Problem

Imagine this, your critical system goes down. Notification alarms blare, fingers fly across keyboards, and the pressure is on to resolve the issue before it disrupts operations and impacts customers. In the midst of this stressful situation, another crucial aspect often gets neglected is keeping stakeholders informed. 

But leaving stakeholders in the dark may have disastrous consequences too. Misinformation breeds panic, delayed decisions slow down recovery, and frustration builds without clear communication. 

In many organizations, when there's a critical issue, people use different mediums of communication like email, calls, Slack channels, and chats to talk about it. This approach creates hurdles for business stakeholders seeking a cohesive timeline, a singular source of truth, and clarity on who precisely is involved in the Incident Response efforts. It's especially tough for the Incident Response team trying to fix the problem because they need to focus on the issue, not on figuring out where the important information is. Later, trying to piece together all the different bits of information from all these places is really difficult and takes a lot of time.

So, how can Stakeholders like CEO (Chief Executive Officer), CTO (Chief Technology Officer), COO (Chief Operating Officer), other business units like Sales, Support etc. be kept in the loop while managing a critical incident?

Solution

Squadcast helps in leveraging hassle free access to Stakeholder Notifications and Status Pages capabilities in one offering to keep both internal & external stakeholders in the loop about incidents. 

In Squadcast, Internal stakeholders are key individuals within the company, and external stakeholders are your valued customers who use your products and services and can be affected by any unforeseen incidents.

Squadcast handles both internal & external stakeholder notifications as follows:

For Internal Stakeholders

1. @Mentions Stakeholders: Notify stakeholders with precision using by @mentioning them in the incident-specific chat room and simultaneously inform them through Email and Push notifications.

2. Designate as Incident Watchers: When mentioned, stakeholders are also designated as watchers of the incident. This means they receive notifications for changes in incident status, comments in the notes section, and actions related to the incident. These actions encompass adding tasks, attaching runbooks, including communication channels, updating the status page, initiating postmortems, applying tags, and incorporating affected SLOs.

3. Private Status Pages: Maintain a dedicated status page that is accessible only to internal stakeholders. Update the status and provide detailed information regarding critical incidents. Internal stakeholders can not only view the impacted services and incident status but also subscribe to automatic email notifications whenever there are updates on the status page.

4. Stakeholder Groups: Within incident notes, you can use @mentions to notify specific groups and add them as watchers for the incident. This allows for targeted communication based on stakeholder roles and interests, ensuring the right people receive the most relevant information. The number of Stakeholder Groups that can be created depends on the Squadcast plan you’re in. 

5. Automated Status Page Updates: Define triggers within a workflow to automatically update the status page with critical information like the incident's current status or estimated resolution time. This ensures stakeholders receive updates without requiring manual intervention from the response team. You can check here for more information.
6. Automated Notifications: Set workflows to trigger email or SMS notifications to specific stakeholder groups based on predefined criteria.  For example, a workflow can automatically send an SMS notification to senior management when a critical incident reaches a higher severity level.

By leveraging these features and automation capabilities you can keep everyone aligned on the incident's progress.

For External Stakeholders

• You can create a public status page for external stakeholders & customers. 
• Customers can subscribe to your public status page and get notified of the incident update via email. So they will receive automatic notifications whenever the status page is updated. This ensures they receive the latest information without needing to constantly check the page themselves, minimizing disruption to their workflow. This builds trust & promotes transparency among your users, and controls the number of support queries coming in. 

Impact: The steps discussed above will help in managing free internal & external stakeholder notifications more effectively, keeping the stakeholders in the loop about critical incidents. This enables engineers to focus on critical tasks and incidents,maximize their efficiency and productivity and not worry about keeping everyone notified repeatedly.