Your Company Will Screw Up…Mine Did
The real question is: what do you do then?
Tock has two payment plans: The preferred plan is a flat-rate monthly plan where restaurants can book an unlimited number of reservations with no additional charges. The second — for small restaurants (think omakase, chef’s counter, etc.) charges a low base fee and a per-person fee on top of that.
Katie, a member of Tock’s hospitality team, was running some reports on our billing system. She wanted to see if we had any restaurants on our “per-person” plan that were doing enough business that it would be cheaper for them to switch to our flat rate plan when she noticed something weird. She noticed what she thought might be a discrepancy in how we were billing for per-person charges and started digging around to double-check herself. She then confirmed with one of our engineers that there was an edge case where we would double-bill our restaurants for a reservation.
We immediately checked all of our restaurants on the per-person plan and found that we had over-billed almost 5% of our restaurants to the tune of a few hundred dollars over the past year.
Nick and I discussed this and immediately agreed that we needed to make it right. This meant:
- Fix the bug
- Audit our billing system to make sure it is accurately counting per-person charges everywhere
- Apologize
- Make it right: Issue refunds — plus a 10% “inconvenience” bonus
Here’s a copy (anonymized) of the email that I personally sent to our affected customers:
From: Brian Fitzpatrick <fitz@tockhq.com>
Subject: Refund for your restaurant
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Dear Chef,We discovered an error in the way you were charged for your monthly Tock subscription and wanted to let you know immediately. Due to a counting error on our part you were over-billed $282 over the past year.Because you were overcharged we'd like to refund you 110% of the amount you are owed for a total refund amount of $310.20. The error was entirely ours, the accounting issue has been corrected, and we are very sorry it happened.Next month, you'll see a line item on your invoice for the refund. Please take the extra 10% and buy yourself a nice bottle of wine, on us.-Fitz
While I’m certainly not happy that we made this mistake, I couldn’t possibly be happier with how the team found the bug and how we as a company handled it. If you want your team to be on the lookout for things like this, they have to:
- Care deeply about their customers in the first place
- Feel comfortable asking questions and calling out when something looks wrong
- Be in an environment of shared responsibility vs. pointing fingers
I’ve encountered far too many people in my career who think that making mistakes or admitting they were wrong was a sign of weakness or incompetence. I couldn’t possibly disagree with that more: no one — and no company — is perfect.
You’re not defined by your ability to be perfect. You’re defined by how you react when you screw up.
