Last Wednesday 12th of march Spanish telco company Jazztel suffered a outage on its mobile phone network, both data and voice, since 13:30 to 21:00 approximately. From a Business Continuity point of view, there could be a lot of different analysis, but with the information that has been brought we can not define if it could be a problem in the continuity plan of Jazztel or if the service was activated in the recovery time objective or how the outage affected to the enterprises and what kind of alternative services they activated. What we can do is to analyse the crisis communication plan.
The internal communication plan will be out of the scope of this article, although it will be very interesting to know what kind of strategy would be carried out by Jazztel to this kind of unavailability scenario. Each time that we talk about alert notification, we think on call to mobile phones of persons included in the plan. As interruption was in business hours, it’s easy to assume that the communication was made by internal communication systems, like landline or any media based on IP. But would be highly interesting to study other alternatives in the carrier’s case:
- To have Dual SIM mobile phones, with a SIM of another carrier to carry out the crises communication (However this involves removing the vast majority of managers in Spain from crisis committees. I have still not seen any Iphone dual SIM)
- Communicate to personal phones, if there are not Jazztel phones and assuming that the managers has two mobile phones (something as unusual as the iphone dual SIM).
- Other kind of communications: landline, email (not too much reliable since there are not certainly received by the receptor), searh engines?
About the communications plan that carry out in the media and the users, could be analyse by information published in the news and social media, and also by customers itself.
Adslzone did a follow up of all notifications realized by Jazztel, and also of messages sent by Jazztel users to what they created a foro
The first messages sent during this kind of incidents is essential and must be clear, precise and use the best channels in order that all receivers will be reached in the fastest way.
Jazztel need three hours from the beginning of the outage to send the first official message at 16:15 and used its twitter account and its official blog to send the following message:
“We have an incident in our mobile phone service that affect to a big amount of our customers, not to all. The company is working on restablishing the service as soon as possible. We’ll keep you informed.”
Analysing what happen until the official Jazztell communication, we can realise:
Time until the first message
Three hours. Taken into account that since 13:30 there was a lot of topics in social media, it seems that it would be too much time to send such a short message and with very short information.
The selected media was twitter and the Jazztel official blog
Is this the best way to communicate to their customers?
It could be yes or not, but is a good way to ensure that the message will reach all the national communications media that are following the social media in the big companies or IBEX35 companies and in this way, advice to the customers.
It’s also a way not to waste time organizing media rooms to deliver an official communication, apart from avoid, obviously, undesirably questions or questions not easily answerable in a moment in which there are a lot of details clearly identifies about what are carrying on.
Call Center
Apart from the official message, the customers calling the call center was informed through an answering machine indicating that there was an incident in the mobile phone service of voice and data, ant that Jazztell was working in recovering the service and tell the customer to call later to know if the incident was solved.
The Message
Both in the call center and in the social media there was no information about what had been the issue that could cause the problem, the estimated resolution time or the scope of the issue and number of customers affected.
There are a lot of factors that are not kwon and perhaps it would be better not to communicate certain issues as, form example, service restoration time, but the extent of the damage, if they knew, should be included. The message was launched trhee hours after the outage and it could be identified customers talking about their problems and located in different places, so it could be quickly identified that the problem was not a local incident but a national problem. This generate untrust about the capacity of Jazztel to solve the problem, the severity of the error that caused the problem and so the time that users are going to be without service (at the end the most important thing)
It took close to five hours to Jazztel since the first official message in deliver another message, at 20:07, in which they say that will compensate the users affected by the incident.
“We’re still working in reestablishing our mobile service as soon as possible and to solve the incident. Jazztell will compensate automatically to all customers affected by this incident without any kind of request by them.
Once the service will be reestablished, the company will contact immediately with all the customers affected to keep them informed about the resolution."
The message
Although the message begins with a clear statement of intent to fix the problem as soon as possible, still no report on the fault that caused the problem, the approximate time resolution, or what the extent of the damage and the number of clients affected. This time the message focuses on talk of rewards to those affected, without really knowing applications without injury or damage caused in this way and try to mitigate as far as possible the damage ratio and confidence that is causing the incident.
At 22:00 the mobile phone service begins to recover, but is not until the next day when users recevies a SMS at about 11:00 or 12:00 askin
A las 22:00 horas se comienza a recuperar el servicio de telefonía móvil, pero no es hasta el día siguiente cuando los usuarios reciben un mensaje SMS sobre las 11:00 – 12:00 apologizing for the damage and report back to the next bill.
A communication plan should be well prepared in order to facilitate that such communications are carried out effectively and in time with accurate and concise information and allow especially and foremost that the situation is under control. It’s important not to generate more questions than existing ones, mistrust and causing a impact in the image that can immediately affect to the business, short and long term.
Now it’s time for everyone to judge if whether jazztel communications was performed properly?
