Having a solid business continuity plan is imperative to your company’s survival. Natural disasters, cyberattacks, and other unforeseen events can make your business out of commission.
A service status page is an excellent tool to communicate any outages to your end-users. It helps reduce their frustration and prevents them from calling your customer support department in vain.
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Keeping Your Customers Up-to-Date
While relying solely on status pages to inform your consumers is not a good idea, they can be helpful with automation and an incident response plan. For example, many hosted status page services allow you to send custom notifications to specific groups of users during outages. This feature makes it possible to notify customers more likely to be affected by an outage, resulting in lower customer frustration rates.
It’s also important to remember that when implementing a public status page, it is best to focus on the services most users care about. For instance, the status page highlights the availability of its core features (search, login/SSO, messaging), which are most important for most users. In contrast, DevOps teams might choose to show monitors of more complex services, such as multiple web servers and regions.
If a company’s website is constantly down, this will not only cause problems for employees and customers but may impact sales. In this case, a business continuity plan should be created to ensure other revenue sources, such as email marketing campaigns or mobile apps, are in place. A good business continuity plan should also include the ability to purchase raw materials from multiple suppliers, reducing the risk that one supplier’s failure could cripple an entire operation.
Keeping Your Employees Up-to-Date
In an outage, the service status site allows you to notify customers through an incident notification email and text message. It prevents users from calling your customer service number and calling you a nuisance, which reduces overall call volume and support costs. Additionally, it enables you to give your users immediate updates, which is a fantastic approach to gaining their trust and demonstrating your concern for them.
When a company goes down, it can be stressful for everyone involved. Even if the problem is minor, you must tell your customers what happens and when they can expect your services back online. It is also essential to have a post-incident report that addresses any issues or challenges your team faced during the outage and how you plan to prevent it from happening in the future.
IT Professionals
Status page services allow IT professionals to access real-time data about the performance of systems and networks, regardless of their location. It can also reduce their time resolving outages by being transparent with customers and providing accurate, detailed information. It can also help prevent miscommunications with other departments and customers that could lead to frustration and long-term negative sentiment.
Keeping Your Vendors Up-to-Date
Many companies use a hosted status page service to help manage and communicate issues with their digital products and services. These services offer an easy-to-use platform for businesses looking to improve transparency with their end users while reducing support calls and frustration.
A host of other benefits can come with implementing a status page, including automated incident reporting, custom branding, security controls, comprehensive insights, and user feedback. The visibility offered by a status page can also provide valuable insight for the company itself. For example, if many different services are affected simultaneously, it might be a sign of a deeper issue with the development and release process.
During an outage, a status page lets enterprises share important information with their customers and employees transparently. It helps to reduce customer impact and build trust while maintaining a positive reputation. A status page can also be used as a marketing tool to show that an organization’s services are dependable. It can also showcase historical uptime and incidents to show potential customers that an organization is trustworthy. It can help to improve sales and build long-term customer relationships. Any business must maintain a strong business continuity plan, as downtime can cost money and reputational damage.
Keeping Your Customers Satisfied
Users want to know how long the outage will last when a website goes down. They also want to know what is being done to fix the problem and when it will be resolved. A status page lets companies communicate this information clearly and effectively with their users.
Status pages have evolved extensively from simple up/down indicators to fully transparent communication tools. Companies now use them to provide their users with critical metrics, incident data, maintenance schedules, etc. It allows them to avoid the back-and-forth of emails and chats that can detract from their ability to focus on fixing things.
Providing this transparency can also help build trust in the eyes of their customers. For example, a recent survey found that when an outage occurs, 71% of people said they were more likely to trust a company that was open and honest about its problems than one that did not.
A hosted status page service makes it easy for organizations to keep their users up-to-date with real-time updates, automated alerts that connect with existing monitoring and issue management systems, and seamless integrations with customer support and help desk software. With pre-written templates and the ability to add 150+ third-party components, a status page can be a great way to create transparency and improve user experience during an outage.
