It’s good to have a number of ways to communicate with clients, punters and everyone
else around your organisations. Case in point, today PayPerPost had an outage when
they tried getting their new servers online. Turns out they blew the power supply
to their data centre because of the load their new boxes placed on the circuits. Within
moments, the PayPerPost Boards were buzzing
with people trying to find out what’s going on and within a few more minutes, PayPerPost
staff were updating everyone with what was going on.
It turns out that the problem was something that was out of their control, and keeping
everyone involved meant that there was little interference in the message they put
out. Everyone was patient until the problem was resolved and it was a good experience
for everyone around. The lesson? Keep people informed. Noone’s going to blame you
for circumstances out of your control, but if you don’t tell people what’s going on,
things quickly escalate out of control.