What are the top SaaS outage communication best practices?

Daniel Coullet

Qlik is transitioning to SaaS first and I am looking for best practices to manage communication to internal and external stakeholders. With COVID-19, communication is becoming a key factor of success so any help would be very much appreciated.

Courtney Ellis

Hi Daniel,

I work for a SaaS organization as well, and we've recently been undergoing changes to enable us to become more nimble in this regard.

For internal stakeholders, we use an online community (just like this!) to disseminate information. The entire workforce has been remote since March, so the existence of this community has become increasingly important. In an effort not to clutter inboxes of our staff, they can choose to subscribe to real time updates, or be enrolled in a daily digest. We force enrollment for all of our staff in a company updates community, and depending on your role and interest, you can opt in or out of others.

We use a similar approach for our customers in a customer specific community. Again, they can consume as much or as little as they decide to opt into, and dictate the frequency of email notifications. We've included product maintenance communities so power users can opt in to be notified of scheduled maintenance or unexpected system issues.

For each group, traditional methods of email are continuously used. We've been working diligently to provide opt in/out forms in relation to the types of pieces we send out. In addition, we've increased our focus on segmentation. Perhaps a C-suite member does not need every marketing email we send, but they'd be interested in an annual benchmark report. Likewise, a novice user might not find as much value in a product roadmap as a power user at the org.

Happy to share more offline if you'd like!

Philippe Mesritz

@Daniel Coullet , we have a few different mechanisms depending on size/scope and situation of the incident.

For true outages, we leverage statuspage.io heavily by encouraging our customers to subscribe. This allows us to direct customers that contact us via support tickets to that URL as well and tie it into a number of different areas.

In addition to that, each account has a list of support notification contacts that are triggered for specific incidents. Ones that go longer than normal, impact security, or where we want to provide more information than we would publicly share on our statuspage. We're currently considering using our own customer community for that as well but not 100% of our customers join the community and, since we host our own community, there could be an instance where we are down at the same time as our customers - so an external platform like statuspage is likely a better solution.

Internal stakeholders are covered through a combination of slack (short quick updates/real time troubleshooting), email (formal, documented and directed communication) and internal community usage (broader company wide communication). This trio of contact points allows those that need to be involved at any particular point of time to be engaged.

Daniel Coullet

Courtney, thank you for your answer, this is very interesting. Would it be way to follow up on this conversation in a 1:1?

[Deleted User]

@Daniel Coullet you can reach out directly to have a private discussion using the messaging feature in the upper right of the community header.

Melanie Gallo

I work for a SaaS company as well. For internal communications, we use Slack. There are different channels related to standard product updates, release notes, or issues (based on severity level).

Communications to customers depend on the issue/outage. Some updates are posted in our notification center near the users icon picture (much like this site) and some are posted directly in the product using an in-product messaging tool (like pendo, walkme, whatfix..). Often email comms are also sent.