Hardly a week goes by without news of a ‘technical issue’ or outage. Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and Tesco Bank are just some of the well-known brands that have experienced tech meltdowns in recent weeks.
We’ve come to expect IT crashes as a part of life, but if handled poorly, they can snowball into a major crisis, tarnishing a company’s reputation, eroding consumer trust and resulting in lost sales.
Here are five safeguards brand owners can put in place to protect their sites and minimise fallout from an IT crash.
Get your comms in order
Tech glitches are much easier to address – and fix when everyone’s in the loop, from your software developers to your marketing team to your customer base. Making your users aware of problems is paramount.
All too often, a bad situation can quickly get worse when details of an outage spread like wildfire across social media (and for some unfortunate brands, this could be the first time they are made aware of the problem). Don’t bury your head in the sand. Be proactive and acknowledge the problem; email subscribers or post a message on social media, reassuring users that you are dealing with the problem and outlining expected timeframes for resolution.
It’s also a great opportunity for your brand to establish or reinforce their ‘personality’ – using a heartfelt apology or humour, for example, if that tone is appropriate. But don’t promise what you can’t deliver – make sure that timeframes and assurances can be met. This is particularly important if there has been a glitch that could affect customer data.
Test, test and test again
We’ve come across many brands that don’t have a back-up structure in place or rollback code, where a system can revert to its previous state. While there’s no standard way to build a system, in our experience, the lack of robust software and website testing often comes down to cost, particularly with smaller brands and start-ups. It can also be due to not having regular access to a software development team or thinking an outage will never happen. Trust me, it can.
Legacy brands have the resources and teams in place as their sites require more complex and continual updates, but we’ve had to battle with such clients when it comes to improving the testing phase.
Don’t underestimate this – testing is vital to ensure your website works. Typically, this involves a build phase, a testing phase and a quality assurance (QA) check, which aims to identify any issues across the entire build. Too often, testing and QA are the first things to go when brands want to cut costs. It could be an expensive mistake.
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