I first experienced this when doing customer support for an online music store I built. A technically illiterate customer would email me with a simple question like, "How do I download my music?" even though the download links are <i>right there</i>. When I answered them with detailed instructions within 5 minutes, they would become evangelists for the store by recommending us to all their friends because of the "amazing service".<p>If those customers had spent just a minute figuring out how to find something they downloaded, I could not have helped them and they would not have become as loyal.
This result doesn't seem contradictory in the least.<p>* All services have outages. Customers know this, even if they express otherwise.<p>* Prior to an outage with a new service, responsiveness to outages is an unknown to customers. Uncertainty is a common source of anxiety, resulting in dissatisfaction.<p>* After a provider has responded positively to an outage, the uncertainty is alleviated, leaving the consumer with a greater sense of confidence. Remember, the consumer knows that regardless of provider, they run the risk of experiencing an outage, so this confidence becomes an anchor.<p>The tipping point is when frequent outages outweight the benefit of certainty. There comes a point at which your customer deems you to be incompetent, despite the hustle you exhibit in the face of a failure.
Does anybody else find it funny that you can't contact Krit using Krit or phone or SMS? But you can contact them via email, facebook, twitter or tumblr ask?<p>And doesn't this miss the whole engaged consumer phenomenon - I don't want you to fix the problem, my day has already been ruined, I want to express my anger about your business on all my social networks (earning me kudos) and decide not to do business with others in the same way!