Service Outage? Just Own It!
Business customers are usually forgiving when service goes down. They just want you to own it and provide transparent, timely communication.
As 451 Research Analyst Donnie Berkholz wrote in a blog post, “We all understand that sometimes things break, because clouds are incredibly complex systems. We’re only really looking for two things out of it: (1) don’t have the same problem twice, and (2) keep us informed.”
Ideally, you would reach stakeholders and clients before they feel the impact of an incident. Warn the call center before the calls start coming, inform clients before their business is impacted, and alert your executives before they hear about it from someone else.
Your communications to these different stakeholders have to meet their unique needs. Resolution teams need incident details and specific action items. Clients just want to know that you’re on it, and what they should expect next. Here are a few guidelines can help with crafting incident messaging for a variety of audiences:
- Is the information of value to the recipient?
- Is the information actionable by the recipient?
- Does the information help to reduce dissatisfaction or confusion? For example, updates at timed intervals can help assure clients that teams are working on it.
- Are you using the audience’s language? Use can use fancy tech acronyms and abbreviations for your resolution teams, but stick with plain language for executives and clients.