A couple of weeks ago, the main broadband service provider experienced a major meltdown which affected Internet access to nearly all subscribers. What everyone assumed to be a temporary outage became FOUR loooong days sans broadband connection!

Granted, you could still connect via dialup and via the competition's newly launched 3.5G wireless internet, but many were still left Internet-less because, like me, they were thinking: "No need to buy prepaid dialup card or 3.5G starter pack. The connection will be up any moment now..." That moment did not come until four days later, of course.

Judging from the various reactions in the blogosphere regarding this shortage, it was akin to a water shortage or electricity outage. Yes, folks, The Internet has become a utility service!

What also became apparent was the need for service providers to be more transparent to the customer about what's going on. As Berakas puts it: "I just wish that telbru and E-speed would actually just let us know what's wrong and how long they expect repairs to finish. None of their Web sites actually lets us know anything apart from the 'promise' of providing services to us. A bit of information will go a long, long way to alleviate the frustrations the users face."

Another fellow blogger, LSM (who thankfully is in Japan so he did not suffer the effects of the outage, the lucky sod!), said: "I understand that such a widespread outage is not only inconvenient for customers, but also very bad for business as it comes soon after the competitive price reduction. But for goodness sake, did they have to send the email four times?! It might as well have read along the lines of 'Hi! This is TelBru! We're awfully sorry about the downtime, but everything's fine now! And to prove that the bandwidth is back, we're going to spam your inbox'!"

My take on the whole episode was: It has been a LOOONG time since E-speed has been down for more than 24 hours... This SUCKS big time! If anything, I hope and pray that this is a lesson well learned by our friends at E-speed that "no contingency is a bad contingency". Guys, I know you're doing your darndest to bring things back to normal, but right now I could just about kick someone! AAARRGGGHH!!

I do foresee, however, that despite having all the contingencies in place, Murphy's Law is bound to kick in, and the same scenario will play itself out all over again. I guess the strategy here is to be better prepared to manage customers' frustrations and offer alternatives.

 

whitey
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