How to handle downtime to make it a memorable experience for your customers

The sad reality of running a business online is that downtime happens and you can’t really avoid it forever. Even the best web companies have suffered and suffer an occasional dip in their services.

Sometimes it goes unnoticed but it might easily turn out to be catastrophic for the business as well. So, if downtime is inevitable, the only logical way to prevent any serious damage is to be prepared to handle the worst.

A poorly handled downtime can severely affect your brand image. Your customers lose trust in your service. You lose on the word of mouth referrals and lot of future customers due to the lack of reliability on your product and brand. In the worst case scenario you might even lose customers to your competitors who are just a couple of clicks away.

However, downtime need not me a customer service disaster. In our experience with companies across the globe, we have seen that just keeping the customers in loop about the problem and an assurance that you are working on it to get it fixed goes a long way in reducing the negative reactions by customers and in fact creates a memorable experience for them. This creates a positive impression and trust in the long run.

How do you prepare for a downtime ?

In this section we’ll discuss about the things that needs to be done before, during and after the incident occurs to ensure that downtime doesn’t become a customer service nightmare.

Before an incident occurs:

Define the conditions for communication

The first step is to define what must happen to warrant a communication to your customers i.e., defining the type and how critical the effect of the incident has to be. Should you notify your customers for a minute or downtime or should it be a minimum of 5 minute outage to notify them ?

It has to be your choice based on the incident but in general a downtime of 3–5 minutes warrants a notification to customers to keep them aware of the issue.

Not just this sometimes you might not be suffering a complete blackout and only a few features might be unavailable or suffering downtime. Hence, downtime isn’t just black and white but has shades of grey as well. In such situations, you must make the decision carefully. If it is something that isn’t critical such as sending an email of downloading a PDF, it is ok not to notify specifically but if it is a critical issue such as payment transaction service, you must make your customers aware right away.

Apart from security issue and data loss when it is 100% mandatory to notify your customers, it is completely up to you to decide how and when you want to communicate the outage.

Define the communication channel

Now that we have defined the incidents that need to be communicated to the customers, we must also define the channels that should be used to communicate the issue.

Do you have a dedicated statuspage to keep your business users aware? Or a widget to alert them on the webapp itself or do you want to alert them via call, SMS, email or through integrations such as Slack? Maybe just update them on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

You can choose whatever channel suits you best but since the purpose of these channels is to communicate and on time, you must be sure that you’ll be able to reach your customers at the right time via these channels else the purpose would remain unfulfilled.

We would recommend you to keep one of the channels as primary. This channel must be the one where you are 100% sure to reach your customer and the other channels should be an additional secondary way to reach them in case they miss your notification via the primary communication channel.

In our opinion, having a statuspage is the best way to reach your customers who are visiting your website at any point of time and doesn’t unnecessarily notify those customers who aren’t visiting your website.

Decide who owns the downtime communication process.

Now when the channel is figured out, we need to figure out the person/team who should be responsible to carry on the communication with the customers and update the company’s statuspage during downtime.

It may be your customer service/support team if you are dealing with non technical customers and product or it can be your IT support or your DevOps team updating the statuspage and communicating with the customers if you are dealing with a product that caters to a technical customer base.

The decision is simple to make, choose the one who can successfully answer your customer questions. Once this decision is made it should be documented properly so that both tech and non tech support teams are clear on the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) and know what is expected from them.

Quick tip: Create communication templates for commonly occurring incidents beforehand.

Imagine yourself as an IT support guy waking up to a critical incident at 3AM in the morning. The last thing you would want to do is think about what needs to be sent to the customers as a notification. It would be really difficult to have the perfect set of words in the right format with a clear idea about how much you wish to disclose at that point of time concerning the incident.

Hence, it is advisable to have some templates ready for commonly occurring scenarios that could be sent with just light editing.

During the incident

Inform your customers

Even though you’ll have to send notifications multiple time during the incident to keep your customers updated, the first notification really matters the most since it determines how your customer response will be graded in public eye.

The first notification doesn’t need to contain specific information about incident like why it happened, how much it’ll take to fix it but should be communicated as early as possible. The goal is to acknowledge the issue immediately and assure the customers that you are working on them.

Whenever a user tries to visit your website but the website fails to load, the user immediately visits your statuspage or your twitter account for details. If they don’t find an official acknowledgement on your statuspage when you are facing downtime, it is a frustrating experience for your users who might even feel like you don’t care about them as customers. This doesn’t look good on anyone trying to build a brand.

Taking care of ongoing communication

If the incident doesn’t resolve within 30 mins, it’s important for your to designate someone as an official designated communicator who is responsible for being updated with all the teams working on resolving the issue and keeping every one in the organization aware of the ongoing issue.

This person will also be responsible for updating the statuspage and sending in notifications in periodic intervals to assure the customers that the issue is being taken care of. Even a “We are still working on the issue and will update you when it gets fixed” is better than having no updates at all.

The idea is to keep everyone updated without having the need to ask for it every time.

After the incident is resolved

Once the incident is resolved and you have notified the customers of the successful resolution, following are the things that you must do.

Provide a resolution report/postmortem

It isn’t necessary to provide this report every time an incident occurs but for serious issues like security breach or data loss, we consider it to extremely important to publish the report to keep not just the business users aware but also keep the whole organization aware of the reason behind the issue and how it was resolved successfully.

A postmortem report should essentially contain:

1. A personal apology for causing inconvenience to your customers/users.

2. Show that you knew the reason why the issue occurred and were capable of fixing it.

3. An assurance that such incidents won’t happen in future and that you have a solid plan for situations like this in future.

The whole idea is to help retain the trust of your customers in your ability to provide the service and reliability your customers desire for.

Apologize like you mean it and not doing for the sake of it.

When you apologize do it like you really care about your customers and not just doing it for the sake of it. An apology coming from someone in the senior management roles such as CTO goes a long way in removing all the negative feelings that your customer may have.

Secondly, the apology should be personal and not just like coming from the corporate overlords. It shouldn’t be something like “ We are sorry for the inconvenience ……”. It should be rather like “I am sorry for letting you down. Our whole team is making sure this doesn’t happen ever again in future…..”

Demonstrate your understanding and ability to face the issue.

Believe us, your customers want to trust you and are in fact rooting for you to win. After all, you are their choice and they want to be wrong about it. Making sure your demonstrate your ability to understand the reasons behind the issue and assuring them of your ability to handle it well assures your customers that you will be able to take care of such issues in future as well.

Lack of communication sends a rather negative message to your customers.

While communicating it is essential that you don’t bad mouth any third party services even if it was the primary reason for your outage. You were the one who chose to use their services and hence should be responsible to take accept your mistakes and apologize for it rather than putting it on someone else. It isn’t professional and if you look clearly doesn’t change anything.

Provide your plan to face it in the future

This part of the report essentially contains your plans about how you would tackle incidents like this in future. Your customers want to know if they can trust your process, your ability and your plan to face such incidents in future as well.
The sole purpose is to regain the trust of your customers and assure them taht they are in good hands.

All these steps together ensure that you gain stronger trust of your customer with every incident you face. This will allow you to make every outage a memorable experience for your customers and your chance to build on your brand image with the trust they put in you.

Here’s your bonus

We like to think and it comes from experience that having a statuspage for yourself is an important part of your team’s toolbox to face downtime successfully.

We at Fyipe help you create white label statuspages for your company to keep your customers and business users aware if something goes wrong with your website or application. Our on-call scheduling feature alerts your team via call, SMS, email and other integrations like Slack about the incident when it occurs and some times even before something goes down so that you start working on it.

Customer support is tough job and takes a lot of effort during an outage. We make it easier.

What else ? We would rather let you try the product for yourself. Its on free trail and you have got nothing to lose. Just try it and see if it works for you. It take just 5 mins to set up. You can start here.