I have been one of the most ardent supporters of Salesforce.com. I think their product is great, and it has been extremely useful in our business. I have probably sent them at least 10 corporate customers because I have liked what they do. Until now.
Last week, Salesforce went down for about two hours in the middle of the day. The week before that the API did not work for an entire day. Our sales force has found the tool extremely slow for the past three weeks. To date, not a word from the company. It seems they have forgotten about the power email has in communicating with their customers.
On their system status page it states, "In the highly unlikely event of extended service unavailability, all customers will receive timely email updates on system status". I guess I am missing what they would call "extended service unavailability." When you log on to their site, nothing. It is like they are pretending nothing happened, it was business as usual. In this day and age, when word of mouth can have such an impact. How can the company be so uncommunicative to their customers. Especially when it is so easy to do.Unless you pay for their premium support, you do not have access to the system status page (although according to the Salesforcewatch blog, they may make this page available to all customers next week).
I'm sure Salesforce CEO Mark Beinoff is concerned the way Wall Street beat up the stock on Friday. This is nothing compared to the damage being done to the goodwill and fantastic word of mouth evangelism that is rapidly evaporating. Ironically, earlier this month Beinoff sent a memo to employees about SAP's entrance to the on-demand CRM world. It was titled SAP on the Defense (a copy of the full memo was included in Steve Hamm's Tech Beat). Perhaps Beinoff might be wise to try some defense and use email to stay in touch with his customers.