I subscribe to a weekly newsletter that shares innovative ideas to add something new and refreshing to your offer, to create something special for your customers: how to wow. (For who’s interested, it’s in Dutch, but this is their website) This week the writer apologised for the late delivery of the newsletter, due to downtime of the email service provider for an upgrade. He wrote:

How to wow:
How do you prevent that your clients experience drawbacks due to your technical maintenance?

Coincidentally, two days later, I experienced exactly the same: our web hosting provider experienced server problems, and that now causes our upgrade to be delayed, which as a snowball effect causes our updates to be delayed. Why is their problem now all of a sudden my problem?

It’s not only important to define risks that affect your own business when analysing your business processes; to deliver great quality service it is critical to consider the effect of disruptions in your process on your customer. If you want to be a great service provider, then you have to put controls in place to ensure that your customer won’t even notice the problems you’re experiencing.