#announcements

We have an ongoing debate about this. While customer comms/marketing needs to be heavily involved, we're planning in partnership with Customer Support, where this would most likely initiate. Since they know where these issues stem from, they are the best ones (at my company) to create the initial process.

That makes sense to me, and I think that’s a great call out that Customer Support needs to be part of the strategy as they’d likely be fielding the most incoming inquiries related to whatever the issue is.

Every time I've been at a company where this has worked smoothly it's been initiated and brought like 80% of the way to completion by Support. Support establishes the overall message we want to convey, adds the important details around the extent of the issue, etc. and then Customer Marketing has taken it from there to edit and finalize copy & handle distribution

I'm actually tasked with that this quarter! Even though it won't be marketing owned, it is needed so it's going to be marketing created😄. If anyone has framework or ideas I'm all ears!

I tend to try and work pretty closely with our support team anyway (like ongoing customer education & product adoption stuff) so having a good relationship with that team certainly helps the collaboration during crisis mode. I know depending on the company that support and marketing aren't always linked at the hip

I'll echo what others have shared: Think Support has to initiate.

What I've done before is create templates for different types of communications, plus SLAs for if/when these types of comms go out. This came up at a previous company because I think it was AWS servers went down (which made parts of our platform go down) 3 times in a few months, so we started to think more about how do we put a plan in place for this.

If anything is a REALLY BIG DEAL, I ask that it goes through Customer Marketing (or if you have PR & Comms - could be that team) before it goes out. Because there's a difference between how engineers write vs. support teams vs. marketers.

Appreciate all the insight, thank you all! I’m connecting with our PR & Comms team next week, then will loop in Support.

@Irwin Hipsman i love that perspective, thank you!

I am heavily involved in getting crisis comm out to our customers and it's also because I am sorta the gatekeeper of customer emails at my company.
I rely on whoever it is that wants the crisis comm to go out (admin, InfoSec, Legal, Engineering, etc) and draft an email template. I also get the list from these teams to avoid spamming some customers. I then share this with my MarOps team to have it go to customers. Essentially, I'm acting as the facilitator and taking a call on when the comm has to go out.

@Krutika Mathihalli What you are describing is very similar to the position I am in. Do you have any certain steps you follow, questions you ask yourself throughout the process, more specifically as it relates to crafting the messaging and making sure the list is as targeted as possible? Or maybe questions you ask the team that’s requesting the messaging so that their work can be the most targeted as possible?

The only thing I try to be consistent with is the process I've set for myself. I have had misses where the email wasn't as targeted as I would have liked, but that is also because we're currently having a data correction issue in our CRM. However, something I am currently doing is trying to get the customer roles identified (ex: Admin, InfoSec, Legal POC's from the customer company)

I work on a process where I get an intimation from the concerned team --> Draft a response and share it with key stakeholders who can help confirm the language and details in the email --> Share this with the CSM team or CS Leads to confirm the distro list --> Schedule it out and share a copy internally. If you have a customer community, it will help for you to have this information housed there.

Hope this helps!