Policy suggestion for Cox

Since someone from Cox seems to be reading at least some of these posts, let me make a suggestion related to outages in general.

Twice in the week or so before this outage, email was down in my area for several hours.  When I phoned Cox, the representatives had no idea what was going on, although they guessed it was "maybe maintenance."  Even during this major outage, at least some Cox chat people had, a day or so into the outage, no idea that there was an outage.

Suggestions:

1.  Notify your customers about what is going on when there is a planned or unplanned outage:

(a) If it is a scheduled maintenance outage, notify customers in advance if possible.  A day in advance would be good if that's possible.

(b) If it is an outage because of a problem, try to notify customers about what is going on.  No fluff messages please.

2.  Here's how to notify customers:

(a) Phone and chat people should know what's going on.  That includes Cox sales people, who were the chat people I somehow got connected to when I selected technical chat.

(b) If the website is up, use that website slider that you finally implemented during this outage.  But once is all that's necessary, not 5-6 times.

(c) Put a notice on the various Cox home pages.

(d) If email is working, email EVERY Cox email address (in advance, in the case of maintenance) telling them about the outage.  (When Cox deleted member storage a year or two ago, I lost family history documents that I had foolishly stored in just that one place.  Apparently Cox had sent advance notice to only one of the email addresses, then unused, associated with our bill, so I never saw it.)

A customer will be much happier knowing in advance that the system will be down for maintenance than they will be to find it down with the phone people having no idea what's happening.  They will be much happier knowing during an outage what's going on in some detail than imagining the worst because Cox hasn't been upfront.

I know someone in your company probably thinks detail is a bad idea because it will aid your competitors, but trust me, an infuriated customer base posting all over the net is worse.  And some of your customers are software engineers and can understand the detail and explain it on the forums to other customers.