Preface: Several years ago, I used to write personal reflections as part of our regular blog posts and newsletters. I got out of the habit due to constraints of time and energy, but it was one of the aspects of the business that brought me immense satisfaction due to the connections with our Outlaw community.
WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
For the past several days, our website has been acting wonky from my Firefox browser, but not from my Chrome browser, and not from my phone.
Because I'm the webmaster, tech support, writer, photographer, salesperson, marketing manager, etc (read: BUSY AS HECK), and I hadn't heard from anyone else, I figured it was probably ok for everyone else and that my Firefox experience was a fluke.
However, just as I was sitting down to get some focused work done, I got an urgent message from Shantel, our Customer Satisfaction Manager, saying people were reporting they couldn't access certain pages... I knew my "fluke" was not just a fluke, but was a real issue.
And in retrospect, I did see a bit of a red flag earlier this week when our conversion rate dropped (that's the percentage of people who end up making a purchase after landing on the website) ... but I told myself that was because we were doing a presale and the presale conversions weren't being tracked correctly.
OK... so... It's Friday at 2. I have to put together promos for the weekend, etc... BUT all the promos that I was putting together involve these certain pages... so if 20% - 30% of Outlaws can't even see the products I'm promoting, that's kind of a waste.
So WHAT WOULD YOU DO if you were me?
We can rarely even conceive of reactions outside of our own native responses, so I genuinely DO want to know: What would you do?
Ultimately, here's what I did:
I contacted the support chat of the company who hosts our website and asked for help troubleshooting the issue. We've been working on it, and I do think we have fixed the issue.
It took me, from "AAAAAAAAHHHH" to "ah," about 35 minutes.
That's not bad... but when facing these issues, you never really know how long it's going to take to fix these things. The stakes are high and the visibility is low.
So that's why I'm asking you... what would you do in this situation?
