Front teams up for great incident response
By design, Front helps their customers work with more transparency, so it's no surprise they excel with communication and transparency during incident response.
Industry
Enterprise Software
Location
San Francisco
Company size
51-100
Share page
"Transparency is key — making sure we are keeping customers updated and not leaving them in the dark is huge for us."
Samantha Wong
Customer Success Manager, Front App
Front brings teams together in shared inboxes, where they can collaborate on all kinds of communication: email, SMS, social media, and more. By design, Front helps their customers work with more transparency, so it's no surprise that Front excels with communication and transparency as an organization. We spent some time with folks from their Support, Customer Success, and Engineering teams to learn how they keep customers in the loop during an incident.
Transparency during and after an incident
"Transparency is key — making sure we are keeping customers updated and not leaving them in the dark is huge for us," Sam, Front's Customer Success Manager told us. Front keeps transparency at the forefront of their incident response process with a handy product integration and a solid post-incident review process.
Front typically uses their own product to communicate with customers, but brings in Statuspage during an incident. They brought the two together by creating a Front + Statuspage integration that provides current status information via pop-ups right inside the Front app. Serving up incident information before a customer even has a chance to submit a support ticket builds a lot of trust and good will. Customers know exactly what's going on and where they can go for more information during the entirety of the incident.
The Front teams aim to be open with users after resolution, too. They conduct internal post-incident reviews, often translating their findings into public post-mortems that tell customers what happened, how they fixed it, and how they're making sure the same problem doesn't happen again. Sometimes their CTO sends this information out in an email that also urges users to subscribe to Statuspage notifications so they can to stay in the loop during future incidents.
Their commitment to transparency definitely pays off. Customers often send notes of gratitude for clear and candid post-mortems, which help to boost team morale after an incident. "It's really nice to see the encouragement and support during a stressful time," said Sam. "It makes me want to give out more #HugOps to services I use since I know how good it feels."
More great teams
At Mixpanel, Support team members are on the on-call list right beside their engineering counterparts so they can start updating users as soon a issue is detected.
Ops teams at Grand Rounds rely on each other down in the incident trenches, and have a deep sense of camaraderie because of it.