Our Engineering and Customer Success teams work together to communicate outages to our customers in the unlikely and unfortunate event that they occur.
When an outage is discovered or reported, Engineering first determines the magnitude of the outage -- whether it's limited to one customer, a subset of customers, or the service entirely. Mitigation strategies and timeframes for resolution are determined and passed along to the Customer Success team, who notifies the designated technical contact at our customer with the information that was discovered.
In the case of the service degradation, updates are sent when milestones in repairing the incident are achieved: Incident reported, root cause identified, fix in testing, fix scheduled to be deployed to production, and fix deployed to production. In some cases, most often with service degradations, it may be less disruptive to end users if a fix is deployed to production outside of business hours.
Generally, total outages require a time-based notification cadence, usually hourly. This involves communicating with the technical contact and other identified customer stakeholders, usually through email. A conference bridge may be opened for the duration of the incident if the customer wishes.
After degradations and outages are repaired, a root cause analysis is prepared and distributed. Once the RCA is approved and appropriate prevention measures are put into place, the incident is considered resolved.
Zammo recommends a distribution list with an email alias be created by our customers so people who need to be in the know for incidents can be notified quickly and easily. Distribution lists scale and are best managed by the customer as they are privy to the comings and goings of their employees in key roles.