Websites go down; it’s a fact. But being transparent about the outages helps reduce customer impact and improve overall customer satisfaction.
Status pages are a great way to communicate issues to your users. Here are some reasons why having one can save your business time and money.
Reduce Customer Support Queries
Many companies face the challenge of keeping their users updated during downtime. While email updates are a good way of doing so, they may be more effective for those not checking their emails regularly or who may have opted out. One of the status page examples solves this problem by providing a one-stop shop for information. This can reduce the number of support queries and free up IT team members to focus on fixing issues rather than answering the same questions repeatedly. Additionally, it can increase user confidence and loyalty by showing that a company is transparent and proactive in communicating downtime.
In addition to showing when the issue started, most companies also provide a detailed explanation of the incident on their status pages. This helps manage users’ expectations as they can learn about the downtime beforehand and plan accordingly.
By having complete autonomy over how incidents and scheduled maintenance are communicated, you can save time responding to a flood of customer inquiries and building trust with your customers. You can even collaborate with your team with private notes to resolve incidents quickly and effectively. Moreover, you can limit the accessibility of your status page to specific devices by using IP Allowlist. This ensures that only the devices in your office network can access your status page.
Reduce Frustrations
Whether you are communicating scheduled maintenance or unscheduled downtime, having a status page lets you share the issue transparently and keeps users updated. This minimizes frustration and maintains trust even under challenging situations.
When a website or application goes down, users often contact customer support to learn more about the problem and why it happened. These queries take up a lot of time for the IT team to answer and can cause frustration with users as they wait to hear back from someone. With a status page in place, you can direct users to check out the update and get all the details independently, reducing the need for one-on-one communication and minimizing user impact.
Most businesses also include when the service is up and running again on their status pages so that customers can plan accordingly. This prevents them from panicking when they see the downtime message and reduces the need for IT teams to spend a big chunk of their time answering questions.
Depending on the size of your business, you can personalize your status page to offer information relevant to specific groups of users. For example, you can have private status pages that allow for password protection and personalized communications for different groups of customers.
Save Time
A status page can save your team time by reducing the questions they receive during unexpected outages. It also allows them to focus on fixing the issue rather than answering individual queries. This ultimately translates into more hands on deck for the support team and enables you to meet or improve your SLA.
When your site is experiencing problems, it’s natural for users to get frustrated and call your customer support. By sharing incident details on a status page, you can inform users of the problem and give them an expected date for when things will be back up and running. This helps reduce frustrations and prevents users from calling your customer support for nothing.
Using clear language and avoiding technical jargon on your status page ensures that users understand the problem and know when to expect things to be back up and running. It’s also essential to include historical data on your status page so that users can see if the issue is common or rare.
Most status pages are publicly accessible, but it’s possible to create private status pages with a password that can be used for specific groups of customers. Personalization is an essential feature on status pages because it allows you to communicate only the relevant services to each user group.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
When downtime strikes, businesses get flooded with support tickets from users and customers worldwide. A big chunk of their time goes into responding to them. This leaves them with less time to work on resolving the issue itself. Status pages help reduce this burden by keeping customers updated about the status of your services. This way, your team can spend more time resolving the problem and less on answering questions from frustrated people about your benefits being down.
When you have a public status page, you can also notify your customers about any upcoming maintenance that may affect them in advance. This allows them to adjust their plans and avoid unnecessary inconveniences. Moreover, you can even use your status page to share important details about your uptime and performance metrics with your customers. This transparency helps you build trust with your customers and increases their perception of your product.
While not everyone will appreciate having their questions answered publicly, many will be thankful for the forewarning they receive via your status page. They will see that your team is actively working on resolving the issues, which makes them feel like your business takes downtime seriously and has their best interests in mind. It’s also an excellent opportunity to educate your customers on how to respond in case of an outage or maintenance.
