Outages happen, whether you want them to or not. And during the stress of an outage, it’s hard to remember that your customers are often in a worse situation. They’re also impacted by the outage, but they have less idea on what on going on.<\/p>\n
They’ve also got their own customers asking them for answers. They’re going to want to blame someone, and that someone will probably be you.<\/p>\n
That’s why an outage communication strategy is vital. By reducing your customer’s stress and keeping them in the loop, you’ll be preserving your customer relationships in the long term. A little bit of well placed communication can go a long, long way.<\/p>\n
Email, voicemail, text message and social media. The more channels you alert your customers by, the more chance everyone will get the message.<\/p>\n
Link to your status page prominently in places like your contact us page, your social media accounts, help documentation, and your initial reach-out.<\/p>\n
Not only does this help you once everything is done and you want to see how the incident was handled, written communication is generally higher in quality than spoken communication. They have time to organize their thoughts and reference things people have said earlier in the conversation.<\/p>\n
There is also no chance of mishearing someone and sending out the wrong information to your customers.<\/p>\n
Your customers don’t need to know the exact details of how Bob was leaning against the servers and spilled coffee into it. Stick to the information they care about. How severe is the outage? What’s the estimated length? What’s being done? Who is working on it? These are the things they will want to know.<\/p>\n
If you have the resources, automate updates to your status page and create new outage messages when you receive updates from your technicians. Click the send button and your customers will receive updates almost immediate.<\/p>\n
This will make them feel in the lop, increase satisfaction and reduce frustration. It’ll also take the pressure off your phone lines because angry customers won’t be ringing up as often to find out what’s going on.<\/p>\n
There’s more to an outage than just getting things running again. How you keep your customers in the loop is vital to your business’s survival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":11168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[292,634,631],"class_list":["post-11129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-support","tag-dr-strategy","tag-featured","tag-outage-plans"],"yoast_head":"\n