OOB customer communications (Re: Looking for Support Contact at Equifax)

Mon Apr 27 04:18:09 UTC 2009

William McCall wrote:
> I could see someone complaining about the idea of letting a third party
> carry outage info like that... at least in my environment.
How else do you propose getting outage information to your customers?

If the information provider is under your control (not a 3rd party), 
then whatever took out your primary services (internet services, phone 
services) might also take out your access to the outage channel that is 
under your control (e.g. fat-fingered admin messes up an ACL).

I *like it* when my service provider has an OOB network outage channel.  
My biggest complaint has been with networks that setup a channel like 
this but then get "too busy" during an outage to make use of it.  If you 
are going to setup a channel like this, make sure you use it.  Also, if 
you post a partial update, make sure you follow up with more information 
when you have it.  Some of us read the archives to see if this 
information was posted and followed-up on in a timely fashion, to 
evaluate the outage reporting service record before signing up.

Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> If your email and phone communications are down due to a connectivity
> break, and your customers get connectivity from you [assume no backup
> links, by default .. you'd be surprised at how many smaller customers
> get by with a single link and no backups at all.  If their
> connectivity is down too - they just cant get to twitter right?
Um... what about text messages to these newfangled cell phone thingies? 

http://www.ehow.com/how_2075926_use-twitter-cell-phone.html

Unless you are AT&T or Comcast (or similar) and your customers have 
U-Verse or Comcast Triple Play (or similar) it has to be a fairly 
widespread outage to take out your customer's landlines, internet, and 
cell phones too.  If your network has that big of an outage, your 
customers can follow the outage news updates on the radio.

jc