Managing Severity-1 Communication For Your Technology Company

Severity-1 Management

Providing technology to customers creates an environment where the technology becomes Mission Critical to the business. Once your technology has become Mission Critical, you need to have a support model that can manage a Severity-1 issue which equates to the fact that the business of the customer has come to a halt because of your technology.

Prior to the Severity-1 category, the call will start in your client services area with the traditional troubleshooting method and a team member thinking that they can get them back up and running quickly. In many cases, the client service team member will work on the issue far too long before declaring that additional assistance is required. Once the client service team member has declared the Severity-1 category, you need the processes in place to pick up the call and assemble the team.

Severity-1 management is about communication. A customer that has their business impacted has the visibility of everybody that uses the technology to those that pay for the technology. This visibility could include the CEO of the impacted company. You need to collect the email addresses of all the parties that want to be informed about the status of the case and get them added to the communication plan. This should include the Account Executive for the customer as well. If you are using technology such as ServiceNow, you can utilize one of their modules to collect and manage the people that required the communication plan.

In order to avoid the proverbial “Is it fixed yet?” e-mail, establish a regular schedule update to the customer. This should not be an hourly exercise. At the minimum, it is a two-hour duration, ideally, it is a four-hour duration. In the update, it should be a running summary of all of the other updates. This provides a consolidated document. This document maintains the consistency in case it is forwarded to somebody they have the full email summary. The fields to include in the communication are as follows:

1. Current status
2. Next Steps
3. Link to the ongoing phone call or screen sharing session
4. Time of the next update
5. Business Impact

The delivery of communication should avoid email. The update should be posted to a customer portal as a web page that they can see and then they can e-mail at their discretion. Distributing the change as email generates a reply all message that can interrupt the chronological order of the communication. Using a web page creates a consistent message that can’t be modified.

Managing the Severity-1 issues at your technology company can avoid scrambling and inconsistencies in the messaging. Spend the time to develop this procedure and practice the flow.