Internal Communications

Customer-facing (or external) incident communications are not the only important communications series. You must also keep your internal stakeholders, such as sales teams, account teams, executive leadership, support, engineering, and sometimes the entire company updated on the incident as well. Internal incident communications tend to go into more detail about the types of systems that are impacted as well as the underlying root cause. Here are some of the key considerations to make when developing your internal incident communications process.

People

  1. Target your communications. If possible, target your internal incident communications to only the resources who care about the incident. For an incident that impacts multiple customers, you may want to notify the entire company. For an incident that impacts only one customer, you may want to target only that customer's account team.'
  2. Know your audience. If you're keeping a timeline for engineering, it may be a good idea to provide technical details, server names, etc. If you're sending comms to the company, cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of knowledge. Keep things at a high level and explain terms that people may not understand.

Process

  1. Keep an internal timeline of the incident.
  2. Send internal communications at a designated cadence.

Technology

  1. Create a template for your communications. Just like you create your templates for customer-facing communications on Trustleaf, you should also make templates for your internal communications for the same reasons: accuracy and consistency for your audience and repeatability for your communicators.
  2. Select an appropriate tool for sending your communications. Some companies use an internal dashboard; some send these types of internal updates via email. Others still add SMS messages into the mix.