You’ve worked really hard to provide a service that people depend on – they use it every day for a key personal or business task. They’ve built some sort of value on your service so now you’re part of their value chain. One day you have some sort of technical problems and your service goes down for a few hours. All those people who depend on your service are out in the cold. They’ve built something using your service, so now they’re putting their own customers out in the cold too. What happens?
I try to provide links and information that are I think are worthwhile through my Twitter feed. In order to do this and still get work done every day, I read through my RSS feeds, select stories and then schedule the tweets to go out intermittently throughout the day. Then I’m able to concentrate on other things I need to do to run my business (like billable time, etc.). To do this, I’ve used SocialOomph (previously known as TweetLater) for several months because they have some nice features (scheduling at any time, distributing tweets over a time period, etc.).
Yesterday morning SocialOomph was down for awhile. None of my tweets were going out – including the feed from my blog posts. I had three options: 1) wait for SocialOomph to come back up – no notification of when that would be 2) tweet everything by hand or 3) look for an alternative. I had some other things I needed to get done yesterday and I would prefer not to have my own service drop, so I looked for alternatives.
Having used HootSuite several months ago, I already had it setup with my accounts and knew it would allow scheduled tweets. Once I logged in, I realized that they had added a number of new features in the months since I had used it – Features which made it a very attractive alternative to SocialOomph – so much so, that I’m not sure I’m going back (the jury is still out). Neither service is perfect, but I’ve found that HootSuite has overcome many of my objections to it before. And now I’m seriously considering it as my main service.
So the outage from SocialOomph caused me to go look for alternatives and now I may not be going back. What happens if you’re providing a service that people use all the time and they’ve come to rely on it and you have downtime? How many customers will you lose? Will you be able to get them back? My point in this post is not to cause some type of technological panic attack, but just to present the possibility. This type of thing happens offline as well – maybe an employee gets sick and no one is able to open your store – or you have a situation where you’re not able to do work – what happens?
I think there are ways to mitigate the loss of customers – primarily by communicating to them while the problem is happening so they know the situation and when you might be back. In the case of SocialOomph, if I had received an email or they had a message on their website regarding the issue and when they would have been back, I may not have gone looking for an alternative (depending on the length of time). Obviously another way is to provide something they can’t find elsewhere – or to charge for your service so they’ll inflict additional costs by going with another provider (although you usually have to provide service for a charge, so you may incur refunds). It seems like brand equity would also be helpful – by providing excellent customer service and having a great reputation, people would be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Communication & Reputation seem to be good ways to mitigate loss during downtimes. What other ways do you think would work?
(photo by Tom Gazpacho @ FlickrCC)
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Technorati tags: customer service, brand, customer experience, business,marketing strategy, marketing
