Has anyone forgotten the Blackberry Blackout yet? It was more than two months ago, after all, and memories fade, especially in such a fast moving industry. And it wasn’t much more than three days out of a lifespan of more than eight years (the first Blackberry smartphone was released in 2003), but I bet that if you had a conversation with someone where the word ‘Blackberry’ came up, one of the first things that would be mentioned would be the network outage.
One of the big problems for RIM was that the outage hit the vendor where it hurt most, in the area that customers had the highest expectations for the company: the provision of a secure and reliable messaging service. As Forrester analyst Charles Golvin told The Wall Street Journal: "The attributes that allow [RIM] to hold on to customers are the attributes that these outages damage most drastically: Blackberry will always deliver your e-mail in real time." In the same article, Deutsche Post AG spokesman Dirk Klasen said the situation was "simply making people angry hanging around for hours to get access to their e-mail services".
So here’s the thing: a company which pretty much based its ethos on communication (and rapid communication at that), was seen to be failing on two counts. It failed in its duty to provide a communication network for its customers and, once the problem occurred, it was perceived to have failed in communicating information about the outage to its customers in a timely manner. When you have people trying to find out what has gone wrong with the network, it’s a good idea to make sure you give them enough information (in the right way) to help reassure them and to manage their expectations.
Emer Breathnach, commercial and sales director at Sharptext, says that when you’re in the business of delivering products and services, everybody accepts there will be delays affecting the flow of delivery based on outages, disruption, transport, or circumstances beyond anybody’s control (such as last year’s extreme weather conditions and ash cloud – remember them?). The issue is how you manage that acceptance when something goes wrong.
To Breathnach, timely and accurate updates can help a vendor, distributor or reseller "to turn a negative situation or problem into a better customer experience". She argues people are reasonable and can deal with delays, provided they are kept up to date on what is happening and when it will be rectified. "The recent Blackberry incident caused such frustration and outrage simply because this did not happen," she says.
Patricia McGrath, marketing manager at Sage (and a Blackberry user), says she wasn’t that badly affected because she was in the office when the outage occurred. Nevertheless, she says it’s important, if there is an issue, for a vendor to protect the brand by communicating to the customer with a level of consistency. To her, the onus is on the vendor to do that and if the vendor is seen to be in control of the situation it gives the customer confidence in the brand and enhances its credibility.
If the vendor sells through business partners and resellers, they will have a role to play at the frontline or fielding calls or e-mails and it will need to ensure the message they relay to the customer is consistent with what the vendor is saying. "In an ideal world, the vendor leads and supports the distributor, the business partner and the in-house operational team," she says.
Social skills
Social media is the big disruptive force which is taking on a much larger role in how bad news is communicated (and the speed with which it is disseminated) and how companies respond. Adrian Kelly, managing director at Blue Neptune, says that the age of social media means "bad news travels further and faster than ever before, so every business has to use social media to fight the fire as well as to sell. The damage that was done to the Blackberry brand through industry gossip alone is very significant. Although the number of users affected was relatively small in the overall scheme of things – every smartphone user was talking about it."
He agrees with McGrath that the vendor has the biggest role to play in these situations. "Only the vendor knows what the exact status of the problem is, so it must be able to communicate to public and channel alike, very fast. The ability to communicate quickly, clearly and consistently without big gaps between updates does give an edge to future sales efforts and can save a huge loss of goodwill and lack of confidence in the technology or service that was affected."
The other point to make about outages such as those that affected Blackberry and Microsoft’s Office 365 service is that they are often viewed in a much wider context. With so much emphasis on the move to cloud, any outage is bound to attract significant attention. "Relying solely on someone else’s service is one of the major objections to businesses embracing cloud services," Kelly says, "so an incident like this and how it is managed by the vendor in question is watched very carefully by everyone as an indicator of what they could be facing if the cloud service they are using or considering should fail."
And that’s a very important point. It’s not just the outage itself (which can often be significantly over-exaggerated in any case) but how companies respond to it. Perhaps more worrying for the industry is that the response is seen not just in terms of a particular company’s own service but helps to frame how customers perceive the overall delivery of similar services.
‘Crass’
It’s probably worth adding at this point that opportunistic marketing may not be the best way to respond to these types of scenarios. In the security sphere, for example, customers might not be enamoured of a vendor that rushes out a press release or piece of marketing material trying to turn a security issue into a sales opportunity. Dermot Williams, managing director of Threatscape, says it’s best to avoid the temptation because it can appear crass. A very apt choice of word as he reveals the origins of ‘crass’ can be particularly pertinent when applied to the security industry.
Back in Roman times, the richest man in Rome was a man called Crassus who gained his wealth by assembling a team of firemen and turning up at houses when they were on fire. He would offer to buy the house for a knock-down price from the occupants, often while they were trying to drag out their possessions. If they refused, he would let the house burn down. If they agreed, his men would put out the fire and he would be the proud owner of a new house bought for a song.
"It’s the first and worst example of opportunistic sales," Williams says, and it’s a story he tells his sales force to ensure they don’t follow Crassus’ example. A surprising number of companies in the security sphere also avoid the rush to exploit these types of incidents. Typically, they will supply a free solution to an especially fast spreading virus and suggest people come back and look at their product once the issue has been addressed. "That’s a far more measured and responsible way to do it," Williams argues.
Michael Conway, director at Renaissance, agrees. "Over-reaction comes from people that don’t understand [what’s going on], so they have to over-react. It’s better to take a sensible, pragmatic approach and to put everything in proportion." And while security companies may be able to exploit a headline security breach to "make a quick buck, they will never make a second buck".
Credentials
Taking a measured approach also means trying not to respond to every single instance of malware, Williams says. In 2010, for example, Symantec detected 286 million samples of malware. Obviously it didn’t issue 286 million instances to its clients. It’s important to issue warnings and to sound the alarm only when it needs to be done because if there are too many people will start to ignore them and that’s the last thing you want. "You don’t want to be pressing the panic button every time you see something the least bit suspicious," he warns.
Williams cites the example of the managed security service Symantec provides to large enterprises. During one three month period there were 3 billion log entries taken from all the networks of one company. These were distilled down to 11,000 and the reviewed by human analysts who weeded them down to 200. In the end, Symantec contacted the organisation to take action 20 times.
While businesses like Threatscape have strong security credentials, Conway at Renaissance says many resellers in Ireland don’t and they tend to push back to the distributors and vendors if they get asked for security advice by customers. The onus is on the distributor and vendor to provide them with the information they require for their customers. Conway says it’s often a case of looking at what’s appropriate to an Irish context and advising resellers of threats, risks and vulnerabilities. Typically, resellers are acting as brokers or intermediaries for social media networks and information feeds from distributors and vendors to their customers.
Not that vendors would complain about such a state of affairs because it helps to maintain consistency and gives them greater control over the information flowing out. A closed Twitter account for distributors and business partners, for example, can get information out to them quickly and in the way the vendor wants it to be delivered.
Vendors can also encourage partners to share updates to blog posts on their web sites or to re-tweet them or post them on Facebook. But it’s here where the reseller can add some value by choosing to post or re-tweet the information which is particularly relevant to its customer base and leave out whatever is not.
But if something does go wrong, Kelly at Blue Neptune says that communication channels such as e-mail, websites and social media can be used to help contain the bad publicity and customer frustration. At the same time, they can also reinforce the positive messages and the image of the company which all its marketing has created up to that point.
Speed
The speed with which updates can be posted using Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, can help to ensure people don’t get frustrated waiting for news. How a vendor reacts to an outage can be critical to the future success of the business. Kelly cites the example of an Irish Internet service hosting company that suffered a technical problem during an upgrade to its SAN infrastructure which led to the loss of a hosted e-mail service for hundreds of small businesses for a whole Monday.
By running a continuous update feed on its website, tweeting regular updates and sending out e-mails, it was able to pacify its customers who felt they weren’t being left in the dark. They could see the company was working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. "The outcome was that people could feel that they were being considered and the business in question didn’t look like it was disorganised or incompetent," Kelly says, "despite the fact it was experiencing an outage which was seriously inconveniencing many of its customers."
A good example for RIM to take heed of if something similar ever occurs again. And there’s another issue Kelly brings up, the need to reassure the customer that whatever went wrong, it won’t happen again and to make sure all parts of the supply chain can provide that response. "The worst possible situation is where a customer is asking a reseller for an update on ‘what happened with that outage a few weeks ago’ or ‘how can you reassure me this won’t happen again’ and there is no clear, simple and honest answer available."
Even if the news is not good, customers want answers not fudge. "The days of responding badly are over," Conway cautions. "Businesses are not interested in a bad response."
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