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

Mon Apr 27 17:13:05 UTC 2009

William McCall wrote:

> I should have clarified. Third party physical control isn't necessarily the
> issue, but third party administration and delivery (in the context of
> twitter) is.
> 
> Dedicated servers are cheap and you can maintain control of the content.

But useless if the customer's data connection is down and their local 
cell phones are the only remaining method of communication.

If 25% of our users would check their twitter feed first and let their 
boss know "They are aware of the problem and this is the ETR", that 
means the other 75% who are trying to call have less competition getting 
that same update from a human (or our auto-attendant).

We're never going to tweet every down T1 because those are easy to 
manage the customer contacts for and also not of interest to 99% of our 
customers. I'm really only talking about the outages that would affect 
the majority of customers where proactive notification isn't feasible 
(by the time you've made it 10% through your list, you've already 
received calls from 95% of the people who want such notifications anyway 
because they all called at the same time, right when it stopped working...).

Mike