5/14/2014

SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for Unplanned Outages

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SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for

Unplanned Outages
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Posted on OCTOBER 2, 2013

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Written by LINCOLN MURPHY

Follow @lincolnmurphy

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So I got an email recently about best practices

for dealing with unplanned outages from a
SaaS Customer Success standpoint.
Ive attempted to answer the question in a
meaningful way, but I am the first to

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acknowledge that there is a lot more to it than

just what I talked about in this post.

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That said, I think my answer provides a great way to think about Customer Success
and unplanned outages by taking full advantage of the SaaS business model
architecture.

As Seen In

Check it out.
Heres Davids question:
Lincoln, Im hoping you can help me with a quick question on SaaS best practices. I
lead the support structure for a company whose applications are all provided in a
SaaS environment and Im looking to create clear guidelines for when we should
notify customers/users when there are unplanned outages.
Meaning if the application is down x minutes we do nothing, if its down y minutes
we email all users, etc. Any thoughts you have on this would be helpful. David
Heres my answer:
David, that might be a quick question to ask, but its not a quick question to
answer.

Trust Trumps Everything

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Question Ever!

Trust that your product does what it says it will do.

Trust that you wont lose data.
Trust that youll keep their data secure.
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SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for Unplanned Outages

Trust that you wont rip them off, steal their credit card numbers, share their IP
out the backdoor with China.
And trust begins and ends with communication.
That means you have to decide not to hide from your customers and be transparent

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with them to the level they need and/or expect.

Dont Hide from Customers

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Outage. Hiccup. Glitch. Issue. Problem. Downtime. Crash.

Whatever you want to call it if it is something other than the norm and it affects
customer-facing areas of your app, you cant hide from it.
Yes, if backend processes bounce but that has no ill effects on customers and the
customers wouldnt even know it happened, that might be okay to not talk about.
But when theres an issue and especially if customers experienced it you cant
hide.

Situation Impact
Okay, so when there is a problem, there are several ways to handle it, but heres
why its difficult to give a general answer to what to do (IMHO)
the reaction depends not so much on the amount of time of the outage but the
impact.
In the early days of a SaaS companys life, its very likely that your app could go
down completely for minutes at a time (maybe even days!) and no one would notice.
However, those that are impacted could suffer greatly if the app is a core part of
their business.
On the other hand, at scale, a 1 second blip in just one area of your app could
literally affect millions of transactions.
But those transactions might be low-value, non-core-businesss functions that
the users or your system will just try again. No harm no foul.
So to say it depends on how to react is an understatement.
Outside of SLAs which are an interesting thing in the SaaS world, especially for
vendors whove built their apps on top of layers of infrastructure and services that
they dont own, control, or even know where it is physically.
Given that, Im not going to get into SLAs here except to say that how you react to
an outage in a general sense and how you react to and even define and outage
when SLAs are involved are two very different things.
Remember this

People Use your App

I know sometimes its hard to remember this, but your customers even your
free(loading) users are people.
Because of this fact, a good rule of thumb is to remember that while the problem
with your app affected millions of transactions and thousands or millions of
individual users and customers, each customer was affected individually.
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SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for Unplanned Outages

This means that your users dont cry for the masses that lost their work and they
certainly dont care about how this is affecting you and how thats affecting your
relationship with your cat.
They care about themselves, even if theyre generally good, caring, giving people in
real life.
Its good to remember that they arent your customer base
They arent your user base
They are individual people that trust(ed) you and have expectations of a certain
level of service.
Of course their expectations around the level of service to expect or what is
realistic could very well be incorrect, but thats your fault for mismanaging those
expectations in the first place.
Anyway
Even though the fan and the room is now covered in the fallout from this mess,
and it might be panic-inducing to have thousands or millions (or even just tens) of
unhappy users out there frustrated with why they cant finish their work or
communicate with their customers or post their next blog post or check on their
campaign
and even though theyre out there complaining on Twitter and posting y u no
work? memes on Reddit
you need to keep in mind that each one of them is experiencing the outage
individually, not as a cohort of unhappy customers.
Who cares, Lincoln? Why is that important? Context.

Context is King
First I have to say that Jason Lemkin, former CEO of EchoSign, has a great post on
scaling your Customer Success team which should shed some light on how you
might reach out to your various customer types, so I wont go into that detail here.
But suffice it to say that when you reach out to your customers and users people
(as weve established) you need to keep in mind that youre reaching out to a
human being experiencing an issue and feeling quite helpless (as we all have when
a cloud service just disappears).
Theyre angry probably pissed but not for the self-centered reason you think
(this is where context comes in):
Theyre embarrassed in front of a customer for using your system to store the
artwork that their customer cannot access now
Theyre embarrassed in front of co-workers because they championed your
system in their company over other competitive products they invested
social capital with you and now this failure is blowing back on them
Theyre frightened that theyve lost work and remember that work means
sunk costs, time and materials, ideas theyll forget, hours theyve invested, etc.
They fear the worst catastrophic data loss, hackers from a tiny country
theyve never heard of outside of, well, news about hackers
In other words, theyre feeling something about this situation that isnt strictly
technical or honestly even about your app.
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SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for Unplanned Outages

Just like marketing, this isnt about you or your SaaS app its about your
customer.
They arent upset that they cant get in and see your super-slick UI elements.
They arent kicking their trashcan across the office because they cant see
your elegant sentiment-analysis algorithm at work.
They arent yelling obscenities at their cat because they cant access your
super-cool implementation of Node.js and CouchDB
Get the point?
Theyre all people, so treat them that way.

Rage is a Gauge
The irony is that the more passionate and urgent the reaction to your outage is
probably is an indication of how important your SaaS app is to your customers,
at least in a B2B environment.
So while youre in the midst of this mess, keep in mind that those horrible emails,
phone calls, and tweets youre getting indicate that youve found an audience. Its
not all bad, even though it probably sucks right then.
In fact, if youre a startup wondering if you have reached Product / Market Fit,
dont survey your users and ask if theyd be unhappy if your service went away
unplug your service on Monday morning and see what the reaction is.
If the response is crickets, you probably arent there yet.
Disclaimer: Dont do that. (But it would prove the point) (But dont do that).
So back to the question at hand

How do you React to an Unplanned Outage?

Dont.
Dont react.
Thats not how SaaS providers think youre better than that!
Get Proactive.
Remember, youre a SaaS vendor you have visibility into whats going on in your
system in ways legacy software vendors simply did (do) not.
In the old days Im telling my stories kids, so pay attention when software was
installed at a customer location (yes, this actually used to happen), support would
only know about a problem when the customer called.
Often, the customer only called after trying everything they could possibly do on
their end to fix it first because talking to support was such an awful, brainsquenching experience.
When they finally did contact the vendors support team, and after the requisite
did you reboot the server? question then they might get started actually
helping the customer fix the issue. Maybe.
But youre better than that, right?

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SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for Unplanned Outages

Youre a SaaS vendor and you should be able to see what your customers are doing
and interacting with inside of your app (at a high-level at least maybe not exactly
what data theyre working with). If you dont have this visibility, thats a problem
far beyond the context of this post and means that youre not taking full advantage
of the SaaS business model architecture.
Being a SaaS vendor means that you have the ability to be proactive and not wait
until people contact you with a problem.
And this is especially true when you notice something that is affecting a large
swath of users across all of the layers and areas of your application.

What to Say
What level of detail do you provide? Whatever is necessary.
What level of transparency is required? Whatever your customers need.
What might your customers be thinking? Put yourself in their shoes.
You have to know your customers.
If your customers are software developers, DevOps, or other technical folks, you
might need to provide some low-level details and doing so might even endear you
to that crowd.
But if your customers are SMBs or Department managers in larger companies, they
probably dont need such a level of detail.. and in fact, providing that might alienate
them.
If its something out of your control an integration partners API was down, your
cloud infrastructure provider went away briefly, etc. dont just pass the blame,
but explain that the problem was out of your hands
and then tell your customers (in the level of detail congruent with the audience)
how youre going to fix this problem so it doesnt happen again.
I say it is 100% legitimate to blame Amazon Web Services when they go down and
take your service with em
however, its incompetent to blame them a second time for the same exact issue!
Ultimately, the depth and frequency of your transparency and updates about an
outage depends entirely upon who your customers are and your importance to
their business.
Once you know what level of detail to provide, you need to

Get Proactive!
I hate to even give tactical advice here because it varies so much, but this might get
you thinking about what is possible as a SaaS vendor.
Heres some super-generic advice for a minor blip (whatever that means in your
situation).
Since this is SaaS we should be able to see who was using the system when the
problem occurred, which means you should be able to notify them probably via
email or other outside-the-app means if theres even a possibility they were
affected.

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SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for Unplanned Outages

Easy enough, but what if you know that while 500 users were logged-in at the
time of the blip, that the issue would have caused people to not be able to log-in
or access your app at all?
Well that very much depends.
If the time was 12AM Pacific on a Saturday and those logged-in users were from the
handful of customers in Europe, you might be able to safely assume that few people
in the US where the vast majority of your customers reside were not affected.
However, if the time was 8AM Pacific on a non-holiday Monday you might have
only had 500 logged-in and active at the time, but could have had 10k people
trying to access your service right then (possibly contributing to excess
downtime inadvertent DDOS attack!).
It should be easy to pull up some historical data to see that from 8:00 to 8:03AM on
a non-holiday Monday, your system goes from 500 users to 10,500 active users
which means you need to not just reach out to those who were logged in and
potentially directly affected, but probably to everyone.
If its a prolonged outage and you dont know when itll be back up or you do but
it will be a while (whatever a while is) reach out to everyone and perhaps point
them to a status blog or Twitter account where they can get updates on the outage.
Again, it is 100% unique to your situation, but hopefully that gets you thinking in
the right direction.
I hope this helps a bit even if it doesnt directly answer the question.

Lets Improve your SaaS Customer Success

For immediate consultation and advice on SaaS Customer Success, schedule at
least a 15-minute meeting with me via Clarity. If you feel a more involved
engagement is required for me to help you, email me with the specifics of your
situation (as much detail as youre comfortable giving) and well setup a meeting to
work through the particulars.
- Lincoln

Abou t Lincol n Mu rp hy
I'm currently Customer Success Evangelist at Gainsight and am not taking
on new clients. I can help you - assuming there are no conflicts of interest
- via Clarity. Don't miss any of my posts by joining my mailing list, or circle
me on Google+, connect LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter.

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Comments
BADRI says:
November 22, 2013 at 3:25 am

Interesting that I came across this post today! A couple of days back we were
implementing a small tweak that would make the users lives better and eliminate a few
key clicks as well. There was an issue of browser incompatibility, ie when an image that
was created using Mozilla was appearing oversized in Chrome which we just left it as
such.
We thought that it would pass muster but just yesterday an user sent a mail telling us
how the oversized image is causing problems for him and it was at a very critical
juncture. I immediately wrote to him requesting him to use the Mozilla browser for a
couple of days till we resolve the situation. He offered to comply but expressed surprise
that it was working fine with chrome earlier. I havent heard from him since and hence
am assuming that he has managed for the moment.
REPLY

Trackbacks
WHO'S WHO IN CLOUD OCTOBER 4, 2013LOGICWORKS GATHERING CLOUDS says:
October 4, 2013 at 9:40 am

[] get SaaSy with Lincoln Murphy - he provides the best practices for
unplanned outages for SaaS []
REPLY

SOFTWARE MARKETING TWEETABLES 21 OCTOBER 2013 | SMART SOFTWARE MARKETING says:

October 20, 2013 at 2:15 pm

[] SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for Unplanned Outages []

REPLY

CUSTOMER SUCCESS DEFINED: A GUIDE FOR SAAS COMPANIES says:

March 29, 2014 at 1:43 am

[] across the entire customer lifecycle. Even this typically reactive part of the
organization should move to be as proactive as possible. Looking for patterns
that might indicate a customer is having trouble, monitoring for application,
[]
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