How a Status Page Can Be Your One-Stop Crisis Management Platform

Whether there’s a crisis or scheduled maintenance on your servers, you need to keep your customers informed during these down times. Instead of using multiple tools in your crisis management process, your IT team can use one platform. Status pages can solve multiple issues in one location instead of using your web page, email, phone and ticket system to notify customers. This also helps to let them know about maintenance updates before they happen.

How can you do this? A status page allows you to make live updates on the status of a delay and keep your customers constantly updated on one platform. When you click update on the status page, you’ll notify all of your customers who subscribe to that service. They’ll be notified on multiple platforms (Facebook, email and more) with one message to your status page.

This message will alert everyone who’s subscribed to your updates, helping to manage their expectations, feelings and need for clear, concise information. This also allows employees to get instant information without having to field phone calls and emails one by one.

Status pages are often used in place of multiple platforms by several high profile companies, including most recently Microsoft Xbox Live. A recent outage made Xbox users unable to view their social and gaming services, including achievements, friend lists, and activity of friends. Instead of telling them on multiple platforms, the company was able to alert them to the issues on their own status page. These kind of one-stop notifications can ease the concerns of customers, and lessen the number of emails and calls received in the IT department. This is a key part of Microsoft’s crisis management plan and should be a consideration for yours.

With a status page, you can pull all of your notifications into one space and be prepared for an emergency or scheduled maintenance. One part crisis management, another part notification platform, a status page can pull in your list of emails from customers and give them the information they need during an outage or scheduled maintenance. When a crisis happens, it’ll be too late to implement a crisis management procedure that’s calm, cool and collected. The time to create this plan is before the system is down.

Your IT department can start doing this in the following ways:

1. Meet with the key members of your team. Together, you’ll identify the key pain points during a crisis. They may need to balance team members who are fixing the problem and those who have to update customers during the process.
2. Evaluate which platforms you’re using now. You’ll want to do this comprehensively across your social media, your website or even in apps.
3. Identify how you can put this onto one platform. Looking to the Microsoft XBox example again, they broke down their status page into different categories: Services, Games, Website and Apps, with subcategories within each of these headers. You can do the same based on your business and IT needs.

Once you have a solution in place, continue to customize it. Create communications with your logo and mission statement. Bring trust and your brand to the forefront, so customers can go to your status page and know exactly what’s going on without picking up the phone.

If you’re interested in learning more about how a status page can decrease your call volume and increase customer satisfaction, schedule a call with us here.