Incident Communication Strategies

It is important to keep your company and your customers up to date when major problems are occurring with your service. Effective communication on these issues shows everyone impacted you own the situation and have a plan to fix.

Clear and concise communication on incidents will minimize support costs from customer contacts during a crisis and also lead to consumer confidence.

Internal Customers

---

Internal customers need to know the second there is a major issue impacting services. This allows them to get in front of any customer contacts which will be occurring shortly thereafter. They also need more information than external customers about the extent of impacts and real ETAs. Some suggested data points to include when sending out incident notifications to internal customers:

• Impacted application(s) or services.

• Scope of impact. Be clear about the areas where this is problem lies if needed.

• How to identify. If the issue can be confused with other issues, fill out this data point and give people exact instructions on where to look to ensure they have correctly identified this as the issue. When larger issues exist its common to want to think an issue is the same when in fact it can be something different.

• Suggested workaround. If customers or engineering are able to work around an issue and solve for the customer before the incident is completed, list that here to help support personnel out.

• ETA. (if you have one)

Update frequency. Send updates when you have information to share with internal teams that would impact their support of the issue. This enables support teams to keep customers contacting the company up to date with any updated information.

External Customers

---

External customers need to see a different version of the information about an outage. The message should be communicated with an air of confidence about the situation to ensure customers you have the situation under control. Communications with external customers should be simple, clear and able to be read with the glance of an eye and understood. If the issue is complex, it is good to wait until you are absolutely certain of the extent and impact of an issue before communicating with them.

• Impacted area. Be clear about which areas the customers use which is impacted by this issue.

• Issue. Give a very brief description of the issue as the customer sees it.

• ETA / Next Update. Be honest, if you know when this can be resolved, list it here, otherwise give a time when customers will next be updated on the issue.

Keep in touch. When dealing with ongoing issues for external customers its important to have regular communications with them at specified intervals if you have interrupted their use of your service. Being clear about when the next communication will be and sending out communications at that time allows customers to remain confident in the service you provide. Best practice is to send out notices when you have positive updates. If you expect an extended period of no updates (4 hours or greater), it might be wise to send out an update just to let people know you have not forgotten the issue and are still working on it.