BlackBerry is consistently losing market share and its recent three days long outage just made the situation even worse for the troubled
company. While it has been reported that the direct cost of the outage may be as high as $100 million, the company is likely to pay even bigger price in the form of lost customer loyalty.
According to a survey, about 20 percent BlackBerry users said that now they are planning to ditch Blackberry in favor of its competitors. However, over and above these users, other 42 percent are planning to defect, once their current contract period is over. These stats should get RIM thinking real hard. It does have some time to make good with 42 percents.
Service outages are a bitter truth and the companies need to come up with long term strategies to deal with these situations. Recently, Sony had experienced long service outage on its PSN network. Though, the causes of both these outages are different, but for consumers it means only one thing, that is that they do not get the service thy pay for. Sony tried to lure back its disgruntled users by offering them goodies and freebies. The strategy worked pretty well for Sony and it looks like this is the only way out for BlackBerry, if it wants to salvage whatever credibility it is left with.
RIM has already publicly apologized for the outage. But from previous experiences, it is pretty clear that such empty apologies work well only if accompanied by some substantial goodies.