OOB customer communications (Re: Looking for Support Contact at Equifax)
On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 11:18 PM, JC Dill <jcdill.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
How else do you propose getting outage information to your customers?
I should have clarified. Third party physical control isn't necessarily the issue, but third party administration and delivery (in the context of twitter) is. Dedicated servers are cheap and you can maintain control of the content. Its not quite the same as using twitter or other third party SaaS that is similar (which can, invariably, control the content at its whim and is a nightmare to manage persons authorized to view such outage info, depending on the service) Or even a mailer that is outside of the scope of your service ops and permit only customers to subscribe. Again, its more about distribution in these environments. If I'm Company A, I really don't want to readily provide my competitor, Company B, with information on outages and a full history of it for them to use in some marketing device (which can't be compared because Company B does not publish their info, but instead provides some nice glossy-paper stats). Physical control certainly can't be the question.. or we'd have the same argument in circles, "If we have physical control, how can we ensure the outage doesn't affect this net too? Better question, why can't we fail over to the net that's working to send these notifications/updates for our down services if the net isn't affected?" That point is moot. My biggest complaint has been with networks that setup a channel like this
The way notifications should be distributed is in a proactive manner and followed up as a ticket or some other relevant mechanism. Implementing a process like this is trivial in many environments. Incident response should, in most cases, include a mechanism like this that has already been deployed today. Modifications (technically speaking) should not be a big issue. --WJM IV
William McCall wrote:
But useless if the customer's data connection is down and their local cell phones are the only remaining method of communication. If 25% of our users would check their twitter feed first and let their boss know "They are aware of the problem and this is the ETR", that means the other 75% who are trying to call have less competition getting that same update from a human (or our auto-attendant). We're never going to tweet every down T1 because those are easy to manage the customer contacts for and also not of interest to 99% of our customers. I'm really only talking about the outages that would affect the majority of customers where proactive notification isn't feasible (by the time you've made it 10% through your list, you've already received calls from 95% of the people who want such notifications anyway because they all called at the same time, right when it stopped working...). Mike
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Mike Lewinski <mike@rockynet.com> wrote:
service that provides SMS functionality without having to have it in a public forum. This still allows you to maintain control of who is seeing it without trying to figure out which customer BigDaddyPimpin is on Twitter. Depending on your situation, you really might not want all of those outage updates to become someone else's information. If you don't have much competition against your business model, it might make sense to provide this. If you have competitors ranging from sleazy snake oil to overpriced big name, this data becomes a good source of your operations for your competitors to use in whatever way they like.
And if your argument holds true, those 95% didn't bother to check twitter. They called you anyway. And remember, you still have that website thats hosted offsite, offnet. And you still control it. Twitter doesn't magically change the way information is delivered just because its twitter. It does change who is ultimatly in control of the content. --WJM IV
participants (2)
-
Mike Lewinski -
William McCall