Spit Happens

Things go wrong; there's nothing you can do to stop that. What makes the difference is how you handle it.

by Jason Zigmont HowToSell.net [December 3, 1999]

As I walked through the streets of my hometown recently, I saw a baby with a bib that boldly proclaimed 'Spit Happens.'

Corny, I know, but the phrase it's playing off comes up all too frequently around many ISP shops. Most of us have Murphy on our payroll whether we want him or not.

The ISP industry—and its 'cutting edge' technology—tends to have good and bad days. We've all had those days when the server goes south at 3 AM, or our favorite telco is attacked by a backhoe, or. . . . However, wthe way you handle the problems that arise makes all the difference in the business consequences.

The best policy
The key is to be honest. When disaster strikes, remember that it's not the end of the world, and even the biggest providers have problems. If you are honest and up front with your customers, you'll most likely discover that they are willing to accomodate a lot of the 'spit' that happens.

Many moons ago when I was first getting my feet wet in this ISP stuff, the ISP I was working at decided to move from our pile of USR Sportsters to a nice Microcomm ISPorte, which had great blinky lights. (They really did. An ISPorte on top of a Xyplex Network 9000, which was black with more blinky lights, looked very impressive.)

We decided it would be no problem to switch modems at 3 PM—a slow time for us—one by one. And so we did. (This happened to be our largest POP—over 750 users calling into it—which in 1996 was sizable in Connecticut.)

Unh-oh!
Things looked good until about 6:00 PM when everyone started to call in and the ISPorte decided to loose its NVRAM settings one by one. The short and sweet of the story is that during our peak time, for 6 hours at our biggest POP, we had zero dial-up connectivity.

I have to say that while I use this ISP to illustrate many of my what-not-to-do stories, the organization showed grace under pressure on this occasion. They placed a message about the outage on our 'hold' music, gave a realistic time-to-repair estimate, and took people's numbers, promising to notify them when the POP was back up. When it did come back up, we called every customer who left a contact number and sent out an explanatory e-mail.

And to our amazement, we didn't loose a single customer.

The moral of the story is that when spit happens, you need to face the music (sorry for the mixed metaphors): Be up front and honest with your customers. Nine times out of ten, they will understand. But people hate being lied to and treated like kids.

We all have bad days. We just need hope they are few and far between—and fix things as fast as possible.

—End

More business tips from Jason Zigmont: Can Your ISP Pass the Bus Test?