CrowdStrike is not having a good month. First, the darling of cybersecurity caused an IT outage that affected companies all over the world: something like 8.5 million computers.
Then, CrowdStrike caused outrage when it offered a $10 UberEats voucher to staff that had supported customers during the crisis. Comments on social media complained that the offer paled in comparison to the amount of work and stress that they had endured. And, to add insult to injury, some of the vouchers didn’t work. So, what was meant as a kind gesture from CrowdStrike, in the aftermath of a service failure, ended up making matters worse for the embattled company.
To understand the reaction, it is helpful to consider how customers evaluate service recovery initiatives. To be clear, these vouchers were sent to customer support providers, not customers – but, for simplification, I am using the term “customers”, here.
Customers assess recovery attempts alongside three dimensions: distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice. Distributive justice refers to what the customer gets after the service failure. Procedural justice refers to how the customer accesses that outcome. And interactional justice refers to how the company’s representatives behave during the recovery process.
For customers to evaluate positively (i.e., be satisfied with) the distributive justice of service recovery, they need to feel that the firm has compensated them for the loss incurred. Loss refers to both tangible costs like the many hours of additional work required or sales lost, and intangible ones like stress, embarrassment and loss of trust. And because we are talking about a business-to-business product, our customers are themselves having to deal with service failure recovery for their own customers – i.e., their own customers’ tangible and intangible losses. And this increases the overall sense of loss suffered. Certainly beyond £10. Ideally, CrowdStrike would find a form of compensation that is not a specific monetary value, in order to avoid direct comparisons with the size of the losses suffered. It should also be something that is valued by the person that suffered the loss – perhaps time-off, in the case of staff.
In turn, for customers to positively evaluate the procedural justice of service recovery, they need to feel that the process to access that compensation is fair. In this case, people had to redeem a voucher, in order to access the compensation. Some faced technical problems in doing so, requiring additional effort (also, possibly, reinforcing the association between CrowdStrike and technical failure, which is not helpful in terms of reestablishing trust). And, of course, we are assuming that everyone uses UberEats, which may not be the case. When dealing with compensations for service recovery, it is crucial that the process is swift, simple and be seen to be fair.
Finally, for customers to positively evaluate the interactional justice of service recovery, they need to feel that they have been treated well. Factors like empathy and politeness are usually critical. I think that the e-mail sent to customer support staff which, according to the BBC, recognised the extra work put in by those staff and expressed gratitude, was good. I might also recognise the additional stress and loss of trust suffered and would make sure that the message was signed by a named individual. It is also essential to create a sense of closure – for instance, specify what is being done with any complaints received, and what measure will be put in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.
CrowdStrike has a really big challenge ahead of them, in terms of service recovery, and I, honestly, can’t claim to have the solution for them. But I do hope that they pay attention to these three dimensions (distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice) when climbing that mountain, to increase their chance of success.
How would you compensate the staff (including external staff) that worked so hard and had such a difficult time supporting Crowdstrike’s customers during the crisis?
Ana Canhoto 
A measly $10 voucher…there’s a Filipino phrase (borrowed from the Spanish) that comes to mind — “consuelo de bobo,” which means a prize or reward of little worth.
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