The Price of Failure

Ok. Who thinks that their web site/web service will be up all the time? If you absolutely depend on online presence you have to go one step further for your users. 37 Signals, the leading 2.0 site, went down and Dreamhost went down as well. We deal with companies in the financial services sector that have extensive plans in place for such outages. Yes, I know most 2.0 firms and smaller hosting companies don't have the customer service staff to man the phones, but you don't always have to. A simple outbound message to the end users phone giving them the message, and a sense of how long the delay will be, would go a long way to alleviating anxiety. AND I suspect that showing that you are more than a web site by going "out of band" would go a long way towards increasing your brand equity with them (fancy way of saying, "everybody fears that the services they use will fail, but if you recover very strongly and with great integrity, you will not only win loyal customers, but advocates"). "Our agents await your call!"....

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact