Showing Love To Greece
It’s not my place to get political.
But anyone who’s been following what’s happening in Greece knows that it’s a very difficult situation. Amidst economic crisis and potential exit of the Eurozone, funds to foreign countries have been restricted (capital control) to protect banks and prevent a massive outpour of capital.
To put it simply: the people of Greece have been financially cut off from the rest of the world. How we respond can help them or bury them, as even hospitals remain unable to pay foreign suppliers and food shortages are a looming threat.
I want to let our customers in Greece know that we stand with you. We know that your livelihoods may depend on the continuation of our service. Your success is our success, and we have no intention of pulling the plug at a time when you need us the most.
Initial Response
Here is the first ticket we received from a Greek customer alerting us to the situation:
At this time we had a very general understanding of the situation, but nowhere near the amount of insight we have today. That said, our team huddled together and knew instinctively that we needed to help our Greek customers. By the nature of providing an infrastructure service, removing the ability to run their businesses would hurt the Greek economy even more.
We immediately sectioned out our Greek customers in the database and sent out an email letting them know they’d be granted a grace period for payment.
Hi there,
You may be wondering how the current capital controls in Greece will affect your billing and DigitalOcean service — don’t worry, your service will not be interrupted.
Although your credit card may fail to process as scheduled on Wednesday, July 1st, your account will remain active and in good standing. You will only get billed once the capital controls are lifted on Tuesday, July 7th.
We know this might be difficult for you, and we’re here to help! Have questions? Feel free to get in touch with our support team at any time.
Happy Coding,
Team DigitalOcean
Support Philosophy
I’m lucky to work for a company where the support team is empowered to have autonomy and do the right thing for our customers on a case-by-case basis. I have been doing support for the better half of a decade, and too often policy dictates the way a support team is supposed to respond.
At DO, the way we choose to handle these situations is in the company’s DNA — love was a core value long before I got here, and it’s a great feeling to know that your company will fully back decisions we’re making every day on behalf of our customers.
Because ultimately we are their megaphone into the organization. If one customer is shouting from the rooftops, we need to be there for them. The goal of top-notch support is to listen to customers and shed light on their challenges — we are problem solvers; we want to know what’s going on and we want to fix it. And if we can’t fix it, we want to give our users the benefit of the doubt.
Now let’s be clear: we are in a capitalist environment, and servers are not free. Typically, we have a binary decision that if you want service, you need to pay us. But the decision I’m discussing in this post was one based on compassion. We have customers in Greece who have grown with us and have never missed a payment — how ridiculous would it be to shut off their service due to circumstances out of their control, just to look good when it’s time to compare last year’s revenue numbers?
The Future
To date, our customers in Greece have been communicative and many have found solutions on their own, either by routing from a bank outside of the country or leveraging international payment services like PayPal. For the customers who are still having trouble making payments, we plan to stick this out with you as long as we can.
From a financial perspective it’s not a good situation for anybody. But I believe that in the long-term it’s the right thing to do, and hopefully we’ve built long-term relationships with our thousands of Greek users. Ultimately, we rise and fall with our customers — it would not be right to abandon them when they need us the most.
Here’s some of the love we’ve received back from our community in Greece:
