Do your business partners need to know when there is a major incident?

Major incidents often cause mass chaos, making it difficult to figure out how to notify your business partners.  There are multiple good business communication reasons to notify your partners.  Successful communication during the incident lets your business partners know you are aware of the situation and are working to get the incident resolved.  Notify your business partners as quickly as possible because every minute counts and is costing your business partners money, don’t waste any time.  AlertOps reliable incident management system allows you to notify your partners during a major incident.

Getting ahead of the major incident is crucial, and with important information your business partners will want to be kept in to the loop both during and after the major incident. Save the detailed and technical messages for your services desk teams.  Your business partners want to know the problem and severity and how the outage will affect their business as well as the timeframe to getting it resolved.  Ensure you use the right tone when communicating the major incident with your business partner, don’t place the blame on other systems, and accept the responsibility.  Remember that proactively spreading the word to your business partners will helps build their trust.  Your business partners will value your honesty and will help grow your future by talking about your outages.

AlertOps’ workflows are a great way to quickly send updates, giving your business partners and support teams the most up to the minute updates on major incidents and resolutions.  The silence will only frustrate your customers, regardless of the time of day so with AlertOps you can send updates immediately and keep the information coming.  Regular status updates will show your business partners that you are still working to resolve the outage.  Keep in mind that your business partners have customers too and need to stay on top of the major incident.  AlertOps’ workflows will help reach out to your business partners before they feel the impact of the major incident.

Your resolution teams need specific detail and action plans in place because major incidents impact your business in minutes even before incident resolution teams get involved.  Meeting your business partners SLAs aren’t enough! You are under their microscope during major incidents and they want immediate contact.  AlertOps’ message rules and workflows allow you to customize unique messages for each audience: the incident resolvers, IT department, managers and business partners.  Allowing you to send tailored massages for each step of the process until the incident is resolved.  In connected-enterprises during a major incident it will cause a domino effect and may trigger a multitude of additional incidents.   To ensure that the content of the message correlates with the specific teams: resolution teams need specific details and call to actions  to engage and inform them rapidly, external clients don’t need the details they simply need to know that the problem is addressed and what to expect next.

AlertOps communication during an incident includes message templates, with integrations between communication, ticketing and monitoring systems it allows messages to automatically be sent without taking resolution or ops teams off the task, which allows for

multiple messages to be triggered to specific groups.  AlertOps’ team management uses on-call scheduling, groups and skill sets, so during a major incident you rarely have to look for a specific person, but rather look for a specific role or skill set.  AlertOps’ message rule allows communication frequency on alerts and resolution time.  AlertOps’ communication is triggered by escalations so action is taken quickly.  Often times requiring a conference bridge to dramatically reduce the resolution time and use proactive communication to help gather data to troubleshoot, your business partners will want to know what you learned and that you’re confident the same critical outage won’t happen again.

Keep in mind that during a major incident communication is as crucial as the events that are changed and updated. Major incidents often send a ripple effect through your organization and your business partners.  So they are confident that you have identified the root cause of the problem and processes are in place to reduce the risk of similar incidents.  Learn to trigger and use proactive communication with AlertOps’ workflows during major incidents for everyone involved.

AlertOps’ workflows can manage your service levels allowing you to send reminders to incident owners at regular intervals or send reminders off of an SLA deadline.  Workflows can also trigger other flows as well, such as change control processes needed to resolve major incidents.

Do your business partners need to know when there is a major incident?