How becomes a data migration professional to a victim of a failed migration project?

The way NOT to handle your customers

I changed the role from from Inspector to Robber this weekend: one of my webhosting provider announced a server change on Saturday which might have cause 2-3 hours outage.

I did not care too much about it, I have only some test domains stored there. However after the promised maintenance time it began to be suspicious for me when I realized something is stinky here.

I realized three mistakes, which can not particularly strengthen the customer – service provider relationship:

• service outage
• plan only for nice-weather fall
• bad communication

Customer service mistake Nr. 1

I wondering who has been asked whether the Saturday is acceptable for a 2-3 hours total outage.

Imagine the following hypothetical situation: You are the webhosting provider of Facebook (300 million user), and you send an email for your only customer: “Dear Customer, on the 18th of September we will change the transformer relay for our servers, and it may cause 3 hours outage, because of possible electrical power outage. “.  What do you think, how long will it take to change the provider?

When I have been worked at Siemens, 10-20 people have used a test system from more different countries. If one of us wanted to execute an action which had an effect to the entire system, then it was a must to send out a message and wait for answers, whether everyone accepts the system outage.

Webhosting service can be financial very sensitive for the business of the customer – so a total outage for many hours is totally unacceptable. If there is no idea how to avoid the outage, the I would recommend to do the maintenance in the night hours, where a visitor activity is more unlikely.

Customer service mistake Nr. 2

In the evening of Saturday I could not receive emails from that particular domain (it was after the announced finish time of the maintenance), I got always the message from the e-mail client, that the login authentication was not successful.  After the third-fourth attempt I checked my domain: it was inaccessible  neither from the old IP-Address nor from the new give IP-Address. Nice, I thought, but I was patient and my e-mails are not particularly important on the Saturday evening, so I waited until the next forenoon.

You can find out: yes, the service was still non-operational, so I have written a short mail to my provider. They answered very quickly – a positive sign.

But after 1 day the they had no idea what was working on the system and what not, based on the question to my claim (that nothing works).

I have to admit, the service was re-established in 1-2 hours, and everything has worked again.

The mistake here: the provider had only reacted on the complaints of the customers, they had unexpected errors which means they had no plan B for the changed situation. However the guys could solve the problem in conceivable time with improvising.

Customer service mistake Nr. 3

Communication. I received a message from the provider that the migration was successful.

Well, I don’t call it successful when the outage took 1 day instead of the (also unacceptable) 2-3 hours. And what is worse: They thank those who had helped them and not “molesting” them during their work.

That means there were some they dared to ask what is going on with the website.

This  unacceptable arrogant voice – sorry – is not the way to keep the customers and even get new one by reference. It should have been avoided, such sentences are absolute unnecessary in a customer – provider relationship.

Conclusion

I am wondering, whether the provider had a though about these questions:

• who guarantees, that such outage won’t happen in 1 year?
• who guarantees, that no important data has been lost?
• who guarantees, that no important e-mail has been lost?
• who takes responsibility about the eventually lost revenue, If somebody runs a e-commerce on the page?

I was thinking to buy a new storage in the near future, but because of the communication to the customers, I will choose definitely another service provider.

In the next part I will write about some solutions, where the outage could be avoided by

• existing commercial solution
• or find a smoother way to reduce the outage risk

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