Disaster Recovery on a Personal Scale
If you’re a current Red Hen client you know that we’ve had a rough week around here. Our cloud host, who we rely on to provide daily remote access to clients’ QuickBooks file, was the victim of a ransomware attack and is just now coming back up after ten days down.
Our clients trust us. We trust our vendors. And when something goes wrong, we’re horrified and work hard to create stability and put things back together because we want to consistently earn that trust.
In this case, we worked to create manual and backup solutions for everyone and we remain available as things are coming back up to help clients get their files back into usable form. In turn, we’ve been the recipients of tremendous generosity of spirit from our clients. They’ve been kind, patient, and genuine, even when the situation was at its worst and a negative reaction would have been totally warranted. We’re grateful for each and every one of the people we work with and for.
Seth Godin wrote about size and caring today, and it made me think of the current emergency and how we might have chosen to handle things. If we weren’t the type of company we are, we might have been too big to setup customized solutions for individual clients. But we’re interested in daily support in whatever form is required and worked with our clients while we all waited on Insynq to recover on their end.
Seth’s blog entry today, “Too big to care” [https://seths.blog/2019/07/too-big-to-care/] says:
“The marketing math is compelling. It’s obvious that the most highly-leveraged moment in every brand’s relationship with a customer is the moment when something goes wrong.
In that moment, when a promise was broken, the customer sees the true nature of the brand. We make up stories about the brands in our lives, but we believe that when the promise is broken we’re about to see the truth of that story.”
Every company has a responsibility to rise to the occasion. The only way to protect a client relationship is to continue to serve when things are really bad.
This was a singular event in Red Hen’s history and we don’t expect this type of emergency to happen again. But we took this opportunity to review all our procedures and put new backup systems in place so that, should the unthinkable happen twice, we’ll have clients up and running within a very brief window without having to rely on any outside solutions.
Disasters are compelling viewing for their sheer scope, for the huge swaths of destruction they leave. But we’re painfully aware that the real, compelling issues are the small, individual stories. A single business owner, a single employee, a single deadline, a single payment. Those are the pieces that matter. Those are the places where we want to solve problems before they expand.
We hope that all clients, current and future, know that they can rely on us to learn from emergencies and improve as we move forward.
Thank you for living through this one with us.
Cora