A month after we bought the business we only had two developers. And because we have some heavy users of our platform, they see instantaneously when things go down. So we had customers calling us immediately, some customers were calling my mobile because I had just spoken with them. Once they realise they’re trying to send messages and they can’t, they don’t hesitate in calling and letting us know. The smaller users didn’t notice so much, but if you were trying to use it, then yeah, you found out straight away.
I don’t think there’s a right formula. It leaves you quite helpless. But I’m a big believer in old-fashioned customer service. It doesn’t matter how entrenched in online you get, for most businesses customer service looks different but it’s ultimately the driver of business and growth. In this instance it was about letting them understand what it meant and letting them know when we would expect to be updated, and just giving them all the information we had available at that time.
If people feel like they’re informed, and given all the information they can get, they have leniency and faith. They only need a few intermittent issues to raise eyebrows.
It happened on a Saturday afternoon, and Sunday through to Thursday were just full of face-to-face meetings, a lot of communication and letting people know what had occurred, and what steps we were taking to make sure it didn’t happen again. By the Monday night I was explaining to shareholders and the board and advisors what was happening.
There’s a few. One of them is to just plan for the worst. Obviously hope for the best, but you need to plan for the worst. The reality is that data centres get turned off from time to time, not often, but it happens, and you just need to be prepared for it. We’re a small business, and we need to prepare for it.
Since that time we’ve never had an unplanned outage. So you just need to make sure you have your security covered.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
