Zoom, the video conferencing platform that millions of Americans rely on every day, crashed yesterday as millions of students returned to school via e-learning.

When the country shut down in March as the pandemic hit Zoom usage skyrocketed. It was being used by students and teachers, businesses, families and friends keeping touch, virtual workouts, etc. As usage boomed there were a few issues and Zoom tackled each one as it came up.

This issue was by far the biggest and Zoom was able to fix the problem. Based on this latest mishap will users seek another platform? According to our friends at Inc.com, probably not and that’s thanks to their apology.

Zoom issued an immediate update and apology when the issue was resolved, but later in the evening, an email was sent to users from Velchamy Sankarlingam, President of Product and Engineering.

His apology was heartfelt and assumed personal responsibility for the issue and professed his promise to users that he vowed to work to prevent anything like that from happening again.

Zoom is incredibly easy to use contributing to its popularity. Rather than “blow-off” the outages yesterday or pass the buck once the dust settled, Zoom acknowledged the severity of the issue particularly on the first day of school, and assured users they were on top of it.

Everyone will make mistakes – it is a fact of life. But how you handle the apology can impact whether or not you lose that client or account. We can all take a lesson from Zoom handled this situation.  

 

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