massive. Even Twitter, a couple years later, and had lots of issues with Ruby on Rails and having the hit scale. Because we were tracking every click on a website and these things weren’t trivial at the time. And at that time, even Amazon Web Services was very early and a lot of things that they have today didn’t exist. Our site would go down regularly. The tracking on people’s websites, thankfully, wouldn’t go down, but our website would go down, meaning you couldn’t look at your reports and stuff like that. In the beginning we had an error message, or we would just take down the site and there was this little mini-figures and there was a picture, said that our site’s down or whatever and then this picture with mini-figures running around circuit boards trying to fix the problem. And that was what we had. One thing I would say is when it’s down you can use humor, but not in your copy necessarily, unless it’s very good. But we used an image that wasn’t humor but it was cute, right? And then one day, the site just kept going down so much and we couldn’t do anything about it. We had to … It took work from the engineers to keep it up. Again, some of this sounds silly because this doesn’t happen to sites anymore like it used to. And then, one of the engineers is like … He’s actually kind of like a game designer and had built Mac games back in the day, he’s a lead engineer. And we basically built an egg drop game that only showed up when we went down. We would drop eggs on people. You could drop eggs on people’s heads and it was a game. These were people that looked like they were in suits and there’s some funny stuff around it. At the end of the day, what I want to say about this is you want to make the experience, especially if it happens a lot, which usually it doesn’t, very engaging. But really, in a way, and I know this is going to sound bad, but almost distracting. That’s if you actually have your site down and you can’t do anything about it. And that’s not about communication, but it’s about lightening the load of the problem without getting to the point of being stupid or silly. And so we made it a game because it kept going down. I use that strategy every time when things happen that are a crisis in my messaging. And what I mean by that is don’t be so dry and say, “Oh, it’s down. It’s not working, and it’s this provider. And blah, blah, blah,” right? Instead, just be human about it and start by actually talking about “We don’t expect this to happen. We use a provider. They happen to be down. I’m sure they’re working diligently to solve their problem and we will keep you updated regularly about this. And by the way, check out this funny thing while you wait.” And the reason for this is I see a lot of people lying about it. I see a lot of people dry about it. And I lying meaning … I don’t mean lying, but they’re making promises they can’t keep. Don’t tell someone it’s gonna be up in an hour if it ain’t gonna be up in an hour.

Steli Efti:

Oh, shit. Don’t do that.

Hiten Shah:

Right. Anyways, those are my little rants.

Steli Efti:

This is cool.

Hiten Shah:

Back in the day.

Steli Efti:

This is good. And I think I can continue on that thread, because yes, please don’t lie and make promises because you feel the pressure. Don’t be like, “Oh, I’m sure in the next hour it’s gonna be done.”

Hiten Shah:

Don’t be hopeful.

Steli Efti:

Don’t be hopeful.

Hiten Shah:

That’s probably what it is. Don’t be hopeful.

Steli Efti:

A crisis is not a time to be making promises you don’t know that you can keep. So don’t be telling people it’s gonna be “We’re fixing it. It’s gonna be fixed soon.” Fix it and then tell people it’s fixed.

Hiten Shah:

If it isn’t.

Steli Efti:

That’s one. The other one is the dry one, the corporate one. This is the one I see the most, which is “Motherfucker, don’t write me an email or talk to me and say that you are a massive bank and a team of a thousand lawyers went through that email to make it as protective as possible.” Just talk to me like a human being. So don’t say things like, “We apologize for any inconvenience.” No, just say, “We’re sorry.” Just say … I literally, in my quote-unquote “CEO” email to everybody, I emailed all our customers that we impacted by this. From my personal email. And I literally had the word in there, “This sucked.” Because that’s what I thought and that’s what our customers thought. And that’s the-

Hiten Shah:

I love it.

Steli Efti:

That’s the words people would use talking to me and that’s the words I used talking to them. So when I send an email, I’m not gonna write, “I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused,” because I don’t speak like that. That’s bullshit. That’s how a lawyer writes something. I want to be real. “This sucked. I’m sorry. Here’s what’s gonna happen next.” Just using honest language, being real about it, makes a big difference. I think the one big message that I’ll give is that the natural tendency when things are going bad, is that people want to hide. You don’t want to … Your site goes down and you start getting incoming emails, you don’t want to take those. You know what those calls are about. And especially if you don’t have anything smart to say, like “This is down time. It’s our technology provider. We are currently in communication with them. We’ll keep you up to date. Here’s a page you can subscribe to to get an SMS once the site is up. I’ll let you know once we know more, but right now all I can do is I can ping that technology provider and wait to learn more and help you with any kind of workarounds. But I cannot solve the problem this very moment myself.” When you’ve said this ten times, the 11th call is coming in, you don’t want to pick up. It’s the most natural thing in the world. You just want to hide. Because you don’t want to keep saying, “I cannot fix this problem or listen to people that are upset or angry.” The most important thing is to fight that urge. I find when there’s a crisis, one of the most powerful things you can do, is to just show up. Be available. Don’t hide behind your desk, behind an email, behind a status page. Just be available. Even if all you can tell people is “I get it. You’re right. This sucks. And here is it. I’m giving you your two minutes to scream at me so you feel better.” Even that can make a big difference. People truly appreciate that. What they don’t appreciate is when things are down or there’s some kind of a crisis, and they are trying to reach you to figure out what is going on and they can’t. You’re not responding to the support ticket they sent, the email they sent, you’re not responding on social media, or you’re responding with some super corporate, “Thank you. We are aware of that issue. We are currently diligently working on a solution. Stay tuned.” Just being there, being real, and being honest can make a big difference to people. Because most companies aren’t. Because most companies hide, they run, they don’t pick up the phone, they don’t answer the emails because it sucks. It sucks to be in a crisis. It sucks to let down customers and you don’t want to hear the 20th person complaining about this same thing. Show up. It doesn’t matter it sucks. It’s not about you. It’s about your customers and it helps them just to even be able to vent or to hear that you are there. Even if you’re just telling them something they already read on your status page that you are currently working on the problem or something. Just knowing that somebody’s responding to their issues in email or on the phone or whatever format they use can make a big difference. So don’t hide. Don’t use corporate speak. Tell people what happened once you know, tell people the problem is fixed once it’s really fixed. So don’t lie, just like Hiten just said, don’t make promises you can’t keep, and in crisis you’re gonna be tempted to make promises that you’re not fully in control of, even if it’s an issue, like you’ve caused and your engineering team is like, “We know what the problem is. We’re currently in the process of fixing it. This should take 30 minutes.” Please don’t reach out to your customers and tell them, “The problem is gonna be fixed in 30 minutes.”

Hiten Shah:

My advice on that is actually don’t ever give them a timeline unless you’re 100% sure you can meet it. Which essentially means don’t tell them a timeline until it’s solved.

Steli Efti:

Until it’s solved. That’s it. Yes. Don’t tell them a timeline.

Hiten Shah:

I’ve seen the worst there.

Steli Efti:

When there’s a crisis and you tell me it’s fixed in 30 minutes and then in 30 minutes it’s not, oh my God, people are gonna lose their mind over this. Because you’re letting them down and now they feel like you’re lying to them.

Hiten Shah:

I think the terminology is they lose their shit.

Steli Efti:

They lose their shit. Thank you for helping me here.

Hiten Shah:

They literally lose their shit. It’s your fault. Because you told them something … You told them a promise that you couldn’t keep. It’s pretty simple.

Steli Efti:

People’s translation of this is these assholes, they’re not just is not just not working, but they are also lying to me.

Hiten Shah:

Yeah.

Steli Efti:

“They told me 30 minutes ago it’s gonna be done in 30 minutes. I turned around and told my team ’30 minutes, take a break, when you come back it’s done,’ and now we’re all sitting here and I don’t know what to say and I’m embarrassed all because you lied.” People lose their shit. Don’t do that. Only give a timeline … Only tell them when it’s fixed that it’s fixed. You can tell them you’re working on it, but don’t give a timeline. Really, this is something companies, again, get wrong all the time because it’s so hard not to give a timeline. You really want to give a timeline.

Hiten Shah:

And there’s a way to say this. You say “We don’t know, but people are actively working on solving this problem right. That’s why I’m getting on the phone with you.” Or “That’s why I’m emailing you,” or “That’s why I’m responding to you, because I’m confident this problem will get solved because people are working on it. But I cannot tell you a timeline.”

Steli Efti:

That’s the way to do it.

Hiten Shah:

And communicate what happened. That’s another thing I would add. If you have this urge to tell them a timeline, instead tell them what happened. Whatever you know, I don’t mean tell them everything if you can’t yet, but just tell them happened. Just like in your case, “A provider we were using, we are using, that’s been consistent so far, the whole time, had an outage. And it’s affecting us. And we are in communication with them to do our best to figure out when this will get resolved and get it resolved. But at the current moment, there is nothing we can do to solve this problem.” Also, I know this sounds weird, do not apologize.

Steli Efti:

Tell me more.

Hiten Shah:

It doesn’t help you to apologize, because that means you’re admitting you did something wrong. Only apologize if you truly believe you did something wrong. This is a life lesson. This about it.

Steli Efti:

This is a life lesson.

Hiten Shah:

Don’t apologize because the second you apologize you’re admitting fault. You’re admitting guilt. You’re admitting that you did something wrong. And I’m not saying that to be mean, I’m saying that because … Or to hide anything. Find language that is not apologetic, but yet it’s empathetic. The easiest thing to do is apologize to be empathetic. “I’m sorry this is happening.” “I don’t give a crap that you’re sorry, dude.” You know what I mean?

Steli Efti:

Yeah.

Hiten Shah:

It turns the whole thing negative. Just be factual and just say, “Obviously, we don’t expect things like this to happen. We understand how much of an impact this is having on your job right now. And we are doing everything we can to understand what’s going on and make changes. We plan on keeping you updated every hour.” If you need to update them every hour and just say, “We don’t know anything yet. We don’t know anything yet.” You know what I mean? Whatever it is, but don’t apologize. Apologies … And I’m not one who never apologizes, I’m not saying that. I’m not one of those people. What I’m saying is only apologize if you’re willing to admit fault and blame and don’t be lazy and use it as a way out, because it actually pisses people off.

Steli Efti:

Yes, it does. I love that. Don’t be apologetic, be empathetic. I think that’s the money quote. That’s powerful shit. Yes. Okay, the other thing, I think, and we’ve talked about the value of this, which is once you resolve the problem, the work is not done. In crisis mode you have to over communicate. Now you solved the issue, you let them know, but then you have to do a post-mortem and let them know what exactly happened in detail, for those that want to know.

Hiten Shah:

Oh, yeah.

Steli Efti:

How it happened, what the root cause was, how you resolved it, and then, what you’re planning to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Hiten Shah:

This is just hygiene. If something bad happens, even if … You should definitely share this with the customers, but you have to do this internally anyways. Because if you can’t prevent problems like this or have solutions, guess what? It’s gonna happen again.

Steli Efti:

It’s gonna happen again. The other thing about this is that people … The moment you have a crisis, and you’re going through them, it is actually … It is both a risky situation, you might lose customers, you might build a bad reputation. There’s lots of potential loss and risk there, but it’s equally an opportune time. You can build your brand, you can build … Just standing out and doing things differently and better than the customer would expect in a crisis, you can actually turn the moment around. And the problem is that a crisis will shake up somebody’s trust in you. How much can I truly trust this software provider? How much truly can I trust that this company has their shit together? How much truly can I rely my business on using their software? People are gonna be a shook by a crisis and they’re gonna be thinking about how much they can truly trust you moving forward, so it’s incredibly important to do the things necessary to maintain trust or build trust. One thing is transparency and over communicating. You showed up when the problem was there, you were picking up the phone, you were answering the support tickets, you were communicating and over communicating, and then when it’s done you’re not just like, “It’s done. Problem fixed, and you’ll never hear us talk about this again. We’ll pretend this never happened.” No, you go beyond what was expected and you shoot them an email and you provide and in-depth transparent post-mortem that tells them what happened, why it happened, how you fixed it, and what you’re doing to prevent this from happening moving forward. I remember one time … This is actually … I just remembered this. I think in a very year in close, we had some hiccup, I don’t even remember what it is. It was not even something big, but it was something that touched a good amount of our bigger customers, and what we did is actually … Back in the day the number of customers and the number of bigger customers we had was a few hundred, and we spent a week after that happened and we fixed it, calling every single one of the bigger customers and kind of, again, saying, “Hey, this is what happened. We sent you an email about it. How do you feel about it? How’s the team? How did you manage,” I think it was like a 40 minute period where we had some issues. And then when people were really upset, we would allow them to vent, and we would take time to listen and we would just turn it around. And sometimes they would tell us other things they didn’t like and we would try to find solutions and fix things and make … Use this as an opportunity to understand them better and make sure we really invest in them the right way. There were a lot of our customers that were like, “You guys are awesome. I love the fucking the product. Yes, it sucked, but the way you handled it was really amazing.” And then we used all of these conversations, every single call that was positive, we pitched them on our annual contract, believe it or not. We used a crisis to upsell them on pre-paying for the whole year. And the pitch was very simple. It was like, “Hey, we’re so appreciate of your business.” You can have an idea of what the relationship with somebody will be and the partnership between a vendor and a customer. When times are good everything’s always good, but a crisis is really a great opportunity to see what kind of a quality of relationship we have. “You’ve been an amazing customer during this time. We tried to do anything and everything to go beyond to show you that your business really means a lot to us and we want to invest in this relationship long term. And you know what we want to do? I want to offer you an additional discount. All that we would have to do is for you guys, instead of paying month by month, to make a pre-payment, we’ll be able to give you a good amount of savings back.” And also, this is another way of us investing in the relationship and showing them that we’re in it for the long-term. “It’s a way for you to show us that you’re really in it for the long term.” And people were laughing at me, going “I can’t believe that you are asking me to do this,” and then they would go on and do it.

Hiten Shah:

Yeah.

Steli Efti:

I would not say do this at all times, and in all circumstances, all depends. But I just want to open people’s minds that a crisis can really be an opportunity to learn, to grow, to build a reputation that you are a company that can be trusted, that’s transparent, that fixes … Whenever they fuck up something they take responsibility to fix it. Or a crisis can be a time where you run and you hide and you make excuses and you under communicate and that’s the moment people decide that they’re gonna leave you, they hate you, and they’re gonna tell everybody else to never use your software. It can be either or and it’s up to you what it is and we try to do our best with our customers, but looking at the vendor that we had, honestly, they basically did a very poor job communicating with us, and they were not honest in the hindsight. Even funny things, I’ll give you one quick example of this before we wrap this up. The reason why you should not lie, other than it’s the ethical … You want to be an ethical person, yada, yada, yada, all the ethical reasons. The reason you don’t want to lie is that a lie just creates so many more problems than the truth. It really is. Here’s the problem. We have this vendor and they’re giving us a fucking excuse. They’re pointing the finger at somebody else being at fault here. And I’m pretty certain, our team is pretty certain that that’s not true. That is not what happened. Actually we have a pretty good idea what happened, and we think it’s completely their fault. And it’s even an embarrassing fault. And I call the founder and I go, “Hey, I read the post-mortem. You explaining that this, this, and the other happened. Are you really sure that that is what happened?” He’s like, “Absolutely. Not our fault. Da, da, da, da. This and this.” I’m like, “Help me, how did you communicate that with that other technology provider? What has been the back and forth communication?” He’s like, “Well, you know, when that happened, we sent them an email and they sent us an email back,” and he’s explaining to me how they are going back and forth in email and that that provider … I asked literally, “Did that provider admit fault? Are they in agreement with you that that’s what happened?” He’s like, “Yes, but they’re still trying to figure out this and that. But they said that it is …” all that. And you know what my simple ask was at the end of that conversation? I was like, “Dude, I’m gonna be honest with you. I have a really … I want to believe you, and I want to trust in this relationship, but right now, I’m shook. And I have a difficult time believing this, but since all this happened and since you have an email thread documenting this, can you do me a favor, just click forward on that email thread so I can see it. It’s just gonna make me feel much better and it’s gonna help rebuild the trust in us, should be fairly simple for you. Can you do that while I’m on the phone?” And you know what the response was? “Uhh, yeah … I’m not in front of my computer and I need to see where that email thread is and …” He was scrambling. I’ve not even that email thread to this day. I’ve followed up multiple times.

Hiten Shah:

Damn, dude.

Steli Efti:

Doesn’t this suck? Isn’t this shitty?

Hiten Shah:

Damn. Damn. I mean you had me at the edge of my seat, dude. That was good. But like, wow. Nice work. Look, you want to feel comfortable with a vendor like that. Especially because your business relies on that vendor.

Steli Efti:

Yeah.

Hiten Shah:

Core functionality of your product. In your case that even makes your product more unique than others, relies on that thing working.

Steli Efti:

Yeah.

Hiten Shah:

I think that’s a tip also, not even a tip, more than that, a process of really making sure you can trust the other parties when they’re the ones that fail. Especially if it’s a smaller company versus a larger one. Larger companies have a lot more process around communicating this stuff. Like Amazon, for example. I’m not saying they’re the best or anything, but they definitely are communicative in the proper ways. Maybe a little too … Maybe a little less than most people would like, but still, they communicate when things happen, and historically, things have happened with Amazon take down not even half. Pretty much all the Internet. And in this case, it’s like, I’m damn sure you’re looking for an alternative.

Steli Efti:

Oh, yeah. We’ve started … The moment the crisis wrapped up and fixed, we started working on our transition and alternative and fall backs. We’re investing massive resources in not relying on them anymore and we are going to take our business away and they’re gonna suffer from that, and it’s that moment where I’m like, “Why are you just not owning up to your shit?”

Hiten Shah:

Why don’t you just tell me the truth? Just tell me the truth.

Steli Efti:

Why don’t you tell the fucking truth? Don’t try to lie to me. It’s gonna come out. It’s gonna make everything worse.

Hiten Shah:

And it sounds like a made-up story. Even worse, it’s like a made-up story.

Steli Efti:

So stupid.

Hiten Shah:

And that you can verify easily. So then it’s like, “All right, I’m good. I can’t deal with this.”

Steli Efti:

His problem is that, like most people, he didn’t think that I was leading down the path, so … Almost every lie, the longer you have to live with it, the higher that chance is that you’re gonna stumble over that fucking thing. It’s just the nature of lies. No matter how smart you are, you’re gonna stumble over it. Just don’t lie. Life is much simpler. Anyways, that’s my little rant on this. We’re gonna wrap on that fairly note of just don’t lie. Be honest, show up, have some humor if you can, like lighten up the mood. I think that’s a good one after all the dark shit that I just shared. Make sure that you use a crisis to learn and grow and to build your brand into something more powerful, because I don’t think most people realize that it can be an opportunity. It’s not just risk, it’s also an opportunity if you handle it the right way.

Hiten Shah:

Totally agree.

Steli Efti:

All right, this is it from us. Bye-bye, guys.

Hiten Shah:

Bye.

The post 214: How to Communicate With Your Customers During Crisis appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.