Defining a Customer Service Incident
There is a big, practical difference between managing the experience of one customer with a problem versus one thousand customers having the same problem. Just because an organization is good—or even exceptional—at individual customer support does not mean it is prepared to face a situation where something goes wrong for a large segment of its customer base, like a system outage or major supply chain disruption. How an organization manages incidents is a direct example of the kind of experience customers can expect overall. Successfully coping with issues involving a sizable number of customers requires its own strategies and playbook.
Organizations may have different definitions of an 'incident,' but here we are talking about customer-facing incidents that are widespread and may impact customer service teams by flooding the contact center with questions. A widespread incident is a communication and investigation challenge, as organizations race against time to address the problem while maintaining customer trust. It is also a test of how well a service team manages customer experiences at scale. A “major incident” is made up of multiple individual cases which are related in several ways. For example, they may stem from a common cause or nuanced system dependencies. Importantly, they have the potential to overwhelm service capacity if not addressed collectively.