PagerDuty’s Operations Cloud helps organizations with critical work across the entire business, from IT teams to customer service to human resources, marketing, sales, and more. With PagerDuty, organizations can prioritize accurately, respond efficiently, and reduce operational overhead.

In this blog post, we’ll share examples of how PagerDuty can be used for critical work in all departments, not just IT, using our new Solution Guides for Business.

Human resources improves employee and candidate experience

Human resources is responsible for making sure that the people who currently work there, are leaving the company, or looking to join are all cared for. For human resources, critical work could range from making sure wage and tax information are kept up to date, to offboarding employees promptly, to coordinating last-minute changes in the candidate interview process. This critical work is key to ensuring employee and candidate experience. If these workflows are disrupted, it could mean losing out on star candidates, attrition, or even compliance problems.

PagerDuty helps human resources teams stay on top of their ever-changing organization and ensure that workflows are actioned quickly and by the right people. Additionally, you can optimize these workflows to reduce operational overhead and say goodbye to sending multiple “reminder” emails.

For example, the human resources department is responsible for offboarding. When an offboarding request comes in, it can’t afford to be lost in someone’s inbox, as there’s an increased risk with any delay in the offboarding process. So the team establishes notifications for each offboarding request that immediately route to the correct person. Additionally, once human resources fulfills its portion of offboarding, the team can reassign the notification to the IT team responsible for decommissioning the employee’s accounts.

The IT team then understands that this is critical work, and responds accordingly. Rather than submitting a ticket and waiting for it to be resolved through a queued workflow, it’s addressed quickly. The human resources team can watch the notification as the IT team works, confirming that the process is complete end-to-end without needing to follow up or send emails. This ensures continuity in the offboarding workflow, and reduces manual, low-value work for the human resources department. Most importantly, it mitigates the risk that comes from not offboarding employees in a timely manner.

Sales expedites the deal cycle for customers

The sales team is the face of the company and the key driver of revenue. Sales needs to be seen as responsive, competent, and friendly. On the backend, there are many processes and workflows that keep the sales engine moving smoothly. Critical work for this team can be customer-facing (such as keeping customer support informed of key deals or incoming prospect messages) or internal-facing (such as expediting month-end sales quote updates).

PagerDuty can help sales teams cut through cluttered inboxes and understand what’s really important while protecting and bolstering productivity. This makes for a more effective sales force, happier customers, and more closed-won deals.

Sales representatives are often exceptionally busy at the end of a month or quarter, and with good reason. Customers may have purchasing windows or budgetary reasons for making certain purchases at certain times. When a deal is set to close with just a day left in the quarter, neither the representative nor the customer can wait for delays in sales processing. Missing the mark by just 24 hours could mean needing to postpone the deal, or even losing the opportunity.

To avoid this, sales can set up an integration between Salesforce or another system of record and PagerDuty. When the final quote is sent in for approval, it doesn’t need to sit in the queue until the approver signs off. And the sales rep doesn’t need to send an email or message to let the person know this is a high priority. Instead, the integration automatically sends the approver a notification and prompts them to complete this action immediately, keeping the deal on track for close.

Finance teams ensure payments are made and received on time

Finance teams operate with little margin for error, and issues need to be corrected without delay. Teams need a way to ensure that all transactions are made at the correct time and in the correct amount. For finance, critical work may be a scheduled payment that doesn’t complete, or a processing failure, or audit control violations that need to be handled promptly. Left undiscovered, this critical work could result in a large impact to the company’s bottom line.

With PagerDuty, finance teams can minimize delays in responding to critical work via notifications through text, call, or email that alert the responsible team or person when a process fails. When a team receives these notifications, it can immediately begin to remedy the situation and ensure that all transactions complete within the designated time frame.

Imagine there’s an overnight payment that’s scheduled to complete precisely at 9:59 PM at the end of every month. It’s considered late if the payment is not made within 24 hours of the due date. The last day of the month is a Saturday. If the team were to wait until Monday morning to discover the payment failed, the company would incur a late fee.

To ensure that there is no delay in mitigating this issue, the finance team sets up a notification for their overnight payment processing. If a payment fails, PagerDuty calls and texts the responsible person, who then can resend the payment immediately, ensuring that it completes as expected.

Marketing uses data to pivot in the right direction

Marketing is a fast-paced department. This team strives to make data-driven decisions that provide sales with qualified leads while also educating customers and prospects. Critical work for this team could include things like staying on top of competitor developments, changes to planned campaigns, or keeping an eye on key opportunities. 

PagerDuty helps marketing teams stay topical and react quickly to make the most of their time and budget. Marketing can understand when a tool they rely on, like Marketo or Hubspot, is unavailable, or when to pivot based on company or competitor announcements.

Let’s think about a marketing team for a retail organization that plans to push a big email and social media campaign into effect ahead of the annual sale. While the organization does have some brick-and-mortar locations, the majority of its sales and some of the most exciting promotions are online only. The team wants to ensure that its customers have the best experience possible.

To ensure that this experience is protected, the marketing department sets up notifications to call and text when there is a customer-impacting issue with the online store. With this information, marketing can pivot moments ahead of the campaign release to postpone. This way, when the campaign is launched, customers will be able to make purchases and give the marketing team an ROI on its investments.

Critical work is the future of all business

Critical work isn’t just in the domain of IT. All departments require a way to handle critical work so customer, prospect, and employee experience are protected.

Learn more about how PagerDuty Solution Guides for Business can help your team by taking a look at our solutions guides.