AOL e-mail snafu yields valuable lesson for IT
Last week my mother told me she was worried about e-mail. She exchanges messages with Buddy, a friend from her palmier days. (Luckily my father isn’t the jealous type. It helps that Buddy is 3,000 miles away.) Buddy had written to chide my mother for not writing. “But I did!” she cried. “Twice!”
Like many of you, I’m the first technical support contact for many of my family and friends. Luckily for my mother, we live just a few miles apart. I visited her computer and ran a few simple tests, and announced, to her relief, that the problem was probably at Buddy’s end.
Buddy himself, it turns out, was not to blame. Buddy is an America Online customer, and my parents’ e-mail service provider is EarthLink. This week EarthLink disclosed that AOL has been dumping messages EarthLink customers sent to AOL users, thanks to misconfigured AOL servers that were supposed to discard messages from spammers. Instead, the software purged users’ inboxes a little too efficiently.
Nobody likes to admit they screwed up, but these things happen. What’s troubling, however, is that the problem could have been solved much sooner. EarthLink learned of the problem last Wednesday, and worked with AOL to get it solved by Monday. According to a report on CNET’s News.com, however, Steve Dougherty, EarthLink’s director of systems vendor management, complained that AOL had not assigned executives at a level high enough to resolve the trouble more quickly.
Could this happen in your business?
Your reputation is probably your most important asset, and the easiest one to lose. Take steps to ensure that problems reach the ears of those who can fix them.
Have a written escalation policy, and make sure your staff knows about it. Post it on the Web so your customers can find it. You can perform a Web search to find examples of what other companies, such as CacheFlow, ePresence, and Emergent OnLine, use. You can also use help desk software with built-in escalation features.
The main point is to make sure nothing you do keeps your customers from conducting their business. Critical failures on their end demand a strong response on yours.
Escalating problems to the appropriate managers can help your company notice patterns in hardware failures or software faults that might not be apparent to the front-line support staff that hears hundreds of sad stories daily. You can then take systematic action to fix the problem, not just the symptoms.
If you discover a serious problem that may affect a large number of customers, come clean. Let your customers know what the problem is, when it can arise, and how to fix it. Though they may not be happy, they’ll at least appreciate your proactive steps to minimize their troubles.
Even announcing the outcome of a problem after it’s solved can help. Mom was thrilled to hear the official explanation of her problem. She asked, “Can you send me that story, so I can send it to Buddy?” I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the mail goes through.
Articles | Administrator | 
Thursday, March 22, 2001 12:00 pm
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