BlackBerry suffers outage across EMEA. How can BlackBerry regain the trust of their corporate users?

Hello, I live in Argentina, South America. I specialize in telecommunications, and iam going to give you a technical point of view.
A month ago I started working on a new company, having charge of the region telecominicaciones. I just met the BlackBerry service, and i had to analyze it, in the wake of a high number of problems being reported to my area. I have found that for all the American Continent, from Canada to Argentina, they have only two IP addreses to point our servers trough Internet, and they Are Located in Ontario, Canada, and they are round-robin balanced.

How works BB as i found? for example, sending a message...
1 .- from your phone, the message reach the GSM network of your provider of cellular telephony
2 .- Then the phone company routes the message to your company's BES server
3 - your BES server sends you the message via the Internet again, to one of these 2 IPs from RIM, remember, only 2 for the entire American continent, and are in Ontario, Canada. It is similar to other continents.

That's the way up to BB, still remains in the opposite way to the recipient's cell phone.

It's a long way, and multiplied by the huge number of users around the continent. It is not such of a huge heavy traffic, insted we are talking about messages traveling multiple networks.

Iam sure they have a very good architecture associated with these 2 IP addresses, and sure it is balanced to other locations. Great! Whe have proven networks and systems models.

But I have the feeling that the service at this point, is in mode "Use it if you reach me". It should be about approach the service to the user, rather than the user approaches to my service.

The situation is complicated, from a telecomunications perspective, naturaly, they should distribute the system across the continent to country level, to eliminate the amount of points of failure. This is the way to regain trust, reducing the issues. Learn and show improve.

From my perspective, I hope they come to a quick fix, because the situation in my company is really serious, not only because of the mails, but because there are also issues with remote applications that runs with BB messages.

Regards

Interesting question - I guess you are assuming that this outage will cause them to lose trust - I am not sure that it will have any lasting major impact.
Additionallyit appears that the recent outage affected BIS rather than BES (Corporate) users,
In my experience the BB BES approach is still seen as the mainstream messaging solution for Corporates - however, I do think that BB has a big challenge to maintain their position - irrespective of this recent outage

Update on Oct 12, 2011, the BB outage has been extended to North America.

I believe that RIM (the manufacturer of BB) has a unique position as the secure provider for email for corporations. Unless there is an alternative with equivalent functionality, corporations and governments will not have a choice but to forgive. I am sure the big corporations are putting pressure on RIM to fix their problems.

When an alternative comes along, then RIM could conceivably loose their significant market share in the business and government markets.

I read the book The Third Screen by Chuck Martin and was surprised to see that there are many countries where people have more than one cell phone. I would venture to say that if someone had 2 cell phones and one was a BB, the other would not be.

There is no information on the BBY corporate news website. I did, however, see this message on the UK BBY FaceBook official page http://uk.blackberry.com/serviceupdate/ In short BBY noted the problem 2 days ago and are currently working to restore email. It would be helpful if they could estimate how long the outage may last for.

I really do not think BBY have done a good job of 1) informing their customers 2) resolving the problem. I can only think that confidence in the service will suffer as a result.

Honestly, I'm not sure RIM will ever get back on track. The well-established iPhone and Android devices have been steadily eating away at BB's user base...and with Windows Phone rapidly gaining traction with their recent innovations, I think we'll see another migration begin to take place, as die-hard business users begin to notice the growth of another trusted name in the corporate world (Microsoft) into the smartphone industry.

There is no way I am going back to BlackBerry, I waited over 5 years for them to come up with something remarkable, only saw excuses after excuses from its very-high-egos Co-CEOs.
Now 100% Apple! at all levels

A brand can only reign for some time and not all the time. Most especially in this fast changing and highly competitive world.

Not sure if there is a loss of trust or confidence among the corporate and government clients. Nonetheless, as with any major outage, RIM must determine the root cause, publish the root cause and explain the changes they are implementing to avoid a repeat if possible, together with a time-line.

I really can't believe how much noise is being made about a service disruption. This isn't world peace folks, it's simply a device that had an upgrade problem. Never had a car break down? Never had a flat tire? Did you get rid of the car or switch all the tires? I doubt it!

How many times has your electricity or cable gone out? It's not the end of the world. I've never seen a mass exodus to Mac every time your Windows os crashes, so what the big deal that you didn't get a few emails?

Stuff happens all the time, it's part of the world we live in and it certainly doesn't necessitate all the drama. Why not enjoy the peace and quiet. It's a rare commodity these days.

Hi Brielle,

To best answer the question, "How can BlackBerry regain the trust of their corporate users?” we should look at a similar situation that occurred in the recent past, where the company has emerged with trust and customer loyalty not only intact, but stronger that before the fiasco.

On February 14, 2007, JetBlue was affected by an ice storm in the Northeast, allowing only 17 of its 156 scheduled flights to depart from JFK Airport in New York. This caused a domino effect throughout the country, as JetBlue flight crews and aircraft were displaced, and more and more flights had to be cancelled. This angered and stranded thousands of passengers, and was a major news story.

The way that JetBlue recovered exemplifies how to win back trust. CEO David Neeleman did the following:

He publicly apologized to over 131,000 customers who were affected, and offered varying levels of compensation from refunds to flight vouchers. He also explained what specifically caused the failures, and described plans that would prevent it from happening again.

A week later, JetBlue issued its "Customer Bill of Rights." The customer-friendly policy explicitly offers compensation for various delays, bumps and cancellations.

JetBlue also replaced its older operations system that was partly to blame for its inability to re-route and re-assign planes and crews, thus exacerbating the crisis.

Anytime a company finds itself in a crisis, the best way to win back trust is to immediately face the customers, give an honest apology, compensate them fairly for loss or damage, and share specific plans that will prevent it from happening again.

I have not been following the RIM response closely enough to know how they're doing, but if they take a lead from JetBlue, they'll be a lot better off.

Jim Watson
http://bit.ly/rmOYIf

Blackberry has a pretty stiff build up in their emotional bank account, I wouldn't be worried about them regaining the trust of their corporate users yet. This was very similar to when Toyota was having problems, so many believed that there would be fallout, but always believed that there problems would go away quickly, everyone falls down one time or another.

The key here is for Blackberry to be honest about what happened, tell their customers what they are doing to fix it and makes sure it doesn't happen again.