Creating your Internet SaaS Dashboard
Earlier this year, OpenSRS was honored to be included alongside companies like Amazon and Salesforce.com in Tier One of Transparent Uptime’s list of SaaS (“software as a service) public health dashboards. But that recognition is only for our most recent status dashboard. Our first version of a Status page was created way back in 2004, which makes it active long before many of the more well-known examples, such as the Google Apps Dashboard.
The OpenSRS System Status page is comprised of three main components: current status for all of our individual services, type of status (online, offline, degraded or in maintenance), and a detailed incident archive for each service, including all incident summaries. Our technical teams use a modified version of ITIL /ITSM for problem, change and incident management. Our communications plan and our system status tool is built right into this process. We give customers options for how they want to receive communications: email, web or Twitter. When we re-launched status, we determined that the biggest goals were to be more transparent and to provide timely detailed responses for all incidents. We know that you answer to your customers and need this information. We are constantly listening to your feedback on what details we need to provide so that you can communicate with your customers.
The Internet is changing communications every day. To that end, we monitor how Internet and technical companies talk about technical outages and maintenance. We use social media monitoring to learn about outages and customer responses to them. We also research trend analysis and look at best practices in technical communications. More and more Internet users write on their blogs, their Twitter accounts, Facebook and on third party forums about technical issues. A technical company that is not listening to their customer base can be caught off-guard by the rapid feedback loop that social media has opened. Companies need to have firm crisis communications plans ready and should include a system status page that fits their company and customer base. In addition, there should be a means to respond to online feedback by the Technical Support or Communications teams. We tend to use a hybrid approach to listen and respond. If there is an issue, you might obtain a response from anyone at OpenSRS, from our Director of Domains (Adam Eisner) to our VP of Marketing (Ken Schafer) to our CEO (Elliot Noss) to individual staff members. We are all encouraged to play a part in helping customers.
These articles emphasize the need to have a system status page or a social media emergency response plan.
There are many different styles of SaaS Dashboards serving a wide variety of customers. Here are some great examples for you to compare:
If you have a status page, feel free to drop the link into the comments and share. If you are thinking about building one, we are here to help too and answer any questions. Or, if you have tips for other resellers, please let us know.
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http://www.richlebel.com Rich LeBel