The frustrations of the past four days for Blogrolling users – me included – look like coming to a positive conclusion.
Last night, there finally was a detailed explanation from Blogrolling’s Ross Rader on what happened re the planned migration to a new server – and what went wrong over the weekend and why there was no communication at all with customers, in spite of the growing and ever more strident comments being posted on the Blogrolling blog on Sunday and Monday (I also posted my concerns on Friday, Sunday and Monday!).
In a detailed post on Blogrolling’s news page, Ross explains:
The short story is that the service should be back to normal but that I’ve really screwed things up and I can’t begin to apologize for it. […] I made some majorly bad assumptions about where we were at and everyone noticed. And no one got the service they deserved – which in this case, at a bare minimum, consisted of a decent headsup explaining that we were having major problems, trying to deal with a swamped support queue and weren’t likely to come clear of things until late today.
Full credit to Ross for the honest and open explanation of the issues and acknowledging the lack of timely communication.
Blogrolling | News : Migration Woes
Sweetening the customer apology is the announcement that all users of the paid Blogrolling Gold service will receive double service credit on 24 September and each Gold account will be extended for 10 full days.
Blogrolling | News : Service Credit
This episode can’t have helped Blogrolling with maintaining confidence that they can deliver the service people expect and which many are paying for. The lack of communication has clearly turned a relatively straightforward matter into a potential business nightmare.
If I were Blogrolling, I’d be paying very close attention to my customer relationship-building activities in the coming months – whatever it takes, look after your customers – and ensuring I have a communication plan in place for keeping that information flow in motion.