When an Incident Strikes: Comms Best Practices

In the digital era, effective communication during crises has become increasingly vital for businesses, impacting revenue and brand equity. This pressure extends beyond technical teams to those responsible for brand reputation and customer experience, necessitating new workflows and best practices, as demonstrated by PagerDuty. At PagerDuty, the communications team is integrated into the incident response process, working closely with support, sales, legal, and leadership teams to ensure proactive and accurate communication with customers during incidents. This involves being on-call, coordinating with support to understand incidents, and maintaining real-time updates to manage customer perceptions effectively. After resolving incidents, a post-mortem analysis is conducted to improve future responses and rebuild customer trust. The approach emphasizes a collaborative, cross-functional effort to maintain digital operations excellence and deliver exceptional customer experiences, a topic further explored at the PagerDuty Summit.