I may owe you an apology...

[jfoxcpacfp]

Please bear with me, I'm probably making a short story long...

In April, we moved to a new website using a service called 20 over 10. We have been quite happy with 20/10 until this morning, when we learned that the email icon on our website had a bug in it and we were not receiving requests from doctors who wanted to schedule a meeting with me.

At a minimum, this has been going on since July. I (finally!) was forwarded those messages this morning and have followed up with the 6 "stuck" inquiries. Because we have another, more heavily used, appointment app through ScheduleOnce, and I was thrilled with the number of appointments we were getting, I was totally unaware of what was going on. My heartfelt thanks to a WCI reader for giving me a head's up after he didn't get a response from me, or we would still be in the dark.

I am mortified that this has happened. 20/10 has found and corrected the bug and apologized profusely. Not quite good enough and we have a meeting tomorrow. They had procedures in place to prevent this from happening and protocol was not followed.

At this point, I do not yet know if there are other (pre-July) emails that have not yet been recovered. If so, and I haven't responded to a message you have sent me, please accept my sincere apologies. I realize you have probably moved on to another financial planner and/or CPA, but I still want you to know that I would never, ever have purposefully ignored a request. I have the highest gratitude and respect for anyone who reaches out to ask questions, no matter how busy we are. It has literally made me sick to realize that some people have had a different impression for several months now. Again, I'm sorry and I hope this is read by anyone affected.

Thanks for reading.

[Zaphod]

OMG. As a small business I could not imagine, I would be intensely fired up about that for all the reasons you mentioned. Terrible thing to happen and hope it doesnt affect you too much rep wise. Gotta watch our tech I guess, but hard when we dont really know how it works.

[VagabondMD]

From the client perspective, I had something similar happen when I made an inquiry to Doctor'a Crossing (Heather Fork) for physical career transition coaching. I made an inquiry did not hear back and, eventually, forgot about it. Months later, I received an extremely apologetic email from Heather, who offered a free introductory session as a make-up. Apparently, her email inquiry routing app had a glitch, and my email slipped through the crack.

I took Heather up on her offer, we had a great first conversation, and I have been a happy client ever since, going on two years. (I highly recommend Heather if you need this service.)

So, Johanna, no worries, people will understand, and you can still turn some of those inquiries into clients.  

[jfoxcpacfp]

Thanks for the encouragement, Zaphod and Vagabond MD, especially your experience, Vagabond MD. I am still thinking about how best to approach this in our call today as I really have no way to measure the damage. These things happen, not the end of the world, but terribly upsetting. I will focus on being thankful we were alerted to it now rather than a year from now.