SAYING SORRY

The power of saying sorry

Clint Smith on how Emma turned a fiasco into a formative experience

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he team at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center this year launched the Circle Back podcast, which invites successful area executives to revisit their roots and their journeys to success. Among those taking part was Clint Smith, one of the founders of marketing email venture Emma, which now lives under the umbrella of global holding company (and downtown-based) CM Group.

In this lightly edited excerpt, Smith details how, nearly two decades ago, a buggy software launch early in its life had Emma team members scrambling to do the right thing — and solidified a culture that would become a company cornerstone and a key differentiator in the battle for talent. We got to a point where, as we had sort of several hundred customers on essentially the alpha version of the platform, we had been scrambling to build the next version — what we considered the real product. And we were close.

We were in this sort of quandary where the original product was dying. We had all these customers on it. The new product was a little bit unproven but seemed ready. So we felt like we had no choice but to wholesale move all the customers to the new product. And the new product didn’t work.

When you’ve got several hundred customers who are relying on you to help them send their emails out… In some cases, their newsletters that they’re counting on, their sales pieces, they’re more like their lifeblood, right? And it suddenly doesn’t work and they can’t do that thing that they’re paying you to be able to do. You can imagine what kind of chaos that creates.

Marcus Whitney was one of those working non-stop to get Emma back online. He calls it “a brutal experience, quite frankly,” to rewrite a system on the fly when it already had paying clients. The small team overhauled all the interfaces and the billing system — at a time when, Whitney points out, cloud computing and many other app development tools didn’t yet exist.

All we would do was pick up the phone when it rang and tell people how sorry we were and to give them the honest update as best we knew it and to tell them to please hang with us and offer them the month free — whatever we could do. And we responded to emails the same way and that’s all we did. And then the phone rang again and you do the same thing over and over again.

Then we would go drink at the end of the day then we would come back the next morning and would go back that night and do the same thing all over again. So it was a bonding experience — not one you would wish on yourself, but it certainly was that.

It was also a tremendous lesson in the power of brand relationship and also just human decency. We said the things that we rarely hear from other companies, even now: “I’m sorry, we screwed up.” We did the things that people ought to do for each other when you think of the person on the other end of the line not as a consumer but as a person.

And it paid off. So much so that, at the end of these two weeks — and even when the software came back on, it was buggy — we lost two customers out of hundreds from that fiasco. Just two. And six months later, one of them came back to us. The other one had always been kind of a jerk so we didn’t care.

When you live through things like that, everybody gets it. When we talk about taking care of people, that’s what we mean. And it matters even more in the worst of circumstances. So those were the experiences that really stuck with us, that got us all thinking even more from that point forward, “How can we go really out of our way, above and beyond to take extra care to people in our universe?”

CLINT SMITH

The launch “fiasco” led to the start of a program that let every employee give $250 annually to a nonprofit of their choice and to the start of the Emma 25 initiative, where the company for years picked 25 nonprofits that would get the company’s services free for life.

FOR MORE ON CIRCLE BACK, VISIT EC.CO/CIRCLE-BACK

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