Tim Flynn feels your pain
Communications
It’s been a torrid few days for Blackberry and their customers who rightly expect their gadgets to get information (SMS, BBM) from their handset to the recipient on time, every time. As with any advances in technology, once you show people what can be achieved that’s the standard they come to expect.
Blackberry have been very poor in communicating with customers which suggest that they just don’t get the importance their products play in people's lives. They haven’t grasped the information needs of their key stakeholders.
In doing so Research in Motion, the company behind Blackberry, have created a very effective information gap down which they have plummeted. All of which creates the very real prospect of corporate customers not renewing contracts and going shopping elsewhere. Scary for any company especially when there are a myriad of similar devices on the market.
Operational Response
As far as their operational response goes it all seems too little too late. My suspicion is that their operation is so complex and the list of potential faults so huge that is it has not been easy for them to diagnose the extent of their problems or how long it would take to fix them.
Complexity
The complexity of their operation is certainly a factor here. If you look at any number of recent crises such as the current debt crisis or the banking crisis of 2007/8, a great deal of it was built on people's inability to understand the big picture. Complexity seems like a good idea during the good times but makes fixing the bad times pretty tricky.
Tim Flynn is a senior consultant at Crisis Solutions
