Cultural or leadership problems (perhaps no one is responsible for status updates).Fear of consequences from being too clear.The most common problems that lead to bad status updates, in my experience, are: If the CEO wants to review and approve all status updates and isn’t available, customers won’t be kept up-to-date. Good writing is actually hard, and it matters a lot for status updates! Yet at the same time, publishing status updates can’t be the sole privilege of the micromanaging perfectionist CEO (just an example, you understand). For example, status updates are best when someone with serious language skills writes them. Some of these things are tough to achieve. Honest, without needlessly airing dirty laundry.A proper approach should be (but not limited to): Good status updates during outages or incidents require a delicate balance of several factors. I’d like to share what I’ve learned, as both a service provider and a customer, in the hopes that it helps you avoid some of the quicksand I’ve stepped into or the bad customer experiences I’ve had.
#Status updates how to#
Unfortunately, although there’s a lot of guidance and examples on how to conduct and write good postmortems, there doesn’t seem to be much about service status update messages. I haven’t always done a great job with our own status updates at VividCortex, and that’s been a learning experience for me too. The signal I get is avoidance, which erodes my trust in them. I can’t figure out the real situation and what the vendor’s doing about it. Most vendors do an awful job telling me the truth about how their systems are running. From my perspective as a customer, most of their status updates are garbage. I therefore have lots of SaaS vendors running key parts of our business at VividCortex. I prefer to buy, rather than build, solutions when possible. Doing a better job with status updates is a high-value activity in my book. Status updates – especially in moments of potential crisis – are a key piece of your relationship with your customers.
It’s a shame, really, because a bad status update can be worse than doing nothing at all. Unfortunately, I see more bad status updates than good ones. As Founder and CEO of a SaaS platform for database performance management, VividCortex, I know the power of a great status update to build or destroy trust. I’ve seen my share of terrible status updates. This is a guest post from Baron Schwartz, Founder and CEO at VividCortex.
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