Blackberry a learning opportunity for everyone in support

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None of us in the Software support community take any pleasure from outages – even to competitors. As a profession, we are all diminished a little when a team of fellow professionals is hit by unforeseen events whether a tsunami or a hardware failure and the spotlight falls on the difficulties of our profession.

 

However, being support engineers at heart, we all do have a detached professional interest, in fact a duty, to learn what we can from the travails of others. The technical details of the two day outage for some Blackberry services are not something I could or would comment on.

What I did pay attention to was the media furore which followed the loss of a service which many customers regard as essential and the very public criticism of the company management. To me, the issue boiled down to a perception that the service providers were not very visible to their customers at their time of need.

There are lessons for all of us here around technical support which fails to take into account the speed of Social Media and the brand impact of potential outages.

When a customer calls for our help, we realise that a loss of your IT services is an issue every bit as important to you as a media frenzy is to a CEO. The last thing you need is a communication black hole, which is why our ‘Touch and Hold’ strategy is so important to us. Our goal is to keep you informed throughout the resolution process, where possible having a single point of contact able to update you on what we are doing now, plan to do and when you can expect to be back up and running.

The fact is that neither we, nor any enterprise software vendor, can ever give a cast iron guarantee that things will not go wrong, but rest assured we take every ‘learning opportunity’ very seriously, so, as you would expect, we are reviewing once again our escalation and customer feedback procedures. We are also trying to be very open and using techniques like this blog, our Twitter feed, Facebook account and other two-way communication, we hope to give our customers a complete range of ways to interact with us.

Please don’t feel you have to wait until an issue arises to contact us, it would be good to hear what your organisation has taken from issues like the Blackberry incident and I would love to know how you think my team is doing at communicating with you.