According to the CIO Executive Council’s ‘Power of Effective IT Communication’ benchmark survey, only four out of one hundred IT leaders believe that they are highly effective in communicating with their non-IT colleagues. A hosted status page can help bridge this skill gap and save your IT team time so they can focus on what they do best.

A Hosted Status Page as Translator, When You Need It Most

One of the primary issues IT staff has in communicating with non-IT coworkers and external stakeholders is the knowledge gap on the audience’s end. A hosted status page can help “translate” what non-IT folks would consider technical jargon into a more readily understandable “how this impacts you” message. A hosted status page can even break this information down by component, so only those impacted by an issue (as determined by what products they’re using or what geographic region they’re based in, for example) will receive the message.

Whether you’re keeping your team informed about your own product experiencing issues or it’s an office-wide tool (e.g. your CRM, email client, VPN, etc) that’s giving you trouble, you can keep impacted coworkers updated via SMS/text, Twitter, email or whatever method of communication they subscribed to for the purpose of receiving status updates from IT.

The same principle applies for your customers as well – you can read more about downtime communication (including whether it belongs under the purview of marketing or of IT) here.

A Hosted Status Page Lets IT Allocate Time More Productively

By integrating directly with your existing monitoring solutions, a hosted status page saves your team the trouble of actually sending a message out when there’s an issue. That having been said, sometimes it is more prudent to set up alerts to be sent on a time delay or to require manual confirmation before going out at all – as the issue may just be a short-lived hiccup or the issue may be better communicated after it is resolved rather than while it is happening.

A hosted status page will allow you to set preferences such as whether messages are sent out automatically and immediately, automatically but with a delay, or manually only.

One in ten IT leaders report that they spend the equivalent of at least three full workdays a month on communication activities. Four of ten report spending at least one full workday. More than six percent of IT leaders report spending an entire work week on IT communication activities every month. And despite this significant time commitment, 48% still feel they aren’t spending enough time on communication (see chart below, reproduced from this CIO article about the The Power of Effective IT Communication Survey, 2015).

Much of this time investment is avoidable!

Click here to read more about how a hosted status page can help your IT team save time and communicate more effectively.