Customer Experience: Perception is a reality

Our product is hosted so the Internet is a mission critical piece of infrastructure which lately has been giving us some headaches with key customers. the Customer Experience is very susceptible to perception of bad things happening all the time. In this case we had some interruption of service with in a 30 day window that has turned into the "always down" syndrome that customers think is the case. the reality is the outages occurred during a time when a large number of customers needed access to their data. The experience they had quickly turned from i like this product to this product "never" delivers. the truth about uptime is this: its not 24/7/365 that matters but "when i need access it better be there" and that is a much harder service level to maintain. The Customer Experience is created and strengthened or weakened and destroyed everyday.