Communication carries more weight than ever before.
Businesses are so much more connected to their customers given the number of mediums they can communicate through; Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and even TikTok.
Because of this, it's essential to prioritize these lines of communication throughout your day-to-day. Some might even say that over-communicating is the best way forward.
Why? No one likes a company that appears simply like a black box with zero insight into what's happening.
Do you have a new feature being released soon? Share a blog post and a Twitter thread. Have a new leadership hire? Make sure to get a press release and a feature on another domain.
But what about when the news isn't so rosy, and you're facing an incident like a total app outage—what do you do then?
Yes, communicating with your customers is extremely important in this scenario, but doing so for the sake of checking off a box is a misstep. However, incident communication is a totally different beast and you have to be very thoughtful about how and when you share information.
So you'll need to focus on communication that hits a few bars to ensure you're being as effective as possible and not making a bad situation worse.
For us here at incident.io, that means:
- Putting out timely communications
- Sharing updates that are of high quality
- Setting clear expectations about when we'll be putting our further updates
- And defining clear responsibilities internally about who will share updates
Here, I'll dive into these and highlight our advice for each.
Prioritizing timeliness
No one appreciates people being late—the same holds for external communications.
Nothing is more frustrating than loading up an app, seeing that it's down, going to a company Twitter or status page, and not seeing a peep about an outage you know is probably happening.
Prioritizing communication is one thing; making sure it's timely is another. It helps no one to see a Twitter thread or status page updated hours after an outage. Yes, you can and should be transparent about especially significant outages after the fact, but you shouldn't use this as the first opportunity to share information about it.
For customers, just confirming that there’s something wrong will likely make them feel much better. Even if there's no meaningful detail about the outage (which is highly likely as you work to triage the issue), something is better than absolute white noise.
Being proactive and timely also benefits you since you'll have to field fewer support tickets and prevent folks from repeating loading your flailing website.
So always ask yourself, how quickly can we get something out?
In these situations, we err on the side of right away, even if we don't have a ton of context.
Aiming for high-quality comms
Your external communications should be the highest quality content you put into the world.
Both customers and non-customers can and will form decisions about your company based on the quality of your external communications, so you should put forth your best effort.
There will be many outages without a clear cause, but acknowledging an issue and being transparent about looking for the root cause is worth the effort.
💭 But when you have significant updates to share, make them easy to parse, especially if you have a customer base mainly of folks with non-technical backgrounds.
But what about if you have a mixed audience? People read from top to bottom and tap out when they don't understand. So make sure that your updates are as accessible as possible to start and that you signpost any technical details later in the update.
Engineers will likely be most interested in this latter, more technical section. Plus, the clearer you can be, the more empathy they will likely have for your current predicament.
Setting expectations around frequency
When it comes to outages, or incidents more broadly, you want to avoid creating information gaps.
As the communicator, you always want to make sure that customers feel like there's a resolution being worked towards and that updates, even small ones, are coming through constantly.
The last thing you want is two information dumps: one letting them know something is wrong and another saying that the issue has been resolved.
With each update, you should set expectations around when folks should expect more information.
For example, "We're aware of an issue with our checkout page. We're working on a fix and will update this page in 30 minutes." Half an hour later, customers can confidently refresh your social media or status page and know they're about to see another update.
This level of transparency and immediacy makes people feel good. It builds up a 'commit and deliver' cycle with your customers: you commit to providing an update and then deliver on that commitment at the expected time. These cycles build trust, even if the underlying issue is unresolved.
Even if you're still trying to diagnose what happened and aren't necessarily any closer to resolution, this communication level totally changes how people emotionally respond.
We discussed this in our podcast episode: How communication can make or break your incidents.
Okay, so how do we put this into action?
By focusing on operational excellence.
Okay, but wait, what does that mean?
💭 For us, operational excellence looks like running exercises like Game Days to stress test our response processes. Thoroughly documenting everything to eliminate information gaps during incidents. And writing a lot so everyone understands what clear communication actually looks like.
Basically, we practice a lot!
So when you hear us talking about operational excellence, we really mean practicing excellence.
Let's talk about how this translates to our thinking around external comms.
Operational excellence around external comms
If an incident happens, we've realized it's not the best idea for a single responder to try to fix and communicate about an issue. One of those two will likely fall short in some way.
In most instances, engineers will prioritize the "fixing" part of this equation and end up not communicating properly. It's a give-and-take. Good comms, decent incident response. Great incident response, lackluster comms. Often, you’ll want to split up these two roles, to make sure that both can be delivered effectively.
And as a separate but related point, taking a technical concept and explaining it in a way customers of all backgrounds can understand is a skill that’s hard to come by.
Being able to choose the right person, whether another engineer or someone from a different discipline, and making sure that person is dedicated to external comms will massively change both the frequency of your updates and their quality.
This is where having an integrated incident management tool really helps. With an integrated incident management tool, all your response happens in a central location—eliminating the need to jump around different screens and programs. In the end, it increases levels of visibility and clarity of communication.
With an integrated IM tool like incident.io, you can designate a comms lead that you know is well-equipped to handle the situation, and this designation won't get lost in disparate tools.
This way, everyone has clear roles and responsibilities within a single source and knows what they need to handle.
Remember, clear external comms is a must
Every organization is different and has unique needs. But in the end, all external communications need to go through a certain amount of quality assurance to make sure they’re representing your brand well.
Remember, even during moments of absolute chaos, customers will appreciate your transparency and will remember you for it.
So next time you have an outage or even a minor inconvenience, don’t hesitate to shout.
