The Page You Hope Nobody Ever Reads

This & That is where we get into the marketing that actually changes how your business grows. This edition focuses on the parts of your brand that only surface when something goes wrong.

Every tech company has a small toolkit for critical situations: service status pages; incident alerts; and communications issued when a service is down, slow, or delayed. If you work in sectors such as cybersecurity, these are even more important. After all, customers bought your product or service because they trust you, and it’s during an incident that they really discover how good your customer service is.

This means that these assets have to work hard. But often, a homepage has undergone six rounds of revisions while a status page hasn’t. That means that the page that your customers will read more carefully than anything else is the page that received less attention.

Your status page is a brand asset

Large companies often have great status pages, as proven by the small industry of blog posts analysing them. Further down the scale it’s a different picture, and it’s often to do with procurement. The technology for status pages is frequently bought by the engineering team, on their budget, without marketing being closely involved. The result can compromise the brand. With Atlassian’s Statuspage, for instance, putting the page on your own domain requires a second tier purchase, while being allowed to change the CSS requires an upgrade to the third tier. The free tier gives you neither. So sometimes the reason the page veers off-brand is that somebody in engineering chose a restricted tier two years ago. Unfortunately, on the morning of an incident, it’s the page that your customers refresh over and over again.

The page doesn’t need to be amazingly creative. However, it needs to unmistakably reinforce your identity at a time of stress. And it needs to be readable by your customers on a device held up in a hurry across a meeting table.

Plain language is a design decision

When people are worried, they read differently: they scan the text quickly, looking for specific information, usually to see if the issue affects them. The sentence “We are currently investigating reports of degraded performance affecting a subset of customers” is designed to shield the company rather than to be properly helpful.

Try stating clearly what isn’t working, who’s affected, and when you’ll provide an update. Overly cautious language can come across as an attempt to dodge the issue; but for a security company, appearing evasive carries a much higher cost than appearing concerned.

Design it while nothing is happening

No one makes good design decisions at three in the morning. Instead, what you can do on a quiet day is settle the things that shouldn’t be decided under pressure: the page’s appearance; the update format; how you sound when delivering bad news. If you figure these out in advance, the only decision left to make on the hop will be what the facts of the incident are.

It’s a pretty small job

This isn’t a full-blown project. It involves a page layout, deciding some procedures, and an afternoon thinking about how you want to come across when things go wrong. Compared to all the other items vying for your budget this year, the cost is negligible. And word for word, this is the content that might be read the most closely – something that can’t be said for anyone’s homepage.

Short on time? Here’s a quick exercise

Open your service status page on your phone, then open your homepage right next to it. Would a stranger say these two things come from the same company? Next, find the last service alert you sent out and read it aloud. If it sounds reassuring, you’re better off than most companies.

If the result isn’t convincing, it’s better to know now than early on a Tuesday morning. It’s far easier to finetune your tone-of-voice when things are going well. That’s the sort of thinking we’d rather do early, than fast.