Communicating planned and unplanned outages
Managing maintenance windows in the organization involves more than choosing a date and time that works for operations.
Consider working around important events within the organization. It takes extra planning and outreach to learn about these events, but it is one way operations demonstrates that it is savvy to the organization’s needs. Wouldn’t it be good to know if the organization is about to roll out the next version of a product, perform a year end close-out, host a big conference, or stage a demo to an important external stakeholder. There are no extra points for doing this, but operations avoids losing respect within the organization for being unaware of the organization’s core business.
For outages that may impact a large percentage of the customers or a critical service, it is a good practice to notify the organization more than a week in advance. This serves a dual purpose: it alerts people who might be out of the office the week before the actual outage and it provides lead time to reschedule in case someone responds with a critical activity that would conflict with the outage. Send a reminder the day before or the day of the outage for customers who missed the first message.
To send a followup email, simply forward the original email with a short note at the top reminding people of the time and services impacted.
Example: Planned outage notification
All file cluster users,
Save your work before 7:00 pm Friday, January 10th for a planned outage of the file cluster.
The file cluster will be taken off-line for scheduled maintenance at 7:00pm Friday, January 10th. We expect the outage to last until 10:00 pm.
Notify operations immediately if this interferes with time-critical work.
[provide a way to notify operations]
Fielding customer complaints
In the world of operations, customer complaints are a given. Operations can’t please everyone all the time. Every operations person has dealt with unhappy customers so it is good to develop strong people skills.
It is important to face customer complaints, not avoid them. Occasionally we have a customer who is a chronic complainer and the operations staff dive under their desks when that person walks in the office. A complaint should be treated as an opportunity to hear a customer’s perception of services. Complaints can be turned into opportunities for improvement and can be a path to creating a lasting relationship with customers.
People are often at their worst when reporting a complaint; emotions are high due to lost data, a service outage, or frustration trying to use technology. Now is not the time for operations to get emotional or defensive about the work. Instead of reacting, follow these steps to adeptly manage customer unhappiness and maybe increase customer respect for operations as a whole.
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Listen without judgment
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Rephrase the concern so to confirm understanding
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Agree to investigate if it isn’t something resolvable now
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Leave the customer with the assurance that someone will get back to him/her with a solution or feedback.
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Get back to the customer even if it is to say
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It was a one-off problem and here is why
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We found a problem internally and it is now resolved
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We are improving our processes to reduce the likelihood of it happening again
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Or an explanation that simply provides feedback to the customer.
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And don’t forget to thank the customer for taking the time to provide feedback
The reason to close the feedback loop is to show the customer that operations did something as a result of the complaint. The customer will know that someone in operations was concerned enough to investigate and potentially resolve the root cause of the complaint. It could have been inconsistencies in operation’s internal procedures or a skills gap. That’s a bonus for operations and the customer should know that the communication had a positive impact.
Try these techniques with chronic complainers. Sometimes all they want is to be heard. Bring in IT operations management if someone is repeatedly impacting operations with complaints or becomes abusive, This advice stands if operations feels like the above techniques are not working. Escalation to the next person in the management chain is a valid procedural step in any of these instances.
Todo
It might be interesting to put together an exercise where the student interacts with a fictional customer in some different scenarios. Depending on what the student does, the customer is happy or complains to the operations person or escalates the complaint up the management chain. How does the student respond? Could have multiple scenarios with different customers (a customer who causes his own problem then gets in the way, a customer who cannot wait, a customer who tries to fix the problem and makes it worse, a customer who uses the opportunity to speak to an operations person to dump 10 other requests on that person. This idea came to me from a series of books my kid has where you make a decision on page 10 that leads to to either page 26 or page 40. Your decision could end the story or take you in a new direction. The books are full of these decision points so the story is rarely the same twice, kinda like customer support!