Imagine this: An airline encounters a major IT incident in a data center that affects their ticketing system. Behind the scenes, technical responders are scrambling to diagnose and fix the issue. However, because today’s systems are so complex, this issue is taking longer than expected to resolve, and hours have passed since the system went down.

Meanwhile, passengers are stranded and taking their anger out on customer service agents and sharing their frustrations on social media. The customer service agents have no idea what’s going on, but are doing their best to provide updates and keep everyone calm—despite having no access to any more information than the passengers do.

In short, we’ve noticed that many of our customers have mastered the technical aspect of incident response. However, the corresponding business response, such as keeping internal stakeholders like customer service agents, flights crews, and baggage service agents informed, is haphazard or non-existent, potentially exacerbating the negative impacts of the incident and causing severe damage to an organization’s brand and reputation.

That’s why we created the PagerDuty Solution for Business Response.

PagerDuty Solution for Business Response

When a major business- and customer-impacting incident like the above example occurs, technical responders (i.e., the primary responders) aren’t the only ones who need to take action. Other stakeholders from across the company—technical or non-technical—need to be mobilized as well.

These “secondary responders” need to be kept up-to-date with the incident resolution progress so that they can, for example, take action to help mitigate negative business impact, such as putting together media talking points to do damage control. In the airline example, customer service teams and ticketing agents need to understand how this incident will impact the business to inform their decisions as to whether they need to provide hotel coupons or rebook passengers.

The PagerDuty Business Response solution helps orchestrate business and customer communications when incidents occur by automatically sharing concise and actionable status updates with those who need to know—all without disrupting the technical teams involved in incident response.

“As customers increasingly expect digital products to be accessible 24/7, the potential negative impact of outages increases. During an incident, technical response is often not well integrated with business response, and this communication gap is reflected in the experience the consumer receives. PagerDuty’s Solution for Business Response was built to address this problem by ensuring both technical and business stakeholders are quickly informed of incidents and are able to take coordinated action to proactively remediate the issue.”

– Rachel Stephens, Analyst, RedMonk

Users can also customize how they want to be notified. For instance, in addition to viewing status dashboards via the PagerDuty website, they can subscribe to receive push notifications—via SMS, email, or through the PagerDuty mobile app—to specific business services so they can be updated in real time when relevant incidents occur.

Status Dashboards for Real-Time Updates

Sending notifications on specific incidents to stakeholders is one way to keep them informed. But what if they receive information from another source (say, a customer phone call) that something is wrong? How can they check to see if their organization’s systems are degraded or down, and find that information themselves when they haven’t received any communications yet? Enter the status dashboard.

PagerDuty’s status dashboards display the health of pre-selected business services so that employees can understand current health of any system at a glance, review what has happened historically, and view any upcoming service changes like maintenance and upgrades. Technical responders can also set up sophisticated incident response plays and flows that orchestrate both technical and business actions when moments matter most.

Benefits of the PagerDuty Solution for Business Response

The PagerDuty Solution for Business Response, built on top of our Modern Incident Response product, seamlessly and automatically keeps users informed with situational awareness of incidents so both technical responders and business subscribers/stakeholders can orchestrate a coordinated response using real-time incident information—all without costly add-ons. Benefits include:

• Increased customer confidence in your business and brand reputation by enabling users to proactively manage customer relationships—stakeholders and employees are aware of incidents before customers ask about them
• Improved productivity of business and technical responders by empowering them to get in front of incidents in real time
• The ability to quickly initiate business response activities, in conjunction with the technical response, when customer-impacting incidents occur
• Live status dashboards that provide an at-a-glance source of truth about service health
• The ability to proactively engage with key stakeholders using real-time, targeted status updates with business service self-subscription—no distribution lists for IT to manage

Want to learn more? Check out some of the following videos to see how Business Response actually works.

• Add subscribers, add status updates, and view the status dashboard to orchestrate business response: https://youtu.be/MaUmLBgLDBE 
• Create a custom dashboard that includes only specific business services that are relevant to different stakeholder teams and audiences: https://youtu.be/Ug1s_fsheu4 
• Manage subscriptions and view notification rules: https://youtu.be/XX2aP200wSw
• Subscribe users and teams to receive and publish status updates: https://youtu.be/C39wNKK_RMw

The PagerDuty Solution for Business Response is now available to customers who have Modern Incident Response in their plans—simply click the button for Status, and you’re ready to go!

If you’re interested in getting started with the new capabilities from this July release, reach out to your account representative and check out our Knowledge Base for more information.

We regularly recap everything that’s new with product, integrations, and more in our quarterly PagerDuty Pulse webinar. Register today for the August 8 webinar to learn how you can use these new features to seamlessly tie business communications into your incident response process across web, mobile, and chat interfaces.