What are your incident communication tips?

[Jake Bartlett]

Incidents happen. It’s how you respond to them that can make a bad situation turn into a great customer experience. Here are our top 5 incident communication tips.

What tips and best practices have you and your team picked up along the way for communicating around incidents? How often do you update your customers? Which channels do you use?

[Sophie Reynolds]

Love the tips! We have come a long way from hiding away trying to fix the issue before communicating to our customers. Now we let them know as soon as an issue is detected- even floor walking to let people know there is an issue before they switch on their PCs. We also aim to provide a post-mortem same day as the incident resolution. Our service desk IVR message encourages people to check the Statuspage for incidents before raising a call and we have had a lot of positive feedback on the clarity and honesty of our messages. Communication is key!

[Jake Bartlett]

Thanks for chiming in!

We have come a long way from hiding away trying to fix the issue before communicating to our customers. Now we let them know as soon as an issue is detected

This is so great to hear!

Our service desk IVR message encourages people to check the Statuspage for incidents before raising a call

Are you doing anything to increase awareness of your status page? Examples: embedding your system status in other web properties, including a link to the status page in emails, mentioning it in onboarding/training? 

[Sophie Reynolds]

Yes! First, we set up a sample group of users from our call centre and once we were ready to launch we blogged about it on our intranet page, using the call centre as our case group. We included it on our old email incident templates ("coming soon" type message).

I wrote a piece on it for our monthly IT newsletter

We also include it to our out of office messages and at the bottom of every call closure notification.

We set up a widget for our intranet page which shows green if there are no incidents and red if there is something on statuspage with a direct link to the page too.

I have trained all of our operational teams to use it so it can be updated out of core working hours.

[Jake Bartlett]

Awesome! Thanks for sharing this, these are great tips/ideas for others.