Our philosophy here at Mio Partnerz is to do the best job that we can for our customers in every thing we do. To us that entails being proactive with our customer service. This includes the management of our servers, making sure that backups are doubled and tripled and work properly. It includes answering emails and phone calls as quickly as possible and it means keeping our users informed. As part of our standard procedures for system problems, we have decided to be ulta-transparent using both this blog and our @mioworks twitter account. It seems that this decision may have back-fired on us this past week…..
Last week we experienced a small issue that caused us to take action. Only a fraction of our customer sites were impacted but we wanted to provide information on what was going on so there was no worry and no question that our team was solving the problems. As soon as we were alerted of the problem we sprang to action. Our system administrator dove into the cloud feet first while the back office started disseminating information with blog posts and twitter messages. The impact to the system was minimal and everything was recovered in 10 minutes. We all felt good about our ability to respond and completely reroute production servers to our our standby environment in less then 10 minutes.
I heard a few things later in the week that made me wonder if transparency is good or bad? Several people came up to me at Lunch 2.0 and questioned the stability of the platform, sighting that they saw on twitter that the system was experiencing an issue. I received emails from people who decided not to sign up for the beta because we proactively announced what was going on. If we kept quiet and let clients flap in the wind….the new clients would never have seen a thing…well unless someone else started a twitter-fest. So there is my question to those of you who read this blog. What do you think about transparency? Is it good or bad? Can this hurt a small young company like ours, even though we feel it showcases our ability to respond and provide superior service?
…..David
