Service Outages

Automating multi-channel communications to minimise the impact and cost of service outages

When faced with a service outage, an organisation supporting a critical network infrastructure often failed to meet targeted SLAs covering incident notification times and service restoration. Manual processes were used to both allocate the resources to attend to an incident and to notify impacted customers. Service Centre operatives were also required to make a series of ‘kick-off’ calls to notify several hundred customers.

View the Service Outages process

Step 1

Accept an outage notification from a monitoring application

Step 2

Use the content of the notification to automatically trigger a message to a group of available engineers responsible for the fault type specified in the notification. Also use this as the trigger for service outage notification to all impacted customers and internal stakeholders

Step 3

Request a response from an engineer (or multiple where required) to acknowledge that the outage is being attended to (where no response is received, escalate the notification across additional communication channels until a response is received)

Step 4

Accept the first response(s) from an engineer and issue a reply requesting an update when maintenance is completed

Step 5

Issue a notification to all other engineers receiving the original outage notification, advising that the incident is being attended to

Step 6

Use the engineer’s completion response to trigger a notification to all impacted customers and internal stakeholders advising that service is restored

Boomerang has helped to join together a number of siloed processes by enabling real-time automation of communications during a service outage. Boomerang interfaces with the organisation’s monitoring software and creates automated SMS and email alerts when a ‘problem’ or ‘critical outage’ notification is generated by the software. The content of this notification is used to determine the on-call engineers that receive the alert, the communications channels used to reach them and the content of the alert itself. Furthermore, customers that may be affected by the issue also receive an alert to advise them.

Intelligent Messaging enables real-time updates to be distributed to relevant stakeholders using inbound replies from the engineer. An engineer submits the first reply to confirm availability to attend to the incident, and a further reply when the required work is completed. These replies trigger further automated alerts to both internal stakeholders and customers to keep them informed of progress. In the event, that an on-call engineer fails to respond to the first alert with the designated timeframe, communications are automatically escalated to a team of stand-by engineers.