The Outage of Fido

The Outage of Fido

The Situation: What Happened?

On Wednesday, October 9, 2013 Fido Solutions’ network went missing in Vancouver, Canada. Although the problem was reported to have started at 6:30 pm ET on Wednesday, it extended for more than 3 hours on the same day (O’Rourke, para. 1-3). On the same Wednesday, customers could neither receive calls nor text messages from their beloved friends and relatives. At the same time, customers could not receive any internet connectivity. The lack of internet connectivity further affected customers who complained that for quite a while their cell phones had been rendered for more than 4 hours. The outage came at the time when Fido had the largest share of mobile and wireless customers in Vancouver and the entire Canada at large. As such, Fido 9.7 million customers remained in a state of despair for the better part of the evening after returning home from work due to lack of network.

At 1:45 am ET on October 9, 2013, Nadir Mohamed, the President and the CEO of Rogers Communications, sent an apology message to the news rooms. This is apology message was sent on behalf of Fido Solutions which is a subsidiary company of Rogers Communications. In his message, Mohamed noted that Fido’s network outage affected the entire 9.7 million Fido customers across Canada (Bruno WS). Mohamed also cited that Fido’s management had rectified the problem and the network services had resume to a state of normalcy. The CEO regretted and apologized that Fido’s customers had been inconvenienced by the incident despite that it was unexpected. Through the message, Mohamed further noted that Fido’s disaster management team had responded quickly to reinstate the service. However, Mohamed fell short of specifying the cause of the problem. Nevertheless, Mohamed promised to offer one day-free services to Fido’s post paid customers. This move was perceived to not only be meant to gain the customer’s trust, but also to compensate the customer for the time that had elapsed since customer who are on postpaid services are often charged a constant amount of money for the services. This implied that despite that there was no service rendered, the customers on postpaid service were still going to be charged.

Mohamed’s apology came at a time when Fido’s customers were criticizing the wireless company for incompetency. Most customers were contemplating severing there relationship with the company. Despite Rogers’ CEO apologized to its clients in a bid to assure then of optimal service, he did not mention the cause of the outage.  However, told Fido’s customers to be patient because the company was investigating the cause of Fido’s outage. Nevertheless, reports emerged from the media fraternity that Fido’s problem was caused by software problem (O’Rourke, headline). However, Rogers’ quietness over the cause of Fido’s outage had annoyed Fido’s customers. Most of them went on social media such as Twitter and Face Book citing that they were going to switch allegiance to another mobile internet service provider. For instance, Mark Carcasole tweeted that he was wondering how he was going to convince his mom that he had “tried” calling her, but could not get through because the Rogers services network was unavailable (O’Rourke, para. 20). On the other hand, Justin Ling tweeted that Rogers’ customers who were “experiencing the outage” would only get their mobile phones working if they switched to other mobile service providers (O’Rourke, para. 21). The companies that could benefit from Fido’s outage included Zipwhip which offered both texting and voice call services. Zipwhip supports cloud texting and landline short message services (SMS). Zipwip also enables its customers to connect to the internet via desktops and laptops (Lauer et al.). This implied that Zipwhip’s customers would have varied options to connect and communication to their families and friends.

However, if Fido’s customers went ahead to enact their threat of switching their allegiance to other rival company’s, such moves would reduce Fido’s customer base. A reduction in Fido’s customer base would translate into a reduction in Fido’s revenue collections.

Intervention: The Survey

The Survey Process

To determine the cause of action the customers were going to take following Fido’s network outage, a survey was conducted in Vancouver and its environs. A sample of 50 customers from Vancouver and the environs were interviewed on their planned course of action after the incident. The sample contained 24 men and 26 women; all the respondents were above 18 years of age. All the customers who had used Fido’s services network for the past 6 months or longer were interviewed. Seven (7) questions were employed to obtain responses from Fido’s customers. The first question was an open-ended question and was used to test the customers’ experience of Fido’s service for the time they had been using the network for both communication and internet connectivity. The second question was meant to determine Fido customer’s initial reaction to Fido’s network outage on Wednesday 9^th October, 2013. The third question was meant to determine Fido customers’ second course of action after Fido’s outage crisis. The fourth question was meant to determine whether Fido customers’ used alternative means of communication to reach their friends and relatives. The fifth question was meant to determine whether the customers contemplated switching to another service provider. The second-last question sought the customer’s advice on what Fido Solutions should do to avert the crisis if it happened in future. The last question sought to discover Fido Solution’s take on Rogers CEO’s apology and one day free service offered to the postpaid customers.

All the information from the interviews was recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Observations were also made and included in the interpretation process.

The Results: Key Highlights

The results indicated that the majority of Fido’s customers (83%) felt that Fido’s wireless services were the best in Canada while 12 percent cited that they had not had the experience to compare Fido’s services with other service-providers. The remaining 5% reported that Fido’s services were fairly good. At the same time, 34% of the respondents’ first reaction was that their phones had a hardware problem while 13% enquired from their friends on what was wrong with Fido’s network. In addition, 23% could not understand what was going on while 3% threw away their phones thinking that they had been spoilt while the remainder (27%) switched to other mobile service providers. Majority of those interviewed (67.6%) reported that they kept on trying to connect to the Fido’s services hoping that the connectivity would resume, 30% went to the landline telephone booth to reassure their friends and families that they were safe while the remainder (2.4%) switched off their phones until Thursday morning. Interestingly, more than 85% of the respondents urged Fido solutions to correct the problem once and for all arguing that they were not leaving to other wireless service providers. About 10% of the respondents stated that they were contemplating seeking the service of another service provider. However, about 45% said that Fido’s apology was not sufficient and that the company needed to do more to assure them (its customers) of consistent service reliability.

After the survey, it became apparent that most (90%) people could not understand how the problem occurred. For example, Ann Schmidt a resident of North Vancouver cited that the outage was a rare occasion since she had never experienced such outage in Canada. Rodgers, a resident at Port Coquitlam wondered why it had taken Fido Solutions too long to correct the anomaly, yet the outage happened across the country. As such, Fido solutions should advance its disaster management and response operations to rectify the problem in the future. In fact, it is advisable that Fido Solutions take its customers seriously because of the fact that customers are often “right” when it comes to the relationship between the business and the customers (Keh and YI 732-742). As such, Fido should acknowledge the fact that customers have the right to complain. In fact, with the Canadian government having come up with morechoices.com many Fido’s customers have the right to switch loyalty in search for better mobile and internet service providers.

Reflection

Fido’s customers suffered from the company’s outage on Wednesday, 9^th October, 2013. Majority of the customers suffered from psychological distress because they were unable to connect to either their families or friends. For instance, 67% of the customers who kept on checking their phones for connectivity to Fido’s services reached a point where they suffered from anxiety. Moreover, the anxiety was aggravated by the fact that Fido’s outage took place during the evening hours. As such, most people were unable to communicate to their friends, neighbor’s, children, spouses, and parents. Besides, most people were not able to share their experiences on Twitter and FaceBook because there was no internet connection. In addition, most people were unable to apply for jobs among other experiences. In other words, Fido’s outage created a situation similar to anarchy since Fido’s customer base is almost a third of the total population in Canada.

Therefore, Fido’s management together with Rogers’ should team up to repair the damage caused by the outage as the customers suggested. One measure that the company need put in place is to embrace social media platform as a means to reach out to its customers. Research indicates that social media such as FaceBook and Twitter have the potential to improve both the image and enhance customer loyalty to Fido’s services (Mangold and David 357-365). For instance, Fido should to keep on providing its customers with online updates of the changes that it is making in a bid to improve its services.

Conclusion

The Outage of Fido Solution in Vancouver and Canada at large occurred as a surprise to its customers. The outage caused a lot of inconveniences to the Company’s customers. Fido’s response to the outage was not a guarantee that it could restore customer confidence and repair the damage caused by the outage. So far, customer reactions to the crisis as evident in the survey suggested that Fido did not take appropriate, efficient, and prompt action to correct the damage. It is recommended that Fido Solutions should put in place measures that would enable it to restore customers’ confidence in its services.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Bruno WS. “Rogers CEO apologizes for outage.” Youtube.com. 10 October 2013. Web. 25 November 2013.

Du, Shuili, C. B. Bhattacharya, and Sankar Sen. “Maximizing business returns to corporate social responsibility (CSR): The role of CSR communication.” International Journal of Management Reviews 12.1 (2010): 8-19.

Keh, Hean Tat, and Yi Xie. “Corporate Reputation and Customer Behavioral Intentions: The Roles of Trust, Identification and Commitment.” Industrial Marketing Management 38.7 (2009): 732-742.

Lauer, John, et al. “Short Code Provisioning and Threading Techniques for Bidirectional Text Messaging.” WIPO Patent No. 2010096348. 27 Aug. 2010. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.

Man gold, W. Glynn, and David, J. Faults. “Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix.” Business horizons 52.4 (2009): 357-365.

Nazimoglu, Özge, and Yasemine, Özsen. “Analysis of risk dynamics in information technology service delivery.” Journal of enterprise information management 23.3 (2010): 350-364.

O’Rourke, Patrick. “Rogers blames software problem for mysterious nationwide outage.” O.canada.com. 9 Oct. 2013. Web. 25 November 2013.

Tax, S. Stephen and Stephen, W. Brown. “Recovering and learning from service failure.” Sloan Management (2012). 2012. Web. 26 Nov. 2013. <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681309000329>

 

 

Appendix

The Interview Questions

1. What is your experience of Fido’s services for the time you have been?
2. What was your first reaction after you had discovered that Fido’s services were not going through?
3. What did you do after discovering that their phones were not working?
4. Did you opt for any other wireless service to communicate to your friends and relatives and which company did you switch to (if any)?
5. Do you plan switching to another mobile or landline service provider?
6. What do you think Fido should do to prevent the problem from re-occurring?
7. What s your take on Rogers CEO’s apology and the one day free service to Fido’s postpaid customers?

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