How and why you should promote your status page
Jake Bartlett · 7-minute read
Incidents are inevitable. When (not if) things go wrong with your product or service – downtime, performance degradation, a faulty update – your customers want to know what’s happening and when they can resume normal usage. You might have a status page, which is a great start, but that isn’t enough if customers don’t know it exists.
Imagine this: your service goes down, and even though you have a status page, your customers aren’t aware of it. They’re left scrambling for answers, venting their frustration on social media, and submitting multiple support requests for more information. These scenarios damage your brand reputation and overwhelm your team with otherwise preventable inquiries.
You wouldn’t design a multi-story building without clearly marking the emergency exits. Not only would that be unsafe, but it would also create more panic during an already stressful situation. When it comes to service issues or full-on outages, it’s not just about launching a status page and keeping it updated. Your customers need to know where to find it and how to use it.
Proactively promoting your status page helps your customers stay informed and reassured during downtime or other critical incidents that impact them. Let’s dive into some best practices for promoting your status page and why it’s crucial for maintaining strong customer relationships.
Why you need to promote your status page
Not promoting your status page is like having a help desk in a busy office but not telling employees where it is. When problems arise, everyone is left frustrated and searching for answers independently. Meanwhile, the solution is sitting right there, unnoticed and unused. A status page gets everyone on the same page, brings clarity and a sense of calm to a stressful situation, and, most importantly, builds trust.
Increases customer trust
Transparent and proactive incident communication creates a solid foundation of trust, and promoting your status page as a critical resource further strengthens that trust. Encouraging customers to use your status page shows confidence in your ability to be open and honest when things go wrong.
Instead of hiding incident updates on your status page (or not communicating about them at all), you can choose to proactively give customers a way to get updates about outages and service issues. Quickly communicating about service issues shows customers your team is prepared to respond promptly. Telling them how to get system status information before things go wrong helps set expectations and shows customers you care about their experience.
Decreases support tickets
The more customers know about your status page, the fewer support tickets you’ll receive when things go wrong. If customers don’t know about your status page, their first reaction is to contact your support team. However, if customers know about your status page, their first reaction will be to check your system status instead of bogging down your support team with repeat inquiries.
Ticket deflection is an excellent reason to create and promote a status page, but the real win is creating a better customer experience.
Builds customer loyalty
Responding well to a service issue can actually create more loyal customers, ultimately impacting your bottom line. This idea is the foundation of the Service Recovery Paradox, and a status page plays a critical role in recovering from a service issue.
Giving customers a resource for status updates shows you value transparency, reduces frustration, and empowers customers with the information they need to make decisions on their own. Whether it’s planning around downtime or understanding how service interruptions might impact their work, your status page is a valuable asset to customers.
By maintaining clear communication and fostering transparency, your status page can help you turn difficult situations into positive customer experiences and ultimately strengthen customer loyalty.
How to promote your status page
Once you create a status page, you must ensure your customers know it exists. Let’s explore some effective strategies for promoting your status page to customers and ensuring it’s easily accessible so they actually use it.
Embed your service status
Having a real-time view of your system status within your application’s UI is a great way to communicate with customers where they already are – in your app. Not only does this make customers aware of your status page, it also provides a real-time dynamic view of your system status at a glance without having to navigate away from your app. You can also embed your system status in other web properties, such as your help center, contact form, and website footer.
Sorry™ makes embedding your system status super simple. Simply copy and paste the code snippet we provide to embed your system status in any of your web properties in minutes.
Announce your status page on social media
Share your status page on X, LinkedIn, and any other social media platforms you already use so your followers learn about the page. With Sorry™, you can connect your X account to publish incident notices to your followers. This gets the message out to a broader audience and builds trust with existing and potential customers.
Syncing your system status updates to social media networks increases awareness of your status page and also helps maintain control of the narrative, stifling any rumors or false information being shared about your product or service as you work to restore regular service.
Add a link to your status page in your help center
Like your help docs and contact form, your status page is critical to providing a great customer experience. When used correctly and accessible from the right places, your status page can deflect many incoming tickets during an incident.
Including a link to your status page from your help center gives customers a centralized place to seek information. If your service is experiencing an outage or partial disruption, customers might navigate to your help center as a first step to getting assistance. If your status page is visible from there, they will have a higher chance of navigating to it to see if you’ve reported any issues.
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Link to your status page in error messages
Errors and outages are closely correlated. Including a link to your status page from your error pages gives your customers immediate access to real-time status updates. Customers can get more detailed information than a static error page provides when you point them to real-time status updates. Sorry™ provides error and maintenance pages out of the box, making integrating your system status directly into your error pages and messages easy.
Include a link to your status page in email signatures
Include a link to your status page in the signature of your support emails, and consider doing the same for any other customer-facing roles (account managers, customer success managers, sales reps, etc.) Giving customers easy access to your status page from email signatures shows your dedication to transparency and makes it easy for customers to access it.
Introduce your status page during onboarding
Whether your onboarding flow is self-service or high-touch, you should include your status page in your onboarding plan to ensure customers know about it from day one. This helps establish trust and promotes transparency early on in the customer relationship.
The sooner you introduce your status page to customers, the better. Most customers prefer self-service solutions, and a status page enables them to help themselves as long as it’s updated with relevant information.
Reference your status page in support tickets
Incidents often lead to support tickets, although having a well-known status page can significantly reduce the number of tickets generated. Still, some customers forget about your status page or are unsure how to find it.
When you get support tickets about an incident or outage, respond to those inquiries with a link to your status page. This gives customers the information they’re looking for and educates them to check your status page before they reach out to support.
With Intercom and Sorry™, support teams can easily share up-to-date system statuses with customers in just a few clicks.
Subscribe your customers
Incident communication platforms like Sorry™ allow you to send notifications to customers via email. Your customers and end-users have the option to subscribe to your status updates, and you can also proactively subscribe them via a manual .CSV file upload or subscribe them programmatically using the API. Adding customers as subscribers is a great way to ensure they know about your status page and receive important updates without needing to take any action.
Create an email campaign
Introducing your status page via an email campaign is another effective way to ensure your customers know about it. As an alternative to proactively subscribing them, you can encourage them to visit and subscribe to your status page on their own. This email campaign could include other helpful customer service resources like your help center and training videos.
How Sorry™ can help
Sorry™ provides a simple but powerful status page solution to help you communicate with customers when things go wrong. Our simple platform gives you all the tools to communicate important information quickly and confidently.
Some of the benefits you get with Sorry™ include the following:
- SMS and Email notifications: Seamlessly notify subscribers when you publish a notice.
- Embeddable status badge: Easily show your real-time system status on any web property.
- Built-in Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat integration: Sync notices to your Slack, Teams, or Google Chat channels to keep your entire organization in the loop.
- Built-in X (previously Twitter) integration: Communicate with the masses by syncing notices to your X timeline Sorry™ provides branded error pages that link to your status page.
- Free error pages: Sorry™ provides branded error pages that link to your status page.
Transparency builds trust and loyalty
Clear and transparent communication during incidents isn’t just about resolving problems – it’s about building long-term trust and customer loyalty. By ensuring customers know exactly where to find real-time updates, you show them that you value their time and want to keep them informed.
Don’t just launch a status page and move on. Use it as a powerful tool to create a better customer experience. Expose your status page on your website, help center, and other web properties, and have a plan for introducing it to customers at the right time.
The more you use and promote your status page, the more your customers will see your dedication to delivering a great customer experience.