Saturday, October 25, 2008

Google G1's email service is down, but does anyone know where to get help?

As reported by Gizmodo, T-Mobile G1's POP3 and IMAP email is down right now. The big question is whether or not anyone knows that the only place to get information on the status of the downtime, and the only way T-Mobile is communicating with it's users is through this thread on the T-Mobile Forum. How many support calls and emails is T-Mobile getting right now?

I'm not a T-Mobile customer, but if I was experiencing this problem, I would go to http://www.tmobile.com/, click Support, and end up here. And then I'd be stuck. If ended up digging through all of this help, I would spend at least 10 minutes figuring out where to go, or end up calling the support department.

The solution is not complicated. Your customers need a single obvious place to go find out what's happening right now. The fewer calls into support the better, both for you and for the customer. Or put another way, broadcasting broad updates to all of your customers is much more efficient both for your customers and for your staff.

In this specific case, I would suggest a big link or button off of the Support page taking the user to a page similar to our Hall of Fame AWS Service Health Dashboard with a running feed of user updated and more importantly responses from the T-Mobile support people as often as possible.