After yesterday's BIS outage I began thinking how nice it would be if RIM were to offer some sort of "System Status" notification system. Some way, for BIS customers to know exactly what to be expecting from the services that we pay for and often times, mean so much to us. As RIM continues to grow and add new customers we have seen an increasing amount of times where BIS services have disappeared seemingly with no real explanation and while RIM's statistics for having the service available still remain a highpoint for them, it may not seem this way to the customer.
This is where the service of a system status notification service could see some life. Sure RIM may not wish to be putting the information out there that they are indeed having issues at any given point. This would seemingly be a credibility issue for them -- admitting their was a glitch within the NOC and services were temporarily down. Crazy right? Not so, considering your BIS customers already know anyways, with most either already having called their carriers and gotten some generic response from them and then walked through basic troubleshooting steps with no luck because even the rep knows RIM services are not available.
Carriers often times do not even get the full notification regarding services or if they do get them, they are often issued as "trouble tickets" and come at a time when RIM has already restored services rather then taking the as they happen approach with carrier notification. It has become common practice to let your valued customers know the status of the services they are utilizing. We see it in lots of places now such as Twitter, GMail and even Apple let's its customers in on the "status" of their services. BlackBerry users however, are still left using the Blogs and Forums and sites like Dataoutages.com to even get a hint of what may -- or may not be -- going on with their services. Yet RIM cannot give us a page on their site or even a tweet with a glimpse of what may be going on so we can quit panicking and staring at our email-less devices, doing battery pulls, sending service books and finally reading blog posts and forums just to see who may or may not be back in action. So let's run a poll on who does or does not want this type of offering.... cast your vote at the top. What do you think RIM? If over 80% of responses vote yes, do you think you can make that happen for all of us? End Rant.
