Thursday, October 13, 2011
Jeopardy
Research in Motion (RIM) has placed itself in jeopardy with its Blackberry outages in Europe and North America. There are some things consumers rarely forgive or forget. Loss of an essential service is one. RIM already is in a dogfight against Smartphones that are eroding its market share. It can't afford to gain a reputation for unreliability. That would be a death blow. If Blackberry can restore service quickly and fix its backup systems, users might give it a grudging pass this time. Should a blackout happen again within a year, all bets are off. One wonders how the Blackberry system is set up such that a breakdown disrupted both Europe and North America. It would seem there was deficient engineering at some point. RIM will need to fix that too.
Comments:
Blackberry faced some serious client relations problems when their service went out for multiple days. Timing is of the essence and when this happened just as the iphone introduced a new model, it was a recipe for disaster. I has friends that were frantically calling their service provider, thinking the problem was with their phones, and when they compared and realized it was blackberry overall they were outraged. The response was slow and unapologetic, as well as many of people I know had switched to iphones as a result of the disaster. Blackberry should have reacted much more quickly and offered incentives for customers to stay or products/accessories and apologies for the error on their part.
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