Tom Corfman is among the prospects trying ahead to a $5 credit score. He’s a senior guide with RCG.
Any letter that promptly offers a refund to hundreds of consumers is an efficient letter, however some letters are higher than others.
AT&T CEO John Stankey’s refund announcement on Feb. 25, 2024, simply three days after a large outage, was a masterful response to an intense, if short-lived, company disaster.
The immediate motion was extensively coated by the information media, shifting the protection from prospects’ troubles to the corporate’s motion.
Whereas his “letter to workers” obtained the job accomplished, the writing didn’t match the brilliance of the technique. We’ve got 5 questions and edits that may have made the letter more practical. However first slightly background.
No service
Stankey is aware of the telephone enterprise. The Pasadena, Calif. native in 1985 took a job out of school with Pacific Bell, which finally turned a part of AT&T. He labored his approach up, turning into CEO in 2020.
The outage started within the early hours of Feb. 22, with service restored by midday. The corporate hasn’t disclosed what number of of its 90 million cellphone subscribers have been affected, however Downdetector, which displays disruptions, counted greater than 1.5 million reviews of issues.
Regardless of the whole quantity of the refund, the comms large says it received’t considerably have an effect on its monetary efficiency. Income was $122.42 billion final yr.
The letter has some fairly good strains, corresponding to this one, “This isn’t our first community outage, and it received’t be our final—sadly, it’s the fact of our enterprise.”
Listed here are the edits and questions we might have proposed if we had been Stankey’s editor:
1. Who’s the viewers? Whereas known as a “letter to workers,” a lot of it was meant for purchasers and the broader viewers, and never simply the refund supply. Writing inside memos with a watch towards exterior audiences is a sound apply contemplating how rapidly issues are unfold on social media. However you should resolve which viewers is the first goal.
For instance, if the first viewers is workers, they aren’t addressed till the seventh paragraph, which is well-written and begins, “Every time a difficult or surprising occasion impacts this firm, I can at all times rely on everybody to rise to the event and the previous couple of days have been no exception.” Let’s transfer that up.
If the main target is prospects, point out the refund sooner than the fifth graph, as journalists name them, and add three phrases to Stankey’s first sentence, “Thursday was a difficult day for our prospects and our firm.”
2. We screwed up. His second sentence is easy: “Our function is to attach folks to larger chance, and we fell wanting what we sometimes achieve this effectively each day.”
His apology is obvious however doesn’t come till the fourth graph, after a 129-word description of the trigger and size of the interruption.
“Regardless of the timing, one factor is obvious—we let down lots of our prospects, together with lots of you and your households. For that, we apologize,” he says.
The background is essential however shouldn’t get in the way in which of the first message.
3. How a lot? The quantity of the refund was of eager curiosity to prospects and the information media, however the firm made everybody hunt for it.
Stankey by no means put a greenback quantity on the refund, saying solely it will be credit score “for basically a full day of service.” The quantity is on a separate net web page entitled, “Making it proper,” which isn’t linked in Stankey’s letter or the information launch posting the letter.
On that web page, a footnote reads:
Credit score doesn’t apply to AT&T Enterprise Enterprise and Platinum accounts, AT&T Pay as you go or Cricket.
One $5 credit score per account in your AT&T WirelessSM account.
Invoice credit will sometimes be utilized inside 2 invoice cycles.
Is that this why they are saying that you must learn the superb print on cellphone contracts?
4. Jargon jungle. Stankey’s had a number of high-level tech positions, which can clarify his rationalization for what occurred: “the applying and execution of an incorrect course of used whereas working to broaden our community.”
In plain English, please? A “software program replace went mistaken,” in accordance with ABC Information.
Then there are these sentences:
Everyone knows that our prospects obtain large worth and comfort for the nominal day by day value of our service, and outages typically have outsized impacts on some subscribers that could be larger than the face worth of the credit score. For that purpose, I consider that crediting these prospects for basically a full day of service is the appropriate factor to do.
I believe he’s making an attempt to say: Crediting our prospects for a full day of service is the appropriate factor to do, although the service wasn’t down for a whole day. I acknowledge that the price of the outage on some prospects might have exceeded a full day’s credit score.
In fact, no company communication is full with an “applied,” and Stankey works it into the subsequent to final paragraph.
5. Tighten up. The letter suggestions the dimensions at 686 phrases, taking over a printed web page and a half. A lot of the letter reads prefer it was hijacked by the advertising division, detracting from the essential message. It may very well be trimmed to 500 phrases by merely eliminating the fluff.
Every single day
Stankey has had greater complications than this outage. Earlier than he turned CEO, he performed a key function in ATT’s 2018 acquisition of media large Time Warner for $109 billion.
Time Warner flailed about beneath its new father or mother. Stankey, promoted to CEO in 2020, gave up on the acquisition. In 2022, he merged the renamed WarnerMedia unit with Discovery, leading to a $47 billion loss to AT&T shareholders, in accordance with The New York Instances. The corporate disputed the newspaper’s calculation, saying the transaction benefited shareholders.
In an interview on CNBC in September, Stankey was requested when the inventory market would acknowledge the worth of his enterprise technique.
“I’m accountable day-after-day,” he responded.
Some days greater than others.
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