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By Kirk Averett
By Kirk Averett
Online services *will* have outages like Facebook and Instagram recently. Even with nearly unlimited resources outages are unavoidable. From a customer’s perspective, what matters most during an outage? Here are 3 priorities that I’ve observed as a customer and as a provider:
1) Fast fixes
2) Open, accurate communication including a real apology
3) Believable reasons that the future will be better
All three are critical because the most important thing during the outage isn’t the outage, it is the relationship between the customer and the provider. The outage has put the relationship at risk. If it didn’t, the outage wouldn’t matter much. These priorities reflect the whole relationship and help reestablish trust when trust has been damaged.
Customers don’t love switching providers. They want the relationship to work. A customer that trusts their provider will stay longer — much longer — than one who does not. For service providers who thrive with repeat revenue, this is the life blood of success.
A few years ago the company where I worked experienced a painful outage and we studied the later impacts. Guess which customers were most likely to leave? The newest customers. The relationship was the most shallow and we lost their trust.
Later, we had a different problem that harmed a brand new, large customer. We went out of our way to provide deep communication during and after the issue. The event hurt the relationship, but it survived. Full trust can be rebuilt with enough time.
An outage doesn’t have to end what could be a great relationship.
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