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RIM's BlackBerry Outage: Nine Ways to Restore Enterprise Goodwill

By Don Reisinger on 2011-10-25


Research In Motion’s BlackBerry services outage, which left some users worldwide without Email and messaging for more than a day, was a public relations challenge for the company, and an event that some analysts say could have a dramatic impact on RIM's future. It remains to be seen whether RIM's plans for a host of new "superphones" running the BBX operating system will help it regain market share regain market share . Meanwhile, RIM tried last week to make things right by offering consumers free apps worth $100 and giving enterprise users a free month of technical support. The company also apologized profusely, saying that it let customers down. The outages left out in the cold those CIOs who have held the line on requiring RIM's smartphones and accompanying BlackBerry Enterprise Servers as the best enterprise options for secure corporate mobility. Here are our nine suggestions for things we’d like to see RIM do for its enterprise users to restore goodwill in the wake of its BlackBerry services outage.

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Extended Free Tech Support
RIM’s decision to offer free technical support was a good one. However, the company’s decision to only offer it for a single month was a mistake. RIM would do well to offer free technical support to affected enterprises for a period of at least six months as a show of good faith.

Reduced Fees On BlackBerry Enterprise Server
BlackBerry Enterprise Server is an important solution for RIM’s business customers. The company could have cut prices on the solution for a short period of time, or offered affected customers discounts on license renewals. Sure, it would cut into revenue, but so will losing a boatload of customers because of this outage.

Effective Communications
As news spread about the BlackBerry service outage, RIM slowly spooled out updates on the issues to users around the world. Going forward, RIM would do well to improve how it communicates about any service issues that might arise.

Commit to Infrastructure Improvement
RIM explained that the BlackBerry outage was caused by a core switch failure within its infrastructure. RIM further said that although the system is designed to failover to a backup switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. We suggest that users need to hear the company promise the kinds of infrastructure improvements that will ensure such a long downtime doesn’t happen again.

The Ability to Choose Your Own Apps
RIM's make-good offer to give users $100 worth of apps came with caveats: RIM made only a select number of apps available as part of this offer, and then dictated when customers could access them. Why not give customers the option to download $100 worth of any apps they want whenever they want?

Discounted BlackBerry Pricing
The potential for customer churn is the biggest fallout from the outage, and something RIM hardly needs right now. Why not offer existing customers a rebate on their next BlackBerry purchase? Cash-strapped CIOs would especially like that, and it might help put the company's very latest devices into the hands of corporate users.

How About a Hotline for Enterprise Users?
In the future, a service hotline for enterprise customers would enable them to make the company quickly and easily aware of a problem. To the best of our knowledge, RIM hasn’t set up such a hotline in the wake of these outages.

"Denial" is a River in Egypt
RIM seems to be hoping that enterprise discontent over the BlackBerry outage will simply go away. But market share stats from multiple sources -- including ComScore and Nielsen -- show the company was already losing users even before the outages. We suggest the company would do well to face this reality head on.

A Credit For the Outage Period
If RIM doesn’t want to invest all the money it would take to implement what we’re suggesting in this slideshow, a simple solution would be to give a credit to customers for those days in which the service was out. It's a small gesture to make things right with customers.

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