Three Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Status Page

An outage with one, several or all of your servers is hectic enough, but add in a stream of emails and phone calls from concerned customers and you’ve got a full-on situation. When you start receiving these emails, phone calls or texts from clients who need access to their applications on these servers, you may have to individually answer each request in an emergency or during scheduled maintenance.

Instead of hiring more employees to sit and wait to receive these dispatches, you can save money and be proactive about sending notifications to your clients. As soon as you realize there’s an issue, you can have a system in place to craft clear, calm messages before there’s an issue to push out to your customers during an emergency.

How can you do this? A status page allows you to make live updates on the status of an outage, scheduled maintenance, or other delay. When you click update on the status page, you notify every subscriber to that service. They’ll be notified about scheduled maintenance or an emergency. This message will notify everyone in that environment, managing their expectations, feelings and need for clear, concise information and allowing employees and customers to get instant information without you having to field phone calls and emails one by one.

Here’s why a status page can save you time, money and your sanity during an incident:

Keep customers and employees informed and calm. Your goal is to keep customers aware of what’s going on with their data so they don’t start to wonder what’s going on. Your IT department is in a place of crucial responsibility, where stressed customers can mean the difference between gaining or losing business. In fact, losing customer trust only twice can build a pattern of failure in their eyes. Customers who aren’t prepared for an outage or emergency are relying on you to keep their data safe. This makes it critical to inform them through the status page that all is well.

A short mantra on this concept: Status pages tell customers what’s really wrong, not what they think is wrong. When they think it’s something they did wrong — and will have to explain to their boss — your notifications will instantly inform them of what the issue actually is.

Foster a culture of transparency. Normally, you have to manage incoming phone calls and tickets to the best of your abilities, but this only creates longer hold and response times on tickets, so your customer doesn’t know what’s going on — they only know they can’t get into their application, no one is picking up the phone, and no one is returning their calls. This can be frustrating for them and why it’s key to be proactive. Give your customer base the information they need while you try to resolve the problem. Letting them know what’s going on gives them comfort the situation is being handled instead of ignored. You can even give them specific details, saying the system will be down for an hour and will come right back.

Using status pages is also a drastic reduction in inbound communications, meaning you’ll receive far fewer emails, phone calls and support tickets. Not having a surplus of employees waiting on dispatches from customers can also save you money.

Let your customers receive the information in the best way for them. Whether it’s through text message or email, or even Slack and social media, sending a message about your customers’ servers meets them where they are instead of forcing them to figure it out on your own platform. They can get information their way.

Status pages can be a hero during an outage for emergency or maintenance purposes. It’s a win-win for your customers who want to keep up-to-date on their applications, while you spend less time being on the defensive and more time remedying the actual problem.

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 or email us.