A new version of the software was issued for the wireless systems. Some smart person in development thought the new feature was so cool that everyone would want to use it and so made it to default to on as the system came up with the new code.
Small issue this feature was a radio protection technique intended to poison and block the use of wifi within the range of the system. It would find other wifi access points and then introduce control packets that caused the users attached to the alien wifi to fall off and not be able to reconnect. There were valid reasons to have this feature but from a sales point of view they were a minority. Needless to say all our customers neighbours wifi stopped working after the upgrade. We had always defaulted new features to off and advised of the use in the upgrade notes (who read them right?)
So most of our customers call us over a 2-3 day period saying what was going on? We see consistency in the message and are aware of the new feature. Messages to and fro across the atlantic asking why this happened.
We followed the usual list 1. Form a cross team hit squad to ensure all views are considered 2. Start a common information repository where all message are collated 3. Appoint a person as manufacturer facing (dev in our case) 4. Appoint a person to be customer facing and have a single cohesive message and status, transparent as practical. 5. Collect people who this directly impacts now, advise them of the channel to use and how it will work 6. Start to collate a list of several levels of criticality in the customer base. Partners, customers, others. 7. Have a regular cadence for messages even if it is "no update" so they begin to trust the method and stop calling every five minute distracting you from fixing it. 8. As significant changes happen broadcast them with any caveats. 9. Provide a known escalation channel and allow partners and others to use it without approval. 10. Focus everything else on fixing it.
We got a lot of good feedback and also even in a couple of customer references calls people mentioned it and said we were honest about it and cared.
Whilst I do not doubt a legal element should be maintained (the lawyer was on our calls) it is the transparency and consistency that is critical. If it becomes death of a thousand messages you drown and people stop trusting you.
It was an exciting 1-2 weeks.
p.s. two of the customers were related to F1 and we took out the pit lane at a grandprix.
Everyone loves a Morgan. Even me, unless it's broken again.
