Everyone has the right to express their opinions about your company and the products and services you provide. Today we have a variety of communication methods at our fingertips with the ability to share our viewpoints at a blazing speed with a large number of people. Therefore, protecting your brand and your reputation are paramount. The question is, will you take control and will you manage your reputation or will you just let the cards fall where they may?

Eventually You’re Going to Have an Outage

If you’re a SaaS vendor, you know that eventually you will have an outage – every SaaS application goes down at some point in time. When your application is unavailable, what can be more harmful to your brand and your business than having your customers tell the world that your application is useless?

When your application is unavailable, or not working as it should, this is when your reputation is most at risk. Surprisingly, many SaaS vendors just seem to ignore this point of vulnerability. Just look at how terribly issues with Yahoo Mail were recently handled. Did they think no one would notice or maybe if they just closed their eyes and covered their ears that after a while everything would just be fine?

I think the problem has to do with the fact that often application uptime is the responsibility of IT professionals, whereas reputation management and brand building is the responsibility of marketing. Information technology folks don’t get fired if their company’s brand is destroyed – marketing people do.

Reputation Management is the Responsibility of Marketing, Not IT

If you are a Marketing Professional and you are responsible for your company’s reputation and for building and maintaining a valuable recognizable brand; then what tools do you have to ensure that you can effectively and proactively manage your reputation though an application outage? Here are some tips that can help turn a potentially bad situation into something positive:

To be trusted you must be transparent. This means open and honest communication with your clients. It also means accepting responsibility when you are at fault and offering a remedy to the situation – or least some type of compensation for inconveniencing your users. Uptime.ly can help you easily determine if the Service Level Agreement has been met and help you calculate a fair value.

Proactively reach out to your clients and inform them of an issue or of any scheduled downtime your application might experience. Explain that you understand how the issue will affect your clients and provide a clear path for how, and when, the issue will be resolved. Also, as things progress and/or change, continue to communicate. Ongoing communication is critical.

When an outage occurs things can be hectic. Attempting to get timely updates from IT will be difficult and then crafting an appropriate communication to your clients and making it available via a variety of communication mechanisms will be a pain. You can integrate Uptime.ly with the systems that IT uses to manage application availability so you don’t have to bother them for constant status updates and you can craft an application status page specifically for application end users – not internal IT people. From a single point, you can automatically send updates and alerts to your clients through email and all social media outlets. Even if you don’t wish to handle that aspect, using Uptime.ly you can ensure the messaging is consistent by creating messaging templates. This will benefit your brand and allow you to communicate with your end-users in language that they can understand as opposed to leaving communication to the guys in the IT department.

If you are responsible for managing your company’s reputation then be warned – your reputation is most vulnerable during an application outage. Don’t sit back and hope someone else will ensure your brand and reputation will be unscathed. Instead take control of the situation – your job may depend on it.

Effective communication during downtime is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Whether planned or unexpected, downtime can disrupt operations and impact customer satisfaction. Therefore, knowing how to communicate via a straightforward downtime email template is essential to minimize confusion, frustration, and potential loss of trust. 

In this article, we will explore the best ways to transparently and efficiently communicate downtime, ensuring a smoother experience for your team and customers.

How Not To Communicate Downtime: One Email

We all occasionally overlook an email – including those we care about. We get busy, our email box fills up, and we just miss some.
Sometimes we don’t actually miss the email. Sometimes we just forget we read it. After all, we’re all getting older and I suppose this means that sometimes we forget things.The problem that this poses for a SaaS vendor is that at times it is critical that they communicate scheduled application downtime to their clients, and quite often the primary method for this type of proactive communication is via email.If the client is like the rest of us then it is possible that they might miss the email or they might just forget that they read it. And, if the client misses the email or forgets that they read the email, and the application is unavailable when they want it – what do you think will happen? My bet is that your client will be pissed and he/she will blame you for faulty communication.

Now you might think “as specified in the SLA we have in place, all I am responsible for is sending a single email alert.” You may be correct but your thinking isn’t very customer focused and this way of thinking isn’t going to do much to enhance the relationship you have with your client.

Having a solid, trusting relationship with your clients requires more than just ensuring that your clients are notified of impending application downtime. You have to increase the probability that your notification is read, understood, and remembered. You have to minimize the chance that your clients are surprised by scheduled application downtime.

How to Communicate Downtime the Right Way

Here’s how to communicate downtime properly and reduce all likelihood that your clients are surprised when your application is down due to a scheduled maintenance event:

1. Clear & Concise Communication of Downtime

   – make sure your email is short and to the point.  Let your clients know the when, why and what of the impact downtime will have on them, and the type of action – if any – your client should take.

2. Communicate Downtime Via Multiple Channels

   – although email is primary, make sure you also share this information on your social media outlets and on your application status page.

3. Send Reminders

   – with one email blast, a Facebook posting, and a tweet – you still run the risk that your client will overlook your message or when the event occurs they may have forgotten about it.  Make sure you remind your client of the planned outage as you get closer to the actual time of the event.

4. Be Productive & Efficient

   – listen, if it’s a total pain to remember to send multiple email alerts as the time of the maintenance event nears, and if updating an application status page as well as sending out messages via multiple social media outlets is a time consuming hassle, then you run the risk of not doing what needs to be done well or at all.  Uptimely’s purpose in life is to make this whole process easy.

If you fail to appropriately communicate scheduled downtime you are putting your relationship with your clients at risk. Even worse, you jeopardize your reputation and your brand. Keep in mind that a dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their bad experience (Source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs). There is no form of communication that is more powerful than the viral spread via word of mouth, so make sure your communicating downtime and keeping your customers informed.

Business interest in SaaS applications is growing. An April 2013 Saugatuck Technology survey of 218 IT executives revealed that more than half of them expect to have 50 percent of their application portfolios in the cloud by 2015. However, the same survey found that two thirds of this year’s budget was still going to on-premise applications.

For many businesses there is still some concern about making the move to SaaS applications. Especially when those applications are mission-critical. This is why – according to Gartner – that on-premise spending is about 8 times higher than spending on SaaS applications.

So, why the lag? Why aren’t more businesses moving more quickly to leveraging the cloud? A recent survey by the Association of Accounting Administration might offer some insight. They found that 92% of those survived had concerns about SaaS application downtime and outages.

Now, no one expects software – SaaS or on-premise – to be infallible. The problem with downtime and outages as it relates to SaaS is more about control. Growing interest in SaaS is transforming the role of internal IT. With a SaaS application, internal IT has less control an heightened vulnerability to – well – look like an uninformed fool.

To sell more SaaS applications, SaaS vendors must win over internal IT staff. The following can help:

With an SLA a SaaS vendor can clearly and contractually specify the level of quality that is acceptable and what is not acceptable. The SaaS vendor can also layout the penalties that they will incur for failing to meet these performance metrics. With an SLA in place, the SaaS vendor must then regularly report on their performance. This regular, proactive reporting will help to build a level of trust. Oh, if you’re a SaaS vendor – you probably know that creating a monthly SLA report can be a pain in the ass – unless you use something like Uptimely – which can do if for you automatically!

This is a big one. Internal staff will look to Internal IT when a SaaS application is unavailable or if there is a functionality change. IT must know what’s happening before internal staff – otherwise internal IT looks bad. Internal IT needs to be able to check the status of their SaaS application at will and if the application is down, have an understanding of why and when it will be back up so that they can communicate to staff. IT staff needs to be alerted and reminded of any scheduled maintenance to the application and proactively informed of any changes coming to the application. Now, if you’re a SaaS vendor your probably saying “damn, that’s a lot of work” – but not if you use Uptimely.

Listen, if you sell a SaaS application and you want to sell more, then you need to make sure that internal IT doesn’t object to purchasing your application. One way to do this is to let them know – show them – how dedicated and efficient you are at keeping your clients informed about application status. Show them what will basically equate to their “window”, or “dashboard” into your application’s status so that they feel informed and in control to intelligently communicate status with their internal constituents. This is what Uptimely does. Uptimely makes it easy for SaaS vendors to create application status pages that make their client’s internal IT staff look good.

Most marketers, and business people in general, tend to define brand in a way that I feel overly complicates their world. Even those whom I highly respect as marketers, such as Seth Godin defines brand as a series of components that make up what he refers to as the brand value (see here).

Marketing philosophy side note: Brand value should not be measured in its ability to create customers and value. Brand is about getting the right customers. In many ways, brands help turn away more customers than they create. Brand helps you focus.

For me, a company or product brand has always represented one simple thing: The emotional response elicited by your customer when your product or company is mentioned.

Tying your product to a brand helps customers decide which product (relative to your competition) someone should purchase. If I want a safe car, I buy a Volvo. If I want a luxury watch, I by a Rolex. If it absolutely has to be there overnight, I go with FedEx. You get the point.

Now lets look at your job. In almost all ways, managing your application infrastructure is a thankless job. Whether you work for a corporate IT department, or manage a cloud application for thousands of other companies (SaaS), the opinions of your user base are typically the same:

In the nineties I worked for a software company that built and sold a product that was bigger and more complex than a company our size should have built or sold. The product suffered a lot of downtime as a result of bugs, and unplanned emergency upgrades. The thing is, the few customers that we had, absolutely loved us. Our team realized early on that the application was problematic and we worked hard to make sure our customers knew that we knew. During some of the worst times, we would sometimes camp out in our customers server rooms even when things were working, so that we could be there as soon as something went wrong. Our intense focus on proactive monitoring and customer communication earned us a lot of credit with our customers. We often said,

One of the best ways to build brand is communicating directly with your customers. When end users access your application, or purchase your product, very often the only interactions you end up having with them is when they call in for some support, or when you need to get paid. With so few opportunities to interact with them, application downtime, as awful as it is, should be treated as a third opportunity, and should be looked at as just that: an opportunity.

Let’s look at the facts:

• You manage software applications.

• Your application will crash, your network will go down, or maintenance will eventually need to be scheduled.

• Customers / end-users care about downtime.

Given the inevitable fact that you will eventually be communicating to your customers about application availability; isn’t it in your best interest to build a process around that which frames your company in the best light possible? Here at Uptime.ly, we call this “the politics of down”.

The Politics of Down

It’s a simple philosophy: Control the message.

Being proactive about the situation lets you frame the problem under your terms. This includes communicating the problem to your customer proactively, letting them know that you are on top of the issue and that you care about their situation. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly from your end-users perspective, it prevents them from wasting their time trying to guess when the application is going to be back up.

Treat downtime as another point of customer interaction that you can use to build an emotional tie they will have with your company or product. In other words, use it to build your brand.