Blackberry, IT and Tech Accountability
So Blackberry users have suffered a couple of days without service, I remember switching a client to Gmail and then the very next day Gmail suffered on of it’s worst outages ever. Many NComp@ss clients have themselves suffered outages from email and website hosting services.
And I sympathise with all and everyone affected by any issue in which a standard technology feature stops working as expected.
But there are no answers and this is extremely worrying… we’re all glad when something starts working again, we heave a sign of relief, cross our fingers and hope it does not happen again, after a few months we blot it from our memories. But where are the official explanations.
‘Oh a server went down’ – did it indeed – why? what caused it? will it happen again? a simple statement just initiates a wealth of questions. Where’s the liability, reliability and accountability?
Engineers fix things and we hope they know what they are doing – they should do they are Google after all an 11 year old company of ‘brilliance’ – are we mis-placing our faith somewhere? Makes you wonder.
What is required is a procedure from the moment a service stops working, a responsibility on part of the provider, they love taking our data, mobile numbers, addresses, money… now it’s time to use of it. There should be automatic system in place so that if a core service goes down – we’re told (most Blackberry uses only found out via the News Channels). We also need to be give a time scale – wrong or right – it’s better to have an idea at least of when things might get back to normal. And final we paying customer deserve a full explanation.
So – my recommended procedure would be:
- When a service goes down – customers need to be informed before they find out.
- During the failure customers need to be given updates and estimated times for repairs
- After the service is repaired – customers need a full explanation
- If required customers need to be pro-actively compensated
Companies who adhere to these simple steps might well find that regardless of the negative publicity – their honesty and clear ability to support customers in their hour of need might well reward them in the long term.
Now time for me to explain what’s been happening here are NCompass – I shall reserve that for my next post. Keep reading if that is your will.