"Hey everyone, our system went down"

Well we're almost in March and I am only onto my second blog post and haven't proceeded very far with any of the other new year resolutions either.  It's been a bit of a hectic and not all positive February, which is my excuse for not updating the blog as well as not cutting down on the alcohol.

This month saw us have our first customer affecting issue in around two years of providing conference call services.  Providing *reliable* conference call services is our core business and we differentiate ourselves from other low-cost teleconference providers by focusing on the audio quality and the stability of our systems, so any issue is a big deal for us.    

This particular issue wasn't as bad as it could have been, our services were still available and working for the majority of customers, but some were experiencing intermittent disconnects and having to re-dial back into the conference.  We had identified there was an issue before the first support ticket came in and had established the problem was with one of the providers of our UK geographic dial-in numbers.  The provider (who will remain anonymous) acknowledged they had an issue and their engineers were working on it.  They were unable to provide an ETA for resolution.

This left us with a difficult question that I haven't faced since my days in IT management:

Do we notify the customers?

Before I go into the thought process around this, I will let you know that we did notify our customers.  We already have a policy in place that in the event of any issue we send out a service status message to all of our customers letting them know.  I believe that being honest with the customers will ultimately pay off in the long run, but that still doesn't make the process any less painful.

The temptation that I had to overcome was that we have several thousand customers signed up to our services; some daily users of our services and some occasional users.  If we say only 10% of our total customers are using the service at any one time (this is pretty much a guesstimate) and only 10% of those were effected by this intermittent issue, that means only 1% of our total customers would ever actually experience the problem - even less if the problem was resolved quickly.

So, we could sit quiet and deal with individual support requests from the 1% of customers that were effected and not have to admit to the other 99% that we were having issues.  Or, we can send an e-mail to everybody letting them know we have problems.

The temptation to do the former was great and I have to admit that I almost faltered, but having done the later and received feedback from our user base who re-scheduled their calls as not to be effected it was definitely the right thing to do.

Whether publishing this blog post to the rest of the internet letting them know we had a problem is a good idea remains to be seen.  I guess by being honest with your customer base (both current and potential) means you do not fall into the trap of not dealing with the actual issues because you got away with them the first time with good PR, deceit or by simply burying your head in the sand.