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Here’s my own experience and my own feeling on a topic that has also been covered on SupportOps.co hangout/podcast. I came to the same conlcusion that they did.
Recently at the top of my help desk’s saas web page appeared a message saying that they were investigating performance problems that are delaying their secondary service.
I noticed right away and felt that: 1. that this is transparent(the fact that i am informed of the problem while the problem is not-yet-resolved), 2. that it benefited me by comforting me that my saas provider was aware-of/working-on the issue, and 3. that the downside was that negative publicity that all of the saas provider’s users now knew there was a problem and it’s not fixed yet.
Then thinking about this again, and thinking in light of the recent SupportOps.co hangout/podcast that I had listened to, I realized there is no downside. Number 3. doesn’t apply. in the above example, I am not a customer of the secondary service, only of the primary service which is running fine. And so the message does not apply to me. So I just ignore it. As long as I’m not constantly flooded with such messages, I don’t care.
And on the other hand, if I were a customer of their secondary service, I’d actually appreciate the fact that the saas provider is keeping me informed. Therefore there isn’t any downside in the above Software Customer Support scenario — it’s excellent that the saas provider transparently provided this performance interruption status message to their customers.
*2014-12-05 edit: previously published at
http://w̶i̶e̶l̶d̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/?p=85
[2020 edit: Moved to: https://i̶n̶v̶e̶s̶t̶o̶r̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶r̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/2014/... .html.]