UPDATED 13:00 EDT / OCTOBER 18 2011

RIM’s Top Dog Answers Customers’ Concerns

If Research in Motion thought that free premium apps and tech support would compensate for the three-day service outage that their consumers experienced last week, they’ll have to think again.  Customers want to know what really happened with the BlackBerry service failure, and if there’s a chance that it will happen again.  And everyone’s a little curious as to what RIM plans on doing to prevent future incidents and network interruptions.

Good thing one of their top dogs decided to speak on behalf of the company and take the massive artillery of questions from consumers and investors.  RIM’s UK managing director, Stephen Bates did an interview with Newsbeat and tried to defend his company, as well as answer some questions that have been bugging everyone since the service outage.

When asked whether giving $100 worth of premium apps for free is the right way to go about the incident, Bates stated that “it’s a good reflection of the patience people have had with Blackberry over the service issues,” and that free apps is the best way for RIM to show their commitment to customers.  Also, they plan on adding more, free premium apps that their customers would surely enjoy.

But the free premium apps don’t really do much for business owners who lost money during the service outage, so Bates was asked if RIM was looking into individual compensation.  Bates stated that RIM has over “70 million customers around the world – there’s a scaling issue here.”

“For us, the approach we’ve taken provides the best solution to reflect how we feel our customers felt about this issue.  We’ve organized with some really cool app companies – EA Games, Shazam – to come up with a set of apps that we know people want.  For our business customers with a Blackberry technical support service, we’ve given them a month of technical support and other businesses will also get a month of technical support.”

And since RIM got their service back online, they have been analyzing the situation, trying to figure out what went wrong.  It appears that their chief technology officer already started a full audit of their infrastructure.  Simply put, they’re still clueless as to what really caused the problem, much less how to prevent it.

Facing the competition in more ways than one

While Bates was sent out on a mission to squash customer dissonance over the BlackBerry outage, some took it as an opportunity to hear RIM’s plans on curbing the competition in other areas.  Ben Craggs, a BlackBerry user, asked how BlackBerry is going to maintain its market share now that Apple has iMessage, a service much like BlackBerry Messenger, Bates simply said that, “BBM is about a user community where you can interact with your friends, family and colleagues.  We’ve now opened up that platform for developers so we can extend that social experience to games, social networks and music.”  He also added that RIM has lots of plans in the works, and that the future of BBM is in the social aspect and they’ve already added a new feature which enables users to share music with BBM Music.

Though the outage caused a lot of problems, especially for those financially hit by productivity loss, Bates and RIM don’t think that anyone at the company should be fired because of this.  Bates believes that RIM’s technical team did their best and addressed the issue as quickly as possible, and that no one person is responsible for the incident since RIM “designed a very resilient system in our infrastructure that has lots of backups. This problem happened with a system that should have backed up in the normal fashion, but it didn’t.”  Also, they’re just in the early stage of investigation so it’s too early to tell if a drastic move, like firing employees, would be necessary.

Turn the other cheek

Though a lot of consumers were outraged by the network failure, some customers aren’t that pissed off and are actually thanking RIM for the quick service restoration as well as free apps and free tech support.

“I’ve had a lot of comments from customers – both good and bad – and at the end of the day what Blackberry is about is delivering a reliable service and we’re determined to get the service back to levels that our customers expect,” said Bates.


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