With the mass network outage recently here in Canada in relations to the company Rogers it was interesting to see today on how they planned to compensate people for the downtime time where rightfully a lot of people feel they should be compensated in some way. As it turns out, apparently the company is offering five days worth of credit for the downtime as they believe that should be adequate.
That was the controversial part as a lot of people were saying that is not good enough. You could say on paper that sounds perfectly reasonable where the mass majority of people loss service for a day or two and so they are basically doubling the days to compensate people to be safe. However, it seems like many people are upset because that could mean maybe a five dollars saving whereas the service going down in this magnitude costed some businesses thousands of dollars as an example.
So from that perspective the compensation from Rogers for an outage that appears to be a mishap on their end doesn’t seem reasonable. So what would you offer if this was your business? It would probably be overboard to say they will pay for everyone’s business loss for the day as an example. Considering the circumstance though would offering all customers say a $10 to $20 credit be wise? Apparently, they have about 11.3 million customers so that wouldn’t be small change when you add everything up.
Then again, would it be better for the sake of consumer confidence and treating it as some kind of advertising expense as an example? I know for myself if I used them and my downtime was more of an inconvenience getting say $20 would lead me to believe that they are sincerely sorry for the error and values one as a customer. But if my business operation was attached to them that would definitely be a different story. The above and beyond would be to get two months of free service to achieve that same effect I feel.
But of course, some people won’t be satisfied regardless where I suppose they have to determine ahead of time if they are willing to just lose customers to competitors as an example.