Brilliant piece of marketing by Slack

We use Slack at work, and today I received the following email from Slack's service desk ...

"Hello there,

Slack suffered service disruptions in the previous month, resulting in a 99.90% uptime.

This isn't the quality of service that we've promised to provide to you and your organization. We are acutely aware of how disruptive Slack service interruptions can be, and our team has worked diligently to diagnose, understand, and address the underlying issues that led to the disruption.

Since we missed our 99.99% uptime guarantee, we are refunding you 100 times the amount your workspace paid during the period Slack was down in the form of "service credit."

At first it didn't make sense to me, and I almost thought it was spam. But when I re-read it I was amazed at its brilliance. Slack was issuing a mea culpa over achieving only a 99.90% uptime instead of the promised 99.99%, and then issuing a credit for 100 times the value of this difference!

This admission is less about caring about their level of service, which I already think is excellent, than just excellent marketing. Firstly, what user would really have noticed the 0.09% downtime — equal to about 40 minutes in the month? Secondly 100 times the difference is around 1 cent per user! Free drinks for everyone ... well 5 drops of something at least!

Anyway, lastly and most conclusive of all, how often does someone write a gushing post about a supposedly "negative" service-level email from a supplier? The proof of their genius lies in the simple fact that I am writing about it.

QED