proactive communications

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Sending notifications too late, to the wrong stakeholders ... be easy to use that data to send one communication to ...
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ajor incidents start to impact businesses within just minutes, often before incident resolution teams can even be engaged. With this immediate impact to business, meeting your major incident SLAs

is no longer enough. You are under a microscope from customers with expectations that all systems are ‘always on,’ or you’ll inform them immediately and communicate to them along the way.

What’s more, given the sensitive nature of incidents and the variety of audiences requiring communication, knowing how to adequately manage communication plans can be tricky. Handling them poorly can be even worse than not handling them at all. When it comes to communicating during major incidents, business

customers

are

like

Goldilocks:

They

want

information that’s just right. They don’t want too little, they don’t want too much, they want it relevant to them, and they want it right on time. This paper outlines best practices to empower and engage your key stakeholders during major incidents.

Align Your Communications with Your Process During the Planning Stage Having processes and systems in place to resolve major incidents means you’re already ahead of many large enterprises. Monitoring, contact, triage, resolution, post mortem all constitute areas where pre-planning can bring value. Major incidents happen. The processes and systems in place will determine how successfully you resolve them. The right technology, proper planning and configuration can produce

THE REAL COST OF POOR COMMUNICATION

S

ending notifications too late, to the wrong

Executives kept in the dark can take your time with

stakeholders, or with the wrong message can

inquiries, damage your internal reputation, and cost you

damage your organization (and your job security).

your job.

Extend your communication beyond resolvers: Customers will contact you by the thousands. Customer satisfaction drops by 15 percent every time a customer has to call back about the same issue.1

PROACTIVE COMMUNICATIONS DURING MAJOR INCIDENTS

Third-party service providers who lack information cannot help with resolution. A service outage starts to affect most businesses within just 15 minutes.2

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a turnkey, repeatable process that does not require manual

Choose a template, update recipients if necessary, update

communications and produces faster resolution times.

messaging if necessary, add relevant data, and send. Even better, tight integration between monitoring, ticketing, and

Each of these steps produces a unique set of data. It would

other systems with communication systems could allow for

be easy to use that data to send one communication to

messages to auto-populate based on the type of incident.

incident resolvers and all stakeholders. Instead, parse the data to produce multiple messages for unique audiences. For

at Headquarters are failing intermittently. Please test

Right-Sizing Communications: How to Get it Just Right

the servers and all the connections to determine the

As an IT professional, you likely didn’t sign up for one of the

exact cause so we can take corrective action ASAP.

trickiest communication jobs in the business, but getting

instance, in the Triage step, messages might look like this: •  To incident

resolvers:

Servers

SRDC-RHL09

through RHL16 in the third bank in Server Room 1

the communications right is now officially part of your job •  To the IT department head: Servers SRDC-RHL09

description. A good rule of thumb on tackling this new task:

through RHL16 in the third bank in Server Room 1

communicate as broadly as the impact of your incident, as

at Headquarters are failing intermittently. We are

detailed as required (but no more) for any given audience,

beginning tests. We will let you know when we have

as far ahead of impact as possible.

determined the exact cause and can give you an estimated completion time.

BREADTH Major incidents are no longer isolated to back-end batch

•  To executives: We’re having an issue with some

processing nor even live systems that impact a small set

servers at Headquarters. We are testing to determine

of constituents. With so many applications and services

the cause, and we will let you know the estimated

interconnected, a single incident could have a domino effect

completion time as soon as possible.

impacting multiple stakeholders. Consider the following audiences when building communication plans:

•  To customers: We are experience some service issues. We are working on a resolution diligently, and

Direct Stakeholders – Communications should be sent to

will restore service as soon as possible.

anyone whose business processes may be impacted by the

Automate Messages with Templates

incident. Depending on the type of incident, this could be owners of a process dependent on an impacted service,

You need at least four distinct messages. There could

an internal customer reliant on the interrupted service or

also be messages to partners, utilities, PR, corporate

even end-customers (business or consumer) who will feel

communications, and more. Creating all these messages

the impact in a significant manner. For example, an incident

on the fly in the midst of trying to resolve a major incident

that might simply slow the services of an end consumer

would cause delay and increase the risk of error.

might not require communications to consumers, but a business customer reliant on a service that experiences an

Instead, create a series of templates to automate the

outage will be more significantly impacted and should be

tailoring of messages at each stage of the process.

considered in your communications plan.

PROACTIVE COMMUNICATIONS DURING MAJOR INCIDENTS

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Help Desks and Call Centers – When services or applications

expectations that communications will be transparent and

are slow or disrupted, your typical 2015 worker seems

timely. As 451 Research Analyst Donnie Berkholz stated in a

to have trigger finger when it comes to calling your help

blog post “We all understand that sometimes things break,

desk. Even a 20 minute e-mail outage can result in a flood

because clouds are incredibly complex systems. We’re only

of hundreds of tickets and phone calls in the help desk of

really looking for two things out of it: (1) don’t have the

a typical large enterprise. Alerting the staff manning the

same problem twice, and (2) keep us informed.”

lines not only prevents them from opening duplicate tickets, but it’s also an opportunity to arm them with outbound

Optimal timing would allow you to reach stakeholders and

communication to alleviate the concerns of inbound callers.

clients before they feel the impact of an incident. Let the call center know before an influx of calls, let the client know

Management – While extra inbound calls have hard dollar

before their own systems are impacted, let your executives

costs associated with them, an out-of-the-loop executive

know before someone else tells them.

has an immeasurable reputation cost. Your highest value customers most likely have direct access to company

CONTENT

executives and when they feel a disruption, chances are

As mentioned earlier in the paper, altering the content of

they’re not calling into a call center. Executives should be

your communication to specific audiences is key. Resolution

kept in the loop in real time and never caught off-guard by

teams need to have specific details as well as calls to action

in inbound client.

to engage and inform them rapidly. External clients don’t need or want details. They simply want to know that the

Customer-Facing Staff – In addition to call centers and

problem is being addressed and, when possible, what

executives, any customer-facing staff should be kept

to expect next. Don’t confuse transparency with over-

informed of incidents that might impact their customers. This

communication. Too much information can result in lost

might include field staff, account executives, sales staff, etc.

confidence. The following guidelines can help with crafting incident messaging for a variety of audiences:

Downstream

Dominoes



In

today’s

inter-connected

enterprise, a single incident may trigger a multitude of



1:

Is the information of value to the recipient?



2: Is the information actionable by the recipient?



3: Does the information help to reduce dissatisfaction

additional incidents. Understanding interdependencies could help prevent or mitigate damage downstream. For example, a power outage might not have an immediate impact outside of restoration teams if a back-up generator kicks in. But if a generator gets below a certain threshold and restoration is not

or confusion? For example, updates at timed

imminent, giving application owners ample time to shut down

intervals can be beneficial in assuring constituents

apps properly could save hours in restart time once the power

that teams are working on the issue, even if there is

is back up and running.

no known additional information.

TIMING



4: Does the information use vernacular familiar to the

The modern business customer - be they internal or

audience? For example, don’t bog down executives

outside - is forgiving yet impatient. Intermingled with their

with fancy tech acronyms and internal process

reliance on digital systems is an acknowledgement that

abbreviations. Use plain language that they can

they will break, but the forgiveness comes packaged with

relay as necessary.

PROACTIVE COMMUNICATIONS DURING MAJOR INCIDENTS

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Tactics for Communicating During an Incident When a major incident occurs, time is rarely your friend. The following tactics help you to use communication techniques to actually save time versus wasting precious minutes.

Utilize Message Templates During the heat of an incident, the last thing your teams need to be doing is crafting prose. Message templates can save time by providing messaging and response options. Templates can be rapidly altered during incidents for specifics.

you know they can be fickle with specific needs. Allowing stakeholders to subscribe to communications lets them control frequency of alerts, mode of communication and subject matter on which they want to be informed.

Use Communication to Trigger Collaboration Resolution teams still need to take action quickly. In today’s distributed, heterogeneous environments that often requires collaboration. Something as simple as a conference call for a team representing a dozen skill sets can take well over an hour to assemble. Automating notification to conference bridge recipients (with escalation processes for alternates) can assemble the same team in 3-5 minutes, drastically reducing resolution times.

Integrate When Possible Even better, when communications templates are integrated with monitoring systems, details can be auto-populated into message templates.

Automate When Possible Tight integration between your communication and ticketing & monitoring systems allows for messages to automatically be sent without taking your resolution and ops teams off

Partner with Your Communication Team Once communications leave the walls of your enterprise, it’s fair game. While transparency and honesty are important aspects of communicating to stakeholders, you may want a professional to craft the exact wording. Proactively set up meetings with your client or corporate communications team to create the templates and messages to keep in your arsenal for when a major incident hits.

the tasks of restoring services. Enterprise-grade systems will allow for multiple messages to be triggered for different audiences with different messages.

Synchronicity Synchronize contact information via data sync from systems of record.

Augment basic contact information

with contextual information like on-call schedules, groups and skill sets. During incidents, you are rarely looking for a specific person, but for a role or skill set. For example, you don’t want ‘Joan,’ you want the ‘call center manager on duty’.

Give Stakeholders Control We’ve already covered the requirement of communicating to stakeholders beyond resolution teams. We’ve also let

PROACTIVE COMMUNICATIONS DURING MAJOR INCIDENTS

“T  he processes and systems in place will determine how successfully you resolve them. The right technology, proper planning and configuration can produce a turnkey, repeatable process that does not require manual communications.”

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WHIT E PAP E R

Communication Goes Both Ways

From resolution teams and IT management to executives,

Individuals impacted by a major incident can be some of

from service desks and call centers to partners and clients,

your best field agents. Use proactive communications as

a major incident sends ripples of impact throughout your

a chance to gather data points if you think it might help

extended organization. Learning how to trigger and tier

with troubleshooting or post mortem. Your customers

proactive communication during times of disruption allows

want to know that you’ll learn from the experience and feel

for resolution teams to focus on resolution, mitigates

confident that the same issue won’t happen again. Including

impact to client-facing teams, and can drastically increase

their input as part of that process gives them a sense of

reputation and stakeholder satisfaction.

partnership in improving the services you provide.

After an Incident: Post Mortem During an incident, your company communicates as events change, which is crucial. But it’s only after an incident is over – without the distraction of firefighting - that one can gain true perspective and start to sort out all of the facts. With this 20/20 hindsight, it’s beneficial to give stakeholders the confidence that you have identified root cause, that any processes are now in place to mitigate similar incidents and reduce risk.3

1.  First-call resolution: how important is it, really?, https://www. atlassian.com/help-desk/first-call-resolution, 2014

3.  Cloud Outages, Transparency, and Trust,http://redmonk.com/ dberkholz/2015/01/12/cloud-outages-transparency-and-trust, 2015

2.  Business Impact of IT Incident Communications, http://info.xmatters. com/rs/alarmpoint/images/xMatters-2015-Survey-Report.pdf, 2015

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ABOUT US xMatters’ cloud-based solutions enable any business process or application to trigger two-way communications (text, voice, email, etc.) throughout the extended enterprise during time-sensitive events. With over a decade of experience in rapid communication, xMatters serves more than 1,000 leading global firms to ensure business operations run smoothly and effectively during incidents such as IT failures, product recalls, natural disasters, dynamic staffing, service outages, medical emergencies and supply-chain disruption. xMatters is headquartered in San Ramon, CA with additional offices in London and Sydney. Copyright 2015 xMatters. All rights reserved. All other products and brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.