Gain Trust by Being Transparent About Your Website Performance

A couple of days back, Foursquare one of the popular social networking websites, was down. Mashable, the social blog, covered this event and constantly updated its blog to let users know what was going on. Foursquare, on their part quickly got on to the social media stream and re-assured their users that they were working on a solution and that they will get things back online. 

 

 

The Vice President of Foursquare issued a comment to tech blogs that their engineers were working on the solution and even tweeted an image of their office burning the midnight oil. After nearly 11 hours or so, they were able to get the service back.

 

This whole exercise was captured live via social media. Not only did the company act in a responsible way by getting the service back online, they also kept users updated and kept an online public status page where users could check the availability of their web service. 

 

 

Foursquare probably garnered good amount of Karma from their users because of their immediate reaction to this un-expected downtime. I believe that they employed a two-pronged strategy which worked in their favor. 

 

 

Their first and foremost strategy was to enable a public status page where users could check if their service was up and running. Sometimes the service might not be available not to users due to external factors. Thus, by enabling a public status page users could check if the service was up and running and the problem is only on their side. 

 

 

 

Second, Foursquare used the social media very effectively. They spoke to leading tech blogs and updated the status once the service was back online. There are two important lessons to be learnt from the way how Foursquare handled its un-expected downtime.

First and foremost, make sure that you have a strong strategy in place in case anything like this would happen. If users are facing sudden downtimes on a massive scale, make sure that you communicate to them that you are working on a solution and that they can expect an update soon. Update them via Twitter, Facebook or through other social networks.

Second, establish a public status page while launching your web service and make sure your users know about it. Create an atmosphere of transparency which in turn builds confidence and trust among your users. It also let users know that you value your user’s time and effort of using your service and that you place high importance to high performance and availability.

Another good example would be ZOHO, an online business productivity suite which uses our website monitoring service to establish the faith and trust users have put into its service. Zoho’s public status page allows their users to view various services offered, and how (if at all) the service is being affected.

 

 

 

Similarly, Salesforce.com and Google Apps Engine have also established a similar protocol to display their performance and availability to their end users.

If anything, the whole event with Foursquare puts an even stronger case for companies and businesses to constantly monitor their online services and display their performance and uptime to the public. Some might argue that by displaying your availability and performance, you are vulnerable to being criticized when your website/service goes down. However, if you run the risk of not being transparent about your website performance, you could end up hurting your business in the long run.

Using Site24x7, you can start monitoring your online service and embed the performance and availability stats of your website or online service for everyone to see.

Can you think of any other measure that can increase the transparency of an online service? Feel free to leave your comments.