Proposify's Customer Complaint

The story is an angry customer complains inappropriately and publicly about Proposify’s product on social media, Twitter. “No fee table snippets, just broken fee table drafts that don’t auto-save previous version. I’ve got 10 drafts, all the same. Cute” is one of the tweets. Proposify is online proposal software for the web design and marketing industries. The cause of this complaint is the software does not have a proper basic function to let customer use the program smoothly, makes it even more complicate, and difficult to use.

The risk associated with this case is reputation risk under strategy risk. The effect of this complaint can vary from losing a single customer to reducing in firm’s reputation and causes even more losses to firm. If the firm does not take this complaint seriously and it does not capture much attention, it will end only losing just one customer. On the other hand, if this complaint gone viral, it will have potential to cause significant losses to the firm both in short term and long term.

In this case, Proposify respond to the complaint in its own particular way by replying “Hi, sorry for the issues you’re having. Do you want support to reach out to help or just looking to publicly shame us?” The reply may seem passive-aggressive but the firm takes this complaint earnestly by send an email to the customer directly and immediately after reply on Twitter. CEO send a follow up email, first, to ask for clarification about what the customer meant instead of making assumptions. He eliminates further problems by make sure he understand clearly and on point about what the customer really want and does not try to answer questions that he does not understand. In addition, he offers to help resolve the issue once the question is clarified. He also compliments the customer’s ideas about snippets on fee table. Second, to explain why a particular feature does not work the way the customer wants it to, rather than