54: Panel: Customer communications in a crisis

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to session 54 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week's special is another panel of customer support leaders talking about customer communications in a crisis. So today I'd like to welcome a number of guests to the panel who have all been previous guests on the podcast. First up is Craig Stoss. Craig is senior lead of Shopify Plus Escalated Support. Next up we have Matt Dale. Matt is VP of Support at Illuminate Education. Welcome back also to Natalie Patrush Trent. Natalie's Technical Account Manager at Pandium. Welcome back too to Ash Rhodes. Ash is Director of Customer Support at VidIQ. And welcome finally to Greg Skirving. Greg is a support manager at Broadcom in the Semantic Enterprise Division. Let's jump straight in. So the topic for this week's panel is handling crisis communications with our customers. And as with all panels, I've got a number of discussion points I want to hit. So welcome, dear panelists. The first thing I'd like to talk about is we all have something, I think, of a spidey sense when it comes to crises on the horizon. And when you have a sense that things are about to go very wrong for your one of your customers, or maybe even globally, say with a vendor or with a virus, whatever the thing might be, things are about to go wrong. What what do you do first? How do you manage the looming crisis? How do you manage communications? What do you put in place as as we as we see that crisis approaching us?

Craig Stoss: 2:17

One thing that is always common in in these types of scenarios is panic. And panic helps absolutely no one. It causes more confusion. I find even today with with tools like Slack, where um things like this might, you know, rumors or news articles or you know, YouTube clips get posted and the the communication just feeds on itself. The fire just burns and burns and burns. And um so the first thing that I always like to do is just take that breath. Who who's gonna be members of your uh team to to fix this or to to help address it? Um you know, making sure that there is a common place where updates can be found, and just take that extra second to to make sure that's all in place before that fire gets out of hand through through rumors and hearsay.

Ash Rhodes: 3:07

Well, and you're you're totally right, I agree. Um crises can also, as as you kind of alluded to, can mean so many things. It can be everything from um COVID all the way through to a major outage to to anything. And um a lot of them just kind of have uh certain things in common. It can they'll they'll either impact your company and users or they won't, although they'll impact your own department or it won't. Um I think that it's really good as a general practice to kind of have at least a baseline best practices uh crisis response plan in place, even if it's just your own notes, although ideally they're in a shared drive of some sort, so that if you're impacted, other people know what to do. Um and it can be like, you know, if you're co-located in an area like earthquake, what do you do? Or tornado or major like your internet goes out and does not come back up for your main location, what then? Um, and I have worked places where that was like we ran drills on it. Like, what do you do when the internet goes out? Um I currently am a uh remote guy, uh, so I'll admit that we didn't see any of this coming, I'm sure like everybody else. Um but yes, I I think Craig's right. Like you just have to take a huge breath and start talking with identifying your key players. I just realized I talked too much.

Matt Dale: 4:53

I think we're all remote workers right now, right, actually. I mean, like in this this week, this month, like everybody's working from home. Um but but I think when you talk about crises, you're you're exactly right. Kind of being able to say, hey, what plan do we have? Who's in charge of comms? Like, is there a single point person or a couple people on a team? Um and I think it's really important too to kind of take more what what Craig was saying is getting your arms around the problem. I think it's easy in a crisis to go, oh my gosh, the sky is falling, or or you know, oh, we need to post this on our Twitter and our on our status page and all this stuff. But but if you don't really know what's going on yet, that that can be that can be problematic and it can get the wrong message out there. I think in my world we see a lot of, not so much lately, but a lot of issues. We've had a lot of issues with server outages. And I know a lot of us that work in software as a service, that's like the worst thing that can happen. Um and knowing that, hey, this is something that we see on a in a regular basis, but but it's maybe it's more common than a big virus or an earthquake taken out of data center. Um, you know, what do we do in those places? Who do I talk to on the engineering team? Who do we talk to with marketing? What sort of messaging and responses do we already have that are kind of set up so that we can communicate quickly in those scenarios? Because otherwise the support phone number is getting blown up because everybody wants to know what's going on. And so we've got a we've got a voicemail message or a phone tree message that we can put up and hey, check out our status page and and kind of if you've got another issue besides that, stay on the line. And that that way people know, oh great, I've got a place to go, and and we can update that very quickly and and not deal with 300 calls all at once.

Ash Rhodes: 6:21

Do you think that you have to sorry, default default to transparency, basically? Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 6:26

Yeah, yeah. So so given all the types of crises that we've already described, how prepared do you think you have to be for every single eventuality? Or do you think that a good few broad strokes at this are enough to get going in most scenarios?

Matt Dale: 6:42

I think in in our case, at least, like I said, if you know things that you're going to experience on a semi-regular basis, um, being ready for that sort of thing is really important. Um, there's other ones that are kind of come out of the blue and that you're not really ready for. We had one a little while ago where our phone provider went down. And it was like, oh shoot, what do we do when that happens? Like the phone provider's down, and and we kind of had to scramble and figure something out. And now we've got a different workaround with our email and with our our status page, and we can put that up. So um so I think there's some things you can plan for. There's other things like a pandemic that that affects the whole you know economy and and the workforce. And I'm not sure that's something you can really necessarily prepare for, but you can have some things in place and at least know who on your team is the point person and who should be the one that we go to when something bad happens.

Greg Skirving: 7:29

Yeah, I think uh uh a lot of this is uh is preparation. Um I know large organizations have uh business resumption planning uh teams and a whole process so that when there's a gas leak or an earthquake or the phone system goes out, um immediately key people are contacted, everybody jumps on a bridge, what are we doing? Assess the situation, do we need to move people to a different location? Do we send people at home? Uh customer communication. So um while we can't plan for everything, it's good to have uh a plan that brings people together and uh uh execute on predetermined strategies based on the on the situation. So the more of that you can do, the better off you'll be.

Charlotte Ward: 8:15

Yeah, as always to having the building blocks in place that allow you to form a uh a more cohesive plan once you know where you're going. Yeah. Nat.

Natalie Patruch Trent: 8:24

Yeah, and I would just jump in and say there that um especially for smaller or newer companies that might not already have these processes in place, it's really just a growing process. Um, very much to what Matt said, if there is something that you can pretty easily foresee potentially happening, such as a server outage or site being down, you can put together some documentation there. Um, but for other things, it's really just rolling with it. So over-communicating internally and strategically communicating outwards, because very much to what Craig said, you don't want to be bombarding all of your customers with all this crazy misinformation or just too much information that they might not really need to focus on at that moment. Um and then as far as preparedness teams, uh, if you are at a location or a company that can actually prepare for that, that's amazing. If not, if you are at a smaller company where people are already wearing 50,000 hats, then I think it's a matter of just kind of pulling 15 minutes together and just throwing everyone in a room and saying, okay, we need to tackle A, B, and C. Let's just knock down this list and then we can have, you know, five minutes afterwards just kind of scram at a wall if you have some feelings.

Craig Stoss: 9:41

Yeah, I actually really like that point, Nat, Natalie. Um, the um the one thing that I see is that we tend to focus on um, you know, the the it the highest impact things um uh and the quickest. And uh sometimes that's not always necessarily what uh we um what is the right thing to do. You know, you look at things like what is the situation, how does it affect the company, how does it affect a particular team, how does it affect potentially a particular individual? Um and if you structure your thinking that way as opposed to, you know, the phone system's down, you know, call all the phone people and and and you know raise a havoc, if you start to think about the structure of the situation, okay, well, we can't communicate. How does that affect the company? How does it affect support versus sales versus marketing? I mean, there are there's different effects across these teams. So it's really important to kind of split that up. And if you can get everyone into a room or or as Greg suggested, on a on a phone bridge, awesome, but sometimes that's just not possible.

Charlotte Ward: 10:44

So, Craig, let's talk about messaging then. And everybody, let's talk about messaging. Um as we communicate, we've talked, we've talked a little bit about transparency and about finding the appropriate message, both platform and exactly what you communicate and when you communicate it is really a part of how you structure your messaging. So so what key messages are you trying to get across? And how do you decide when and where and and the tone? What are you trying to do when you formulate those messaging plans?

Ash Rhodes: 11:17

Well, I mean, it really depends on on the crisis. Uh certain companies, I mean, man, every every company these days seem to be uh sending out various updates regarding COVID um nowadays. But um if it's something regarding an outage or something like that, early and often uh let them know exactly what's going on. And we have identified an or we are experiencing an issue. We've identified the root cause, we are fixing it, it is fixed, so on and so forth. I I very much believe in those kinds of things. Um I also have in regards to COVID, I've seen a lot of companies sending messages basically trying to make a buck, trying to um sell uh it almost feels like profiteering. Um everybody needs to stay alive and stay relevant these days. Uh I personally think it's not the time. Um, but but that's me. Um I just I I find it uh unpleasant.

Natalie Patruch Trent: 12:31

I would jump in and piggyback what Ash was saying there. It obviously depends from crisis to crisis. Um and I think that transparency is a really interesting word to tie onto here because as you know, members in customer support, we always want to, for the most part, want to be completely transparent with our customers and let them know what's going on. Um, but transparency isn't always completely the answer. Um, I think jumping into COVID here, that's that's a pretty great example of a big crisis where there's a lot of communication going on and people are trying to figure out how they want to structure these messages. Um, just like what Ash was saying, there's a lot of kind of profiteering messages going out, which for people like me as well don't really hit home and actually seem kind of problematic. And then there's the other messages, uh, the you know, five emails a day we're getting about in full detail what this company is doing internally to prepare for COVID and how they're handling that. Um, in my personal opinion, I would consider that a little too much transparency. Um, what I want to be getting from the message and what I think about when I'm preparing any outbound customer communication message is what would I want to care about if I was that user, if I was that customer. I don't need to know everything that's going on behind the scenes, but I want to know whether my product will still be taken care of if the company is, you know, being is holding it together for lack of better phrasing. Um, and also how it's going to impact me. Um, I think that when you are trying to figure out messages like this, a lot of companies tend to think at it, to think about it from like the company perspective in Periscope and less from the customer side. And I think that's the really important takeaway.

Craig Stoss: 14:28

Yeah, I I actually really like that point. I I listened to a talk from someone at Status Page once, and they had a really good point that how often do you see something like, oh, we know there's an outage, we're working on it, we'll let you know as soon as we have more information. And and they use this as a classic example of actually what's wrong with providing status updates during a crisis because it's such a vague message. Who's working on it? Who do I contact if I need more information? What, you know, when will the next update be? I mean, if I could say, I'll let you know when the next update is, and and that takes a week to do, well, that's not maybe appropriate in some situations. You know, so maybe something like our IT team is working on it, their contact information is X, and the next update will be in one hour from now or one day from now, or whatever makes sense in the situation. And that's what the customers want to hear. And in fact, I would argue that's what internally you want to hear too is is who do I get a hold of if I'm personally affected, or um uh who who can I be assured that the right people are? Can I put my hand up and offer my services? Those types of things.

Charlotte Ward: 15:33

I think that's a really interesting point that giving your customers the opportunity to come back and uh and talk to you more about the situation by just providing them with a contact channel of some sort. Is is it stops it being a broadcast, doesn't it? It stops it just kind of we're we're telling you what the situation is. Now stay over there while we sort this out for you or for ourselves. It be kind it kind of opens up the uh the conversation if they need to. If they need that extra reassurance, particularly that you might perhaps be inclined to give them, as Natalie said, by by being too transparent, by being too verbose, by saying, you know, oh all don't worry, all of our agents are working from home, but they've all got toilet paper, right? It's just we don't need to know that. We just we just want that reassurance, right?

Greg Skirving: 16:23

I I think there's a couple of things here. So I I I think the the the broadcast message is appropriate um um as a uh um uh uh a message to let people know we're working on it and not have them come through in open cases. Um I know I've been in situations where um my team's been uh unable to respond to actual customer issues, uh actual um individual customer issues because of a hosted service being down and just flooding the lines. So I think that's important. But what's really interesting with this COVID thing is when you look at it from the perspective of the customer, um, you know, uh are are you, you know, as a as a as my vendor, are you going to continue to provide service? Will my service be degraded in any way? So uh I think, you know, uh at least conceptually, we all know how to handle the the major outage or um and if it's a bus a business resumption or disaster recovery scenario, customer communication oftentimes isn't really even necessary because you handle it on the inside. But but this COVID thing, obviously, um I'm not so sure organizations have planned for um what communications they'd like to tell their customers.

Natalie Patruch Trent: 17:36

COVID is a really interesting example of a specific scenario where um marketing is having to liaise with the customer success team more and the sales team more in ways that they wouldn't naturally have been doing beforehand. I mean, in an ideal world, an ideal company, all these departments are intercommunicating like the best of them, but that doesn't always happen. For the most part, people are doing their jobs, things are getting sent, email blasts are being sent out. But at least what I've been seeing at my company and friends of mine is that there's much more concern from an overall corporate marketing perspective, uh, because end user customers, and then also from the outside, people who aren't using the comp the service or product might who might be in the future, they're looking at this company, they're looking at the marketing messages that are being sent, and they're no longer looking at this from, oh, is this a product that might be useful to me? And I feel that the conversation nowadays is more a little bit, is this an ethical company that is actually communicating things to me in a way that I can relate to as a human.

Matt Dale: 18:50

I think as we kind of take a look at this too, when you know we're we're talking about crises, and I think there's obviously different kinds of different scales, right? We've we've kind of alluded to this as a group, you know, hey, there's there's the normal uh servers down or you know, an outage, which at the time can can lead to really high volumes and can really impact our teams and our customers. That's on the small side of the scale, and you've got the really big side of the scale where you know there's something major that happens to the entire world and that we're all kind of facing this. And what does that mean? And I think there's there's probably something kind of in the middle there too, where it's a it's not a oh, there's a hiccup and a server went down and we'll get it rebooted in a half an hour and everything will be fine, but but there's kind of like the the middle ground too, where it's like you know, we had it, we had some failure of data or a uh a partner that we work with has gone out of business and we're no longer able to ship through that that that vendor. Those look different for each of our businesses, but but I think in scope, one one is a fix it within a day, the other is kind of a two days to a couple weeks, and the other is uh there's a lot of uncertainty as we look at the globe and the world and what does our economy look like? And will this company even be here in a few weeks? Um, and I I think it's important to kind of differentiate between those because there's different things that we need to do in each of those cases. On the first, like with what I agree with Greg saying, like, hey, you need to kind of say, hey, we know there's an issue so that our team doesn't get overwhelmed. The server's down, there's a problem. And we'll give you an update every 15 minutes with you know our engineering team's looking at it, we'll give you an update. The second, it's like, hey, we've just been alerted that that something in our business has changed and and we're working to you know get our arms around it. Here's our plan or here's what we're doing to kind of mitigate that. And then the third, holy cow, nobody knows what tomorrow's going to look like. Here's what we're kind of doing right now. Here's the concerns we think you have. But but I think identifying kind of what kind of crisis you're in and what your team has done to prepare for it is really helpful. Is this a you know is this a pothole or is this a landmine? Like what kind of are we are we dealing with a bump or or you know missing limbs here and and and how then do we communicate in the right tone and use the right words so that our customers feel cared for through it and that they have the right information so that they have that channel for recourse where they can ask questions. But but generally the common questions are already answered because we've already we've already done that. So I I think that that's helpful to think about as we go, hey COVID and this really big and it's on all our minds but but I think there's other other kinds too I think what's been really interesting about COVID is that it happened globally pretty much within a week or two for everyone at the same time.

Charlotte Ward: 21:18

So we've had a really really strong comparison we have a lot of data around how customers around how companies have responded to this and and we see everything from no communication at all to kind of overcommunication and and and maybe even selling opportunities right um so I think there have been it's been a very strange opportunity to draw some really stark contrasts between different organisations and how they're handling it. And and Matt you raised a a very valid point I felt that this crisis that we're experiencing now is very likely to be a very long-running one. And within those first couple of weeks we did see a lot of organizations rush out there and tell us what they were going to do or what they felt we ought to do. What happens next do you think over the course how do we manage the next few weeks and how do we potentially manage what might be several months do you think that we're still going to see this kind of constant flood or do you think that is an effort for everyone's everyone to get their voice heard in the early rush?

Matt Dale: 22:27

I think it really depends on what we're talking about too for the service right there are some that are impacted pretty heavily like I've gotten a lot of notes from from different airline companies that I used to frequent right and and I'm not right now and and they're obviously very worried about their business and they're trying to say hey look I'm we're being responsible here's what we're doing. You could travel safely if you needed to even though no one's probably traveling right now. I would expect some types of those messages to as as we move through this and have more certainty about what actually is going to happen and how things look I would expect to see some communication from them. I I think it's important too in this this COVID thing to realize that our our leadership and our companies are all trying to go, hey, you know, what does this mean for us? What does this look like from a cash flow perspective? Do we have what it's going to take to get through this to weather the storm do we have enough runway and what do we need to do as an organization internally to to take care of our ourselves and our companies so we can be there for our customers. I think at least I've seen it in some cases and I think we've we've alluded to this as a group here where companies confuse what they're doing internally to survive as stuff that their customers should be aware of and should see and and and and sometimes it's actually very unsettling because it's like whoa I didn't know that you you know laid off half your staff yesterday and wanted to tell me about like that makes me nervous. I don't that that's not the message that I want to hear but at the same time that's exactly what they needed to do so that they could be financially viable you know to weather a storm of six months. And so so I think I think we're in this kind of weird place where people might have overshared a little bit because they were so freaked out and because this is happening kind of all at once.

Craig Stoss: 23:58

I think the I want to pick up on your point about travel and and the messaging I I happened to be out of country when when this hit and and blew up I was traveling um uh for personal reasons and so I had airline um I had airfares booked on three different airlines I had hotels booked with multiple different chains and it's amazing the range of customer experience I had you know everything from hotels proactively writing me saying if you need to cancel it's free re we're you know our refund policy is being opened up to I went to an airport to speak to one of the airlines directly in person and the person recognized my problem said I was entitled to a refund but said he couldn't help me and that I had to go onto their website to go and claim the web on uh claim the uh refund online and then of course follow on to that was the the website actually was broken and said you must call and then I get another phone call and it tells me that it's a four and a half hour wait uh expect it. So you know that's a completely different experience there, right? And and so the communication um of all of this uh varied by company to by company, you know, and and it again to Matt's point, I you know getting these messages saying hey we fixed the cabin filters in the airplane you're about to ride on I actually my flight my flight home, my repatriate repatriation flight, they switched aircraft to get the highest level of air filter they could on the the flight that's a good thing to know. I that made me feel safer. You know, did I need to know uh a bunch of the extra stuff that was going on and and you know the the fact that they did layoffs the you know the fact that they're still going to be there to support me and you know like put me in coach type style messaging I I don't know if that was necessarily um appropriate.

Matt Dale: 25:38

Well and on that point too I think it's really good is uh when we're communicating our customers in a crisis it's important to remember who we're talking to right so Craig is as an international traveler in the midst of this happening um and not knowing what's going on I would I would expect and would want better communication from the from the vendors that I'm using the airlines, the hotels the whatever transportation and I would expect that to be customized to my experience. I want to know what are they doing on the flight that I'm on. I don't really care what their global policy is but I want to know hey is this going to like if I cancel this what does that mean for me and I think if we take that kind of as a as a paradigm and and take a step back like in a in a server outage if it's affecting one of our servers in a pharma 30 um I don't necessarily maybe want to message to everybody in the whole world hey we're having reliability issues but I definitely want to be able to reach out maybe proactively to the people that are experiencing that and give them more detail more more information than than than I would for the whole group because it's affecting them in a real way and and they want to they want to know how does this affect me.

Charlotte Ward: 26:40

Yeah it's absolutely about understanding the context that your customer is in isn't it when you're communicating with them emotionally and and in Craig's case geographically maybe but you know the the experience that they're going through and it's the you know how how many internal fires of their own are they trying to deal with at the same time in something like this? Or is it actually pretty much business as usual and this is your your own fire? But but it has a relatively minor impact that they're all kind of variables and and understanding your customers context in that particular situation is really key to getting the messaging appropriate isn't it?

Greg Skirving: 27:20

Yeah I think understanding scope and audience is uh is always crucial um and having a consistent message is is crucial as well and uh um you know in again going back to this COVID thing as it's you mentioned it's you know it's gonna last for months um this is where the the account teams can can come in and and provide more personalized messaging um um but uh as Matt said you know leadership has you know struggling with certain situations and and uh you know the the message needs to be consistent uh uh um internally so that when we communicate with our customers on whatever front it's uh it's the same message.

Natalie Patruch Trent: 27:59

I think uh talking about how communication is changing um as recent experiences have shaken up life a little bit I've feel that I've started to view businesses as much more like living, breathing moving operations than I did in the past, even though I practically understand that companies are living and breathing entities. But what that has done to my perspective of communication is translating that to what we would hope other humans in our lives were doing on a one-on-one basis. So as we see different companies communicating in certain ways on a mass email way, on a personal, on an individual level, what I would then hope for is that other employees and employees in positions of power are having things like this panels, discussions, what we can do, what we can do better. For example, I loved what Craig was saying about the status page. That's something that I'm going to be taking back and evolving and using in my own life. And I would really hope that for example the travel agencies and the different airplane companies that you were looking at are looking at what the other travel companies are doing and learning how they can evolve their messaging as well. Maybe not just taking and stealing what this other company is doing it, but looking at it and say this worked really well. How can we craft this to give a better experience to our end users? And then also like humans, what I hope that people are doing when this crisis comes to an end is looking at how they behaved during it, how their lives were changed and impacted and then coming out and saying okay this is what I learned. This is what I'm doing to be a better person. And I think that that's the type of messages that we should be expecting from companies and businesses as well.

Ash Rhodes: 29:51

I think that that's actually something that is if nothing else from all of it is that there's going to be a lot of different changes not in in messaging in company practices and everything. And I think it's going to be how people I hope I have fingers crossed that people will start um for lack of a better term shopping more ethically they will be looking at how uh whether it's the messages that were done how companies treated their employees um how all of this was was done uh as a result of this and and let's tie it right back how people were prepared or lack thereof and how quickly they responded to this crisis. We have all seen those companies that have been in no way prepared and are still just completely reeling a month later. And you have to just kind of wonder why am I giving you money? What it like where other what other places are you completely and totally falling down and it's just kind of eye-opening. I hope I I hope that nobody here on on this call belongs to one of those companies sorry so let's think about then some of the things that we've talked about about getting personal with our messaging and uh how personal should we be I mean how how much of your self do you bring to this situation? Well I mean that's kind of a it's kind of a fine line. It it it of course always depends on the organization and the tone that you bring to uh your tickets and so on. I've worked in places where it's a very casual I've worked in places where the only tone that is acceptable is dear sir madam so on best regards name um it of course depends uh one of the benefits of being in charge is that I get to be very casual with my customers and so uh I put a lot of my own self in uh for better or worse and I also am pushing I'm pushing the empathy button very very hard both for myself and for my employees and happily um my company is is kind of matching they are all really really going very hard on empathy right now so so there you go and it is it is very personal we our tone has has changed to um and the I and the the it should always have been the I but but they're finally listening to me um so on.

Natalie Patruch Trent: 32:40

So I I completely agree with Ash I second almost everything that you've said um I would also just add that I think it depends on what type of messaging and communication you're doing. For example I have weekly uh video calls with all of my customers now um maybe it would have been something a little bit different maybe an occasional email instead of a call in the past but now is a moment where people are needing human communication and contact. So if I'm on a video call uh or conference with one of my customers they're gonna see what my room looks like they're going to know that my husband is sitting next to me darning socks um whereas if I was emailing a customer then they might not know about that. I might not be like hey by the way my husband says hi so it's definitely a little bit of a different line but I think that very much as to what Ash was saying, depending on the mode and the scenario you're in, you have some more flexibility with how much empathy and individuality and kind of your own unique personality that you're able to bring into that situation.

Craig Stoss: 33:56

Yeah the the big again I agree with Natalie the the big thing that I I have seen and and when it comes to bringing yourself to these conversations is when there's some sort of a big announcement that you know you maybe heard in a meeting that we're discussing oh this the servers might be back up in an hour and and you go to a customer oh well I don't not supposed to tell you this but the servers might be back up in an hour or uh you know things like that where there's no certainty behind it but you want to be the hero because you want you know you have that customer facing attitude that you want to bring the good news and um and so you know transparency is important but when there's a message in flux you need to make sure that you hold off any of those interim messages um because those could c end up causing more anger if the server's not back up in the hour. And that's the one thing that I've seen a lot of is is you know having hired a lot of customer experience minded people um who want to always share share the best news with their customers you sometimes uh overshare or or share things that that aren't uh solidified yet.

Greg Skirving: 34:55

That's uh I I just wanted to say Natalie that's good that you uh um um communicate with your customers I think uh um you know good organizations um always strive to you know colloquially uh you know put your face in the place which is obviously impossible now other than through video conferencing and uh um I think I think we need to do things to make sure that we're reaching out um because if we're conspicuous by our absence that may raise some uh some uh uh unwanted uh uh dissension or or some flags of of uncertainty from our customers yeah absolutely okay now when all is said and done and this crisis or whatever crisis we are managing is finally over how do you deal with the fallout how do you deal with the climb down actually more than the fallout how do you deal with the end of that situation is it back to business as usual I think it depends again on the type of crisis we're talking about again a lot of times in my world it's hey we've had an outage or there's a problem and I think it's important in those cases to provide kind of a wrap up we we typically you know kind of our our phases is we we identify that there's a problem, we give a timeline for updates and then we provide updates through the problem and through the resolution.

Matt Dale: 36:25

At the very end we say hey the issue's resolved we're still doing our final testing okay the issue's finally resolved and and then say hey within 24 hours or within 48 hours we'll have a postmortem posted to say here's what happened and here's what we've done to mitigate this in the future basically saying hey like let's let's close the loop on this communication and so I think most of the types of crises that I've dealt with in my career up to this point that's kind of how we've handled it. I think again taking talking about pandemics and bigger picture things that's probably a a different story and I I'm not sure that we're gonna be even on this call be say hey this is exactly how we're gonna handle it because none of us have done anything quite this big before. But but I think in general when we talk about those things being able to wrap it up and and let the customer know hey this is what we've done so that this won't happen again or this is what we're doing to reduce the types of this thing in the future is really important.

Ash Rhodes: 37:15

I agree with everything Matt said. In addition though we have spoken previously in this call about um nobody can be prepared for everything and it's good to just have like at least the building blocks of it all. But with that said any crisis that we're fully prepared for like it stops being a crisis because it's just like cool I'm ready like message out so on and so forth. It's it's all sorted. It's an incident but it's not a crisis. It feels like uh I'm happy to be wrong but um when it is an unprepared for thing uh it kind of becomes if not your responsibility somebody's responsibility to make sure that it is never a crisis again. Like you need to learn from it. You need to include that in your disaster preparedness doc folder what have you um and have that be part of your post mortem so that if there is some shiny red button that says like delete all servers from AWS, um that button is requires multiple passwords or something. I don't know. But just you know figure out what went wrong and make it so that it can't happen again or it was at least unlikely to uh so on and so forth. Um but yeah that's that's my main thing about when all is said and done do your best to make sure that we have sufficient PPEs and we've got you know people paying attention to virus growth and and so on. Like let's let's make sure it doesn't happen quite this way. It's gonna happen but make sure it has to happen some other way.

Matt Dale: 39:01

One thing you said there Ash that I just wanted to to to pause on for a minute there are cases at least that I've seen in my professional life where we actually can't prevent something from happening again. We had a situation where we had some server architecture that it was impossible to get it fixed in the time that we needed to it was during a heavy load season and we it went down on one day it gone down on another day and we knew it was going to be happening again. And I think in those cases if we if you say hey like we can't we can't swap this out yet it's gonna take some time to get this fixed, being at least able to communicate with the customers proactively say hey we this has happened, this is what we're doing to mitigate it. But over the next few days this is going to this this could happen again I think having that clear communication for people throughout that or hey this you know having the team set up and ready to go and having a plan in place takes it from hey this is a crisis like you said to something that we're prepared for an incident and a problem and something we have to fix but um but it's not necessarily the same level of crisis as when we saw it the first time. So I think that's important to kind of make that distinction there.

Craig Stoss: 40:00

thing that I can add to to what Ash and Matt just said is is the um is make sure that when you're doing these these postmortem type activities that the that the representation is correct uh especially I mean COVID's probably a classic example but I mean mass layoffs is is is another type of crisis business downturns you know whatever it might be there's an effect at at an individual contributor level that that doesn't always bubble up into those postmortems right how was it communicated uh how did that make them feel how how um you know were they nervous did they understand what was happening you know I've been on both sides of the table on on at layoffs and and I'll tell you neither side feels great but there is are ways to make it feel better and and so when it when you are um when you are in a crisis situation and a COVID again being a good example how did it make employees feel that you know they were working at home they had to take care of kids during work hours as schools were closed um you know was the communication correct to the individual contributors not necessarily uh at the company level or to the customer level and so uh you know again Ash and Matter dead dead on that you need to do these activities and and put mitigation in place but make sure all the feedback is considered there. I don't know or at least represented somehow in in those uh reports.

Natalie Patruch Trent: 41:19

Yeah I I was just gonna say I truly don't think I could have said it any better myself. And just the last thing to add there is uh your customers even though it's mostly and it's most likely a primarily internal conversation how did your customers react? What feedback did you get back in from them? Sure they might have just been angry and writing some angry emails but there's probably at least one gem in there that you can take away from or if you have really good relationships with a handful of customers maybe hop on a call and say hey this is what happens this is how this is how it impacted you we're hoping that this is never going to happen again but if it does how can we deliver the best to you?

Ash Rhodes: 42:03

Well and I I think it goes without saying but even if you can't find those gems make sure that you're representing like how many how many people wrote in and make sure people understand the the multiplicate multiplicative nature of tickets that I mean it depends on the study but between four and 25 um each one of those tickets represents like between four people who are not writing in or 25 people who are not writing in and are still impacted but are just silently pissed off. So yeah like we're we're our customers advocates when it really comes down to it.

Charlotte Ward: 42:42

Yeah absolutely we have to advocate for the customer in every single situation and those port postmortems are really a key part of that we we we concentrate so often just on the facts we draw up a timeline we produce an executive summary and that's it job done that postmortem can be filed right um yeah that's really really good advice thank you so so let's move on to advice the final final thing that I like to extract from all my panelists right before I let them go is is one good piece of advice. So what's the one piece of advice you would give any one of our listeners for communicating with customers in a crisis what could or should they go and do right now and I say that understanding that we are kind of in a crisis situation. So um I mean if you like let's say generally what should they go and do right now and and what should they really go and do right now because of the situation we're in.

Natalie Patruch Trent: 43:41

I think uh um have a consistent message and uh and be proactive uh in delivering it to your customers I would say do your research um now is actually the perfect time to start planning and prepping for crises because we're in the middle of one you have all these other companies and businesses that you can go look, see how they're communicating, see how they're messaging and what they're doing and how their users and their not users are responding to it because everyone's having a lot of feelings right now and everyone might not always have this many feelings but this is the best time to see what's working and what's not working and the best time to learn.

Craig Stoss: 44:19

For me I think it's uh empowerment uh of your employees allow your employees to to have these conversations to have the tools available might go back to my example of speaking to a person in person in an airport who couldn't fix my airport airline related problem. I mean that just seems ridiculous to me for a customer experience. So make sure your employees are set up to take the actions that you expect to to happen. You know the the phone calls, the messaging the consistency internally is delivered to your employees at the right times so they can use it the data driven stuff that I think Matt talked about where only notifying the right the the people that need to know versus everyone that's to me my message is make sure you're set up to let your employees do their jobs as well as possible with as little friction as possible and a little confusion as possible.

Matt Dale: 45:09

I think on that note my my advice would be that um whatever systems you're using to communicate to your customers um that you have redundancy kind of put in place with those especially if you're if you're a medium or larger team. I recall uh one incident a couple years ago when we were having DDoS attacks basically on the whole eastern seaboard um and our our application along with everybody else was down during the time um I was on an airplane and the only other person that knew how to do anything with our phone system was on the same airplane with me. And so um uh from from St. Louis back to I think Salt Lake City um there was a period of time there where we couldn't actually update the phone system to say hey you know we're we're we're experiencing this outage it's a known issue it's something that's affecting everybody you can check status our status page for more information um and our our team just got destroyed because no one could change that message and so so think through in as part of your planning that you're doing think through what are those systems and making sure that you have some redundancy that that the people do have the tools that they need um so that you can make those quick changes and update those specific channels um in case someone your your your name your main person isn't there or or if if they are if they're planning on going away making sure that they have someone in in their stead so that they can take care of the company during that time.

Ash Rhodes: 46:18

Mine is basically bits and pieces from everything people have said one just make sure you've got a plan. It's never too late to start one and write it down like literally write it down and put it somewhere that everyone can find. But then also have have your dream team let them know that they are part of the dream team and if possible make sure that there is a second alternate for for said dream team and and not just in your own but your guy in dev your guy in marketing your guy in like whatever departments there is make sure that there is someone from every single one of them because if there's a department for it they're probably necessary in some way and like at the very least they need to know what is going on and they they've got domain knowledge that you don't have and and they're probably going to be valuable. So like it if nothing else it's a good way to get together and talk once every other month and and update stuff. So it it'll do you good.

Charlotte Ward: 47:27

Absolutely great advice all thank you so much. I'm gonna finish uh perhaps uncharacteristically for me slightly sentimentally and uh even more uncharacteristically for me I'm gonna quote a cons a British conservative politician. How very dare you I know right I I'm not taking my audience into account at any point during the next two sentences but I will say that um a couple of weeks ago in one of the Downing Street briefings our Chancellor of the exchequer Rishi Sunak said something which I think we should all think about in this crisis and any other and I think it would serve us well personally and in our relationships with our colleagues and customers and he said this now more than at any time in our history we will be judged by our capacity for compassion when this is over and it will be over we want to look back at this moment and remember the many small acts of kindness done by us and to us. Yeah yeah that's beautiful yeah I couldn't agree more and I think that's how we that's I think that's how we all want to feel about uh about this whole situation coming out the other side and uh hopefully we can remember that as as this plays out over the next few months and uh hopefully all of our our organizations both that we are employed by and that we are customers of and who are our customers can have that kind of little ring in the back of their heads as well. I think it's a really important piece of uh of uh I think it's a really important sentiment. That's it for today go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash fifty four for the show notes and I'll see you next time.