There are all types of people in the world, and so it should stand to reason that you can’t expect every single one of them to use your service or product in the “right” or “proper” way all the time. Sometimes people will violate your terms of service in obvious or egregious ways. Other times, it will be an accident and they won’t even know they are doing it. Either way, though, if it comes to the attention of your company, someone will have to handle it, and normally that someone will be the support team. So, what’s the best way to do it?
Being bureaucratic and explaining your terms of service, rather than accusing a customer of knowing and making the choice to break them is always going to be a better route. Rather than assigning blame to anyone, instead try to find out what the customer was looking to accomplish and how you can help them do that in a way that falls within your terms. Here’s an example: at one company where I worked, we would occasionally have people that would use the API to create hundreds of items within our product all at once.
This kind of hammering at the API would actually slow the whole infrastructure down as it tried to handle the bandwidth. There were, basically, only two things that could be happening when this occurred: first, someone could have made an incorrect API call and not realize what they were doing or, second, someone is trying to spam someone by completely incapacitating their account. One of our tenets of good support was “assume positive intent,” and that was no different with things like this. Here’s how we’d answer, so maybe you can take it and run with it:
Hey there,
My name’s [blank] and I do [blank] here at [company]. I wanted to reach out because I noticed that you had some unusually high activity via the API which actually exceeds our usage guidelines. Could you share a bit more information with me about what you’re trying to accomplish? I’m wondering if I might be able to help you find a way to do what you’re looking to do while still staying within the boundaries of our terms of service.
If I don’t hear back from you or the activity doesn’t stop within the next 24 hours, I will, unfortunately, have to take action on your account by creating a temporary freeze on your API keys. That will mean that you will not be able to do anything via the API or programmatically (including using Zapier) until I remove the freeze.
Hopefully we can chat soon! Thanks!
While it might be slightly different for you and whatever the main issues with your product are, the important pieces are:
While it may seem like bullying when receiving an email that tells them bad news or that they’ve done something wrong many people won’t respond. That gives them an incentive to explain things so that you can get a dialogue started.