SLAs?

Questions to Reg's Chris Mellor - or indeed any other informed source:

Does this vendor provide SLA agrements for their customers for the services(s) provided?

If so did this outage breach the required service level?

Secondly, does the vendor provide adequate support resources (staff, communications mechanisms) to handle the volume of interest and communication from their customers during a major outage?

What was the experience of users.. did they respond to emails and phone calls with timely, informative and reassuring messages during and after the outage?

I am constantly amazed at our (customers, potential customers) acceptance of very poor levels of service for "cloud services".

What happened to SLAs and decent support?

Why do service providers - from the "free" (ad-supported) through the low-cost and up to the expensive end - appear not to give a hoot about providing a decent level of customer service.

My experience has been that many of these orgs/companies just don't take customer support seriously.. and that many punters appear to accept the poor level of service as though it were "normal".

What do others think on this topic?

Ever tried emailing yahoo or google etc. and getting a human being to answer the question in a timely and useful way?

Steve.