While Shutterfly did make a mistake and send out that mass email, I feel like they did a decent job of recovering and send out an apology tweet and email. With a mistake like this one you may not notice it until people that aren’t new mothers start reacting via social media. I believe the key to a crisis like this one is making sure that the customers know that their complaints have been heard and that the company is working to resolve the matter as quickly as possible. If I were in charge I would have had an apology email ready to go not long after the apology tweet. In my apology email I would have included a special discount code or an exclusive deal that can be redeemed by customers.
After reading the story I read some of the comments and I thought that some of the readers had made a good point. They talked about how when companies make mistakes, no matter if they are big or small, that customers will try and cyber bully the company into deals and free merchandise. I also read comments that talked about how they considered this an invasion of privacy and that lead them to unsubscribe from Shutterfly’s mailing list immediately. I feel like some customer may have overreacted like the comment from Katherine Heidelberg saying Shutterfly can go F themselves. The company acknowledges that they made a mistake and that they were in the process of fixing it. They are humans too and humans make mistakes. It is our job as consumers to help them make it easier to fix the issue by expressing our complaints with civility, not by attacking them.
PR Digest 