1. Don’t sit there while you try to fix the problem and hope that it won’t affect your customers. Why not be pro-active and inform customers in the affected areas that you’re working to sort the problem out? They’ll appreciate your honesty and forward planning a whole lot more.
2. Don’t try to make out that the business or person calling up is in fact not a customer. That will just make you look (a) silly and (b) show that your internal systems cannot perform the simplest of tasks like confirming whether you are a customer or not.
3. Don’t say that the problem is ‘only’ affecting 500 customers. Any number going into three digits sounds like a lot to me, particularly when so many organisations rely on broadband to complete every day business tasks and important transactions.
4. Don’t take 5 working days to try to get some sort of resolution or organise an engineer to be sent out.  A lot can and should be happening in 5 business days with a good internet connection!
5. Don’t refuse to offer any apology whatsoever, ignore the requirement for some sort of compensation or provide an interim solution to ensure business continuity.  With mobile broadband (you know those dongles/USBs that you see everyone using) a commonly available service these days there’s no excuse not to provide your business customers with a short-term solution while you fix the problem.

The business world, and marketers in particular, are always trying to highlight the importance of customer experience and crisis management in maintaining good relationships and stemming churn rates. Our recent office experience just proves that large corporates are still not practising what they preach to handle these situations effectively.

Okay rant over.  Anyone know of a good broadband provider that doesn’t have a two letter acronym as part of its name…?