Bridgestone/Firestone Website Deflated After Tire Recall

Earlier last week, the tire manufacturer had recalled many of its tires that service major car manufacturers, especially SUV's and trucks. The Washington Post reported the problems stem mainly from a plant located in Decatur, Illinois, which had many problems due to the amount of pressure to produce high quantities of tires.

Due to the unexpected influx of traffic, probably from upset and hostile consumers, the Bridgestone/Firestone website was not prepared to handle the amount of traffic that it received. "Let's face it, people going to a site like Firestone are upset to begin with. They're frustrated and angry. Being turned away from the Web site, the inference they're going to make is the company doesn't care, which is very damaging," said Stan Schatt, vice-president of Networking for Giga Information Group.

Schatt, along with countless other IT specialists, constantly have to deal with the growing popularity of the Internet. Along with the business that they obviously won't turn away, IT companies have to deal with the professionalism (or lack thereof) of the corporations coming to them for their services.

This crash is an example of that, as are the previous crashes of the Victoria's Secret and Encyclopedia Britannica websites. What normally happens is that a company that uses the Internet as a means, but not end to marketing, usually doesn't dish out the type of money that is needed to get state-of-the-art equipment to house their site. Therefore, when a site like Bridgestone/Firestone has to deal with a major problem, such as the recall of very popular tires, they are not ready to deal with the traffic of concerned consumers.

Expectedly, companies like AOL, Yahoo! and CNN are going to have the technology needed to house a heavily trafficked site. "In Bridgestone/Firestone's defense, they're probably not one of the highly visited sites to begin with," said Allen Tsai, product manager for public services at Keynote Systems, an Internet performance system company. "The lesson here is even if you're not one of the bigger dot.com's or e-commerce sites, you should be prepared for the worst case scenario," he added

With the emphasis of business being customer service in most parts of the world, people have become very accustomed to good service. When they face a situation where a product that they have purchased doesn't work, they will most likely complain. In the situation like that of Bridgestone/Firestone, consumers don't like it when they try to complain only to find no response. It sends a bad message.

However, Bridgestone/Firestone has most probably learned a great lesson from this occurrence. In the coming weeks, they will most likely be upgrading their system to house the type of traffic that they faced last week. Then the major tire manufacturer has the daunting task of soothing the bruised egos of all their faithful users

Haroon Cambel Islam Online, Washington DC