A very wise and experienced business coach once told me – “There are always going to be problems in any business, especially as the business grows, and it’s not about the problem itself, it’s about how you handle it.”
Monday this week was a Bank Holiday in the UK, and amongst other things, I decided to close the virtual office doors to give my staff some time with their kids, since a lot of them are based in the UK, and also to get a few things done myself on business development.
The day started off like any other – and I logged on, checked everything was functioning and there were no immediate or urgent issues which needed my attention, and I got on as usual.
Then around lunchtime on Monday I noticed that many of my sites had gone down, including the heart of my business, my project management system and my support desk. This is to me a disaster, more than a disaster – there are no words to describe it. Fortunately, I never keep all my eggs in one basket and I did have my main website up and running still in a CMS away from the server.
Just to give you a bit of background info, at the end of last year, I moved over to a Virtual Dedicated Server because my business was growing at such a rate that my shared hosting just wasn’t suitable anymore and I needed something much more reliable with daily back ups – (WOW am I glad I have those daily back ups). The VDS was doing “okay,” but I have had to do several more upgrades throughout this year of CPU and RAM as I have continued expanding.
When I contacted the head of my tech team to find out what had happened to the sites, we made a horrible discovery that the hosting provider’s hardware had blown and it was going to be a while before it could be fixed because of vendors, delivery, installation blah blah etc…
So this has left me with no other choice and I have decided to finally go to a fully dedicated server, and I have chosen a rather pricey, but I am told reliable solution, at ThePlanet.com – this “should” avoid anything like this happening again, and will give me some piece of mind and less grey hair (hopefully). In a virtual business the server is your foundation, your online presence, your bricks and mortar – when it doesn’t work it’s like having your house blown down in a storm. I am ditching my straw house for a brick one.
So anyway – onto the point of this post – I had to face my clients and explain the situation. I follow 5 basic laws when I am delivering bad news to customers – it doesn’t happen very often – the last time was when I was living in France and a Storm, Xynthia, left me without an Internet connection for an unknown period of time (it turned out to be 2 days). I managed to go round a friend’s house to borrow her functional Internet connection to deliver the bad news.
The 5 Laws Of Delivering Bad News To Customers
Law #1 NOTIFY
Inform your customers as soon as possible – putting it off won’t solve anything, and could make it worse.
Law #2 EXPLAIN
Explain in brief exactly what the problem is, and be honest.
Law #3 SOLVE
Give them an alternative solution to the problem – bring out your backup plan!
Law #4 PREDICT
Explain what is likely to happen next, and what you are doing (if anything) to resolve the issue.
Law #5 APOLOGISE
Thank them for their patience and apologise for the inconvenience.
Here is the actual email which I sent to clients regarding my very real disaster:
Dear Client,
I am writing to inform you that yesterday there was a technical error on our virtual dedicated server hardware in the US, which has caused a majority of our core sites to experience downtime. This includes http://support.virtualmissfriday.com and http://office.virtualmissfriday.com
We understand from the hosting providers that they are working around the clock to have the problem fixed as soon as possible.
In the meantime, please use our back up email address of office@virtualmissfriday.net or use the “Contact Us” form on our website http://www.virtualmissfriday.co.uk/contact.html until our systems are fully restored to normal.
If you have sent any email to us within the last 24 hours, or you have any urgent requests please could you also forward them to office@virtualmissfriday.net .
We are doing everything we can to ensure that service remains as smooth as possible during this time. All other assigned work will be serviced outside of the online office as usual. Please note if you are waiting for design drafts, we will wait 24 hours before delivering these to you in anticipation that the issue is resolved by then.
I would like to thank you for your patience and consideration during this time, and I sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Best Regards,
Michelle Dale
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