Elton John’s famous song asked, “What do I gotta do to make you love me?” Well, communicate better for starters when you fail to deliver the promised goods. 

Thousands of Bell Media customers in Ontario and Quebec were offline this morning due to a widespread internet outage. Given the limited information from the company, many (like me) feared it was going to be like the massive Rogers outage in 2022 – a major nationwide network outage affecting landline and cellphone coverage, including 911 calls, internet and TV, and debit purchases. Even the ArriveCan app, which is required to enter the country, was down.

I’ve written here before about apologizing effectively, Tips to Deliver a Successful Public Apology, but the Bell outage this morning reminded me of just how important it is that we go beyond the minimum, over-used, disingenuous sounding “so sorry, thanks for your patience” to ensure public trust is not eroded when our services fail to deliver.

The void made me worry that there could be a cybersecurity incident.

Here’s what I know about what happened this morning with Bell services. 

Following thousands of complaints online, the company confirmed about 9:30 am on social media that service for some Quebec and Ontario customers may be interrupted and said it was working to resolve the issue. As a customer, I did not receive any notification or update from the company and had to rely on social media and news sites – both of which had very limited information and wild speculation from customers. 

The void made me worry that there could be a cybersecurity incident – sadly, not an infrequent occurrence these days.

Fortunately, the outage lasted only a few hours and mine returned about 10:30 am. It wasn’t until 12:21pm that Bell Media posted on Twitter/X – “We would like to apologize for the disruption our customers experienced earlier today due to an internet outage. We can confirm that services have been fully restored as of 11:00am ET. Bell conducted an update that impacted some of our routers.” 

The company rolled back the update apparently and claim there was no cybersecurity issues. 

There doesn’t appear to have been accessible spokespeople on the news (transparency) to help manage the issue and build trust. Even Bell Media stations seemed to have limited access to information.  No direct (personalized, genuine) contact with customers, at least not this customer, nor promises of action (accountability) to ensure it doesn’t happen again. 

Apologies are good but can’t be left to do all the heavy lifting during a potential reputation harming incident. As communications and crisis management expert, Lloyd Rang, put it: it takes empathy, action, and outcome to effectively steer through a crisis. 

I know from personal experience throughout my career how challenging these kinds of situations can be especially to communicate effectively during an emergency when your tools are down. Having solid principles for communications, a well-practiced playbook to guide your comms, trained, experienced staff, supportive leadership and a trustworthy spokesperson help tremendously during tough times. 

When the company can’t deliver on its customer service, double down on making sure customers feel listened to and informed. 

 

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