Crisis Comms with Integration Partner
How I led customer communications for a product incident that touched tens of thousands of accounts and a critical integration partner relationship
Snapshot
Company: Intuit Mailchimp
Role: Principal Marketing Manager, Lifecycle: Customer Notifications
Scope: I led the response strategy, including writing the messaging with close legal partnership and enabling customer teams with background and canned messaging; encouraged a helpful remediation strategy
By the numbers:
Tens of thousands of customer accounts segmented by impact and contacted
10+ message variations
1 playbook created for support and customer success
The Challenge
A bug altered a data setting on contacts synced through a major third-party integration. This meant customers' own email marketing could underperform without them knowing why.
We knew that every day we didn’t send an email would increase the likelihood of customers asking why we took so long to tell them. But the full fix wasn't ready. Although engineering had stopped the bug, they were still investigating the scope of affected accounts and whether data could be restored.
Two things made this harder than the usual incident comm strategy. First, the issue involved an integration partner, so the messaging had to make it clear the bug was our fault and not push customers toward the partner's support channels. Second, impact landed on opposite ends of the spectrum. One message for both audiences would either alarm the first group or anger the second.
So I created a hypothesis: if we were transparent about the issue and provided a satisfactory solution, we could minimize the damage, convert our error into a trust-earning moment, and keep support volume manageable.
The Strategy
Acknowledge the situation. The first call was to communicate early. We wanted to tell affected customers what happened, what we'd done, and that we were still investigating. We’d keep them in the loop.
Segment by impact. We split the audience into three segments. Highly impacted customers got a deeper explanation to show transparency. Low impacted customers got a lower-temp version so it wouldn’t cause alarm (“the lady doth protest too much” can be a major problem with customer notifications). Customers with an account manager got the same message, but with a path to set up a time to talk through questions and concerns.
Push for a better experience. While we were only required to fix and admit to the bug, I pushed to go a step farther. The thing about a customer notification is that it makes it very clear when something is the minimal viable solution. While engineering was able to restore some contact data, there was additional data that we couldn’t determine if it was right or wrong. I pushed engineering to add a tag to contacts that may have been impacted so customers could easily review the contacts and make their own decision on what to do next.
Protect the partnership. The emails named the integration only as the location of the issue. We took full ownership and kept all support in our own channels. Our integration partner manager shared all comms with their team before anything was sent.
The Work
A phased approach
The first phase acknowledged the issue to every affected customer within days of the plan's approval. The second phase closed the loop with additional details and a walkthrough on how to evaluate impact and choose a path forward.
Planning for the hard conversations
Before the first email went out, I provided support and customer success teams with canned responses for all anticipated questions. The enablement plan also included escalation judgment, like when to offer a retention discount, route inquiries to PR, and how to handle social media messages.
Results
The plan played out as we wanted. Only a handful of customer reached out and there wasn’t any noise on public channels.