If our experience at Ministry Health Care is an indicator, enterprises may be transitioning from Internet Explorer (IE) to Google Chrome as the browser of the future.

The problem for IE is not about being an inferior browser (although I am sure that will be argued in the comments). But, enterprises like ours have a lot of early generation web apps that were built to run specifically on older versions of IE. This has prevented us from upgrading IE to more recent versions.

At the same time we are implementing a lot of new web apps (like Workday) that demand a modern browser. Since we can’t upgrade IE without breaking the legacy web apps, we are introducing a second browser: Chrome.

Over time we will have fewer and fewer apps running on IE and more apps running on Chrome.

Yammer is the internal social media platform we use in IT at Ministry Health Care. Recently there was a Yammer thread discussing the effectiveness of the communication surrounding the recent Yahoo email outage. Outage communication has been a focus for us and we like looking at what others are doing.

There were certainly a number of things that Yahoo did well. We thought that a communication from the CEO of the company set the right tone and it was written with a lot of authenticity. Sending an email from generic email accounts like the “IT help desk” would not have created the same level of goodwill.

But, I have two suggestions for Marissa Mayer:

1. Don’t refer to your customers as users. Customers are valued. They are the reason you exist. Everyone has a mental model of good customer support. This Yammer post summarizes it better than I could: “Call me a customer, a client, an associate, a staff member, even just ‘you’ but ‘user’ sounds technical and impersonal.” Even if those receiving your service aren’t the ones paying I believe it is important to constantly remind associates they are the reason we are here and their satisfaction supersedes our own.
2. A thank-you is better than an apology. There were a lot of apologies in the Yahoo communications. I believe it is a better approach to thank customers for their loyalty and patience while recognizing the inconvenience and letting customers know that you are working day and night until everything is fixed. When you thank someone you are recognizing them. When you apologize you are denigrating your performance. Save apologies for intentional acts, not mistakes.