Lessons from C I Host, NaviSite - Handling a "PR Nightmare"

Though the incidents themselves were very different, their impact on each company's relationship with its customers was nearly identical - in a nutshell "my website is down and I want it back up."

Outrage is an interesting thing. It sometimes seems that a certain percentage of people are inclined to be outraged about just about anything. And I have no doubt that a certain percentage of the customers a Web host deals with in a given day is going to be angry, regardless of how good the company's service is.

This hardly falls into that category, however. In each of these cases, messageboards, blogs and - most interestingly, from a publishing-a-website perspective - the comment sections of the stories we've run on both issues have been spilling over with customers venting their frustration and recounting their own personal tales of lost service, lost business or unresponsive hosts.

And in both cases, the complaints seem to have a lot to do with the confusion surrounding the problems. Customers of both companies - in some cases, people whose sites had been offline for as much as a week - seem most concerned with the fact that they're not getting the kind of explanation they want from their service providers.

There are two sides to this kind of situation (or maybe there are more than two, but lets say for the sake of the next couple paragraphs that there are two).

On the one hand, obviously neither of these companies wanted their services to go down. Obviously, both companies want to get those customers back online as fast as possible. I can only imagine that in both cases, the company threw everything it had at the problem of getting things back online (we can probably all agree - priority number one for a Web host).

And yes, that's priority number one for customers too. But customers also want to know they're being treated honestly.

The other side of these situations is that hosts too often seem to want to cover up or downplay the mistakes they might have made. I wouldn't implicate any host in particular here. It seems that almost every time there's an outage, customers report having to fight to get the cause of the disruption out of their hosts. Sometimes they point to explanations they believe to be outright lies. Those claims may or may not be true, but they illustrate the point - confusion is a problem.

A major outage isn't exactly a find-the-silver-lining sort of situation. You'd probably spend a lot of time looking for it and not come up with much. But a problem is always, at least, an opportunity for a company to demonstrate to customers that it's ready to handle a problem.

In a conversation with theWHIR, C I Host's chief corporate counsel James Eckles said "we're just as victimized as our customers."

NaviSite's chief marketing officer Rathin Sinha said "If we look at this issue as something where unanticipated things happened and the company did everything it could to resolve that and restore services, I think that is where the focus ought to be. And that's where most of our customers focused."

Neither of these is an outright offensive point of view, or blatant buck-passing per se, but I'd bet neither one is exactly what their customers are waiting to hear.

A little free PR advice from somebody who sees a lot of PR: if it sounds like spin, it's not very good spin.

Better than any spin, in my opinion, is transparency.

A great example of that is the major outage DreamHost suffered about 16 months ago (you can read our article about it here). The company used its blog to keep customers appraised of the situation at every turn, and assure them that it was doing everything it could to fix things. It left posts and comments up, creating a forum for customers to discuss things. And it took responsibility for the mistake.

Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of customers who offered up opinions on the incident were understanding and even grateful.

At the time, Seth Godin summed it up really well by writing:

"Lesson one: when things get messed up, being clear, self-critical and apologetic is really the only way to deal with customers if you expect them to give you another chance."

It's important to understand that if you fail to deliver on your services, you could end up backing up your relationships with customers to the point where you're basically selling them on your services again. A good start would be giving them a reason to trust you.

This past Sunday and Monday, separate incidents at Rackspace caused significant outages. Now, Rackspace is quite a bit bigger than DreamHost, but it took much the same tack, keeping customers appraised of its repair process, and most importantly, remaining accountable.

In one of its posts (which are still up on the company's site), the company said another thing I'd like to borrow to help make my point:

"We cannot promise that hardware won't break, that software won't fail or that we will always be perfect. What we can promise is that if something goes wrong we will rise to the occasion, take action, resolve the issue and accept responsibility. If you are a Rackspace customer and don't think we've lived up to this promise at anytime during the outage, please let your Account Manager know."

I'm not really interested in making any distinctions between the quality of the services Rackspace provides and those provided by C I Host or NaviSite, or any other host for that matter.

But I do think that even though the company is living through a very comparable situation, I'd be surprised if Rackspace lost many customers over this outage.