Stakeholder Communication

The latest episode of Incident management café had stakeholder communication in MSPs as the topic of discussion. With Josh English, who is part of the customer success team in AlertOps, and has first-hand knowledge of customer pain points, joining the discussion had some interesting and informative insights.

In the case of MSPs, customer communication is of prime importance. MSPs have contracts with customers and the customers expect a level of ROI on their investments. They, even though do not want incidents to be happening, would be expecting high visibility in case an incident occurs.

The best mechanism for stakeholder communication depends on the following things:

1. The culture of the MSPs, as well as their customers.

2. Mode of communication is also an important factor that varies with companies and their cultures. With some customers, an email with an estimated MTTR would suffice, whereas, for some others, MSPs may have to constantly update them with the progress.

3. SLAs is another crucial factor that dictates the channel of communication and other factors in the communication as they have a huge impact on the relation between an MSP and its customer

To sum up, the mechanism depends on the kind of contract and relationship with the customers and what level of visibility is expected from the MSP.

Another segment for whom the SLAs are extremely important is Managed Security Service Providers. SLAs for MSSPs have huge financial implications, therefore it is crucial to assure customers that everything is under control in case an incident occurs. Informing your customers about an incident only after it gets out of hand should be avoided. Being proactive and transparent is extremely important.

Even though customer communication is fundamentally the same in companies across sizes, there are a few points where it differs.

In large enterprises, it is much broader and involves multiple groups and communication channels.

When you are communicating with business partners, meaningful contexts are expected. It is different from a technical team where an error message would suffice. With the increase in several groups, channels, and messages, complications and chances for mistakes go up.

Automation and templating make the communication system much more efficient.

Having an efficient communication system allows you to face unanticipated incidents and minimize their impact.

A good Alerting system not only enhances your internal capability to resolve the issue but also ensures that your customer is never hampered.