OK, we'll admit it. A few of us here have the "CrackBerry" problem. We're addicted. So, we're a little concerned about the possible shutdown stemming from the lawsuit between RIM (Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry) and a small company called NTP.
From everything we've read, it seems that the way we use our BlackBerrys here -- accessing POP3 email accounts -- won't be affected either way. But wouldn't it be great if our cellular providers actually TOLD us that?
One person in our office tonight called their cell provider (we won't pick on anyone by name here, tempting as it is) and asked what would happen should an injunction be issued. The good news? After being on hold for only about five minutes (!), the answer was "no problem. There are available workarounds should a shutdown be ordered. Your service will continue."
That's great news! Our thought: that's the kind of news you should proactively share with your customers.
A quick office survey revealed that no carrier that any of us work with has proactively contacted their BlackBerry customers (if there's a carrier that has, we'd like to hear from you). Let us recommend a communication strategy -- if your company sells BlackBerry service, send an email or SMS to your BlackBerry customers and tell them everything's going to be OK.
Like Jules said in Pulp Fiction (with the "colorful" language edited for this family blog), "All I wanna hear is, 'You ain't got no problem, Jules. I'm on the (expletive deleted)!'" That's how most of us CrackBerry addicts feel, yet there is a strange wall of silence from the industry.
Our recommendation is to be as forthcoming as possible in all such situations. If your company is facing an issue, your customers are facing an issue. Tell them the score as best you can.
In this case, if there's a workaround and the worst case is a brief outage, tell us. If you're really not sure, but you're working on it, tell us. If it's really bad, give us some options. We're more likely to stick with a company that shows a willingness to help than one that seemed the last to know.
In the end, any company eventually has to handle whatever situation arises. You can either handle your customers when they're angry, your switchboards overloaded and your people are getting screamed at, or you can be proactive, keep people informed and manage (rather than react to) a situation.
And consider your audience. BlackBerry users tend to be reasonably tech savvy and informed. We know what's happening and what the results might mean. The only people that aren't talking about it are the people that we pay each month for the service.
Wouldn't it be great if a group of CrackBerry addicts were talking, and your customers said "You haven't been contacted by your carrier? Really? Mine sends me regular updates, and I know I've got nothing to worry about." When contracts are expired, we'd place bets on some new business flowing toward that company.
In the end, this probably even makes sound economic sense. In addition to being a good idea, it might even be cheaper to push a few SMS or email messages to affected customers than handle calls from even five to 10 percent of them (especially when the customer service rep we talked to had to ask for the information...so the call was just more than five minutes long). Since this provider is able to send "courtesy reminders" via SMS if a payment is more than 24 hours late (no exaggeration!), they certainly have the ability to keep some of their highest value customers informed of a potential situation.
We're curious why they're choosing not to do so.
Comments