day 3 of xbox live issues and poor communication

Dear Microsoft Chiefs,

In the hopes this might make it through to someone in Microsoft empowered to make some positive changes I'll spend the time i have off work and unable to play on xbox live to give some feedback or suggestions.

As someone who works in the telecommunications industry I not only know and understand how difficult certain technical problems (either through unexpected failure, increase of traffic either legitimate during holidays or external factors such as DDoS) but i
also know there is a larger lesson for Microsoft to learn here from the past 3 days of issues - communication to customers.

Much of the angry and outraged customers would be far less so with changes or improvement in communication techniques and level of detail with customers.

Some feedback or suggestions:

1) Keep to any stated commitments you may make in communications, if they can't be met for whatever reason still provide an update as stated. Things like the following where it was over an hour between updates and there was actually no update other than
shifting a few words around is not useful and simply harm your reputation for future communications - i expect in another hour we'll either get the same thing again or a 'everything is restored' message:

12/26/2014 6:46:32 PM CST:

Are you running into issues when attempting to launch certain titles? Don’t worry! We’re already working to address this. Thanks for staying patient, Xbox members. We’ll fill you in on our progress in 30 minutes.

12/26/2014 7:46:53 PM CST:

Can’t launch certain titles? Don’t worry! We’re working to fix this as quickly as possible. Thanks for staying patient, Xbox members. We’ll post a progress update right here in 30 minutes.

2) Provide at least an *estimated* time for restoring service. Whilst this can sometimes be difficult it's not impossible, I'm sure you have DR strategies so use those as an upper limit and to provide something than nothing. The absence of this can give
the message that the root cause is unknown nor what is required to restore service back to normal. It would be useful to know if people should just wait it out for an hour or do something else for the next 8 hours and an ETA is vital to make that decision.

3) Provide at least a high level summary of what is happening. This can be a delicate subject since some information won't want to be disclosed but you can provide better information either on what customers should or might experience or what they should
do (or not do). If its a complete outage say this, if its high load or equipment failure related say this, if its partial give a little more detail as to what partial means to the customer - should customers just keep trying as it might work one time if their
attempt squeezes in, or will only customers in certain locations be affected so there is little point to keep trying until service is restored etc.

4) Don't treat all your customers as if they live in the US because they don't - i live in Australia and it's frustrating when I'm signed in via my profile (thereby the system should know my location) and the status update times are provided in a timezone
which i then need to calculate to my local time to comprehend how long ago it was. At the very least add something similar to (XX minutes ago) near the time since that is what most customers will be focused on during status updates.

Furthermore whilst still signed in via my non-US profile, seeing things like the following:

Important! You must be signed in with your Microsoft account and provide a 10-digit US phone number.

will make many people outside the US feel like a second-class customer as Microsoft so often do. If the customer has an xbox live account and viewing the page, one can safely assume they are living in a country with decent internet and telephone services.
Provide a means for people outside of the US to be notified in similar means, it's not the 1990's anymore sending an SMS to any country in the world with decent telecommunications is neither difficult nor expensive plus there is always email as a worst case.

Cheers & happy holidays

:)

 

XBOX One Stereo Headset - Can't hear chat

I was suspended for one day via Communication 11/4/15 my suspension was uplift on 11/5/15 I am now having Communication issues it seems like it's my headset wire but Xbox live customer service said its from my suspension. How can I fix this issue?

 

December 24th 5:02pm EST Xbox Live service

I've had no issues all day. I was just online playing Gears of War 3 like 15 minutes ago with no issues. Take a look at the currently Xbox LIVE status page
support.xbox.com/.../xbox-live-status

 

I wonder how many more re-wordings of the same thing will occur:

12/26/2014 8:47:10 PM CST:

Are you having issues launching certain titles? We’re aware of this issue, and we’re working to address this ASAP! Thanks for your patience. We’ll update you on the progress of this issue in 30 minutes.

 

Well said! As a UK user who has two accounts in the family but nonetheless although we are on the internet & can play Steam games together with ease neither of us can get on to together to play either HMCC or Destiny due to Microsoft issues NOT the usual
blame game of shifting it on to either your own modem or internet settings which have all been checked as well within the parameters required by both Microsoft and Bungie & 343?? Not a very gamer firendly Christmas at all and it's not all the fault of Lizard
Squad either - lets hope in 2015 Microsoft get their act together especially for those outside the USA!!

 

Will Microsoft ever learn, I have held and xbox live account for 10 years and have had some of the best support from them but this is the third outage I can remember.

Will they ever be able to support a true 24/7/365 platform that they charge a premium price for or should we expect outages of this nature with what you would expect to be some of the best tech minds in the world supporting xbox live.

As for the one year celebration fiasco a screen saver for 10 years loyalty really does not cut it Microsoft you are lucky that you really have no real competitor at the moment as I think you will lose market share as soon as one becomes available.

 

Hey everyone!

I am truly sorry to hear about the connection issues , I can definitely understand how frustrating that could be. In order to make sure that your suggestions and feedback get seen by the proper folks, I recommend posting on our Xbox
Feedback page. If you would like to continue troubleshooting the issue, please go ahead and create a new thread. This way you an receive support specifically tailored to you. Be sure to include the details of the issue as well as any troubleshooting
steps that you have tried. Once again, I am truly sorry to hear about the connection issues and any inconveniences this may have caused.