Communicating like a pro during an outage – learning from Twilio

I just thought I'd mention, since I am mentioned here by name as someone whose customers were adversely affected, that no customers complained to me about this because we didn't drop a single SMS and, as a consequence, it is unlikely they know that this happened at all. Relevantly to the article, the status page updates gave me the confidence that Twilio was on top of things enough such that my participation was unnecessary, so I quite literally went to sleep after verifying that our messages were still going out.

Reminds me of studies done by power companies on utility outage communication.

http://www.emergencymgmt.com/emergency-blogs/crisis-comm/Why... http://www.tppa.com/events/2013/barrow.pdf

Outage communication is a key driver of satisfaction

- Outage communication drives approximately 55% of customer satisfaction for key account customers

- Customers desire communication of estimated time of restoration

- Customers desire ongoing follow up during the outage event

- Customers desire communication of outage cause within 2 business days