Atomic in-app messaging for incident response

At Atomic we love eating our own dog food (or drinking our own champagne - as we like to say here). One of the ways we do this is through our “inception” set-up. Inception is the name we’ve given to the Atomic Action Flows that we use to send in-app messages to users of the Atomic Workbench tool (Atomic inside Atomic).

Communicating urgent updates from right within our apps

One way we love to use our “inception” cards —beyond our typical automated messaging triggered when our customers do specific things— is for special one-off ad-hoc messaging, for example when:

• something new has been released

• we’ve enabled a preview feature just for you

• there’s some maintenance coming up

• something is going wrong

I want to talk about that last point - when something is going wrong.

It’s an unfortunate reality that in the tech world sooner or later something in your product or service will break - you can only hope it’s something minor and contained but that’s often out of your control. Even the tech giants have periodic unplanned outages, or performance degradation. Of course you can mitigate these things with a solid test suite, good engineering practices and monitoring. But you will never ever avoid having some sort of customer impacting issue at some point, no matter how hard you try!

So the next best thing, when things go wrong, is to talk to your users like humans and let them know what’s going, when you expect to have a fix in place and how they can work around the issue if possible.

Keep calm and communicate

This is where we like to use our inception cards in a targeted manner. In the middle of an incident we can quickly whip up an Action Flow letting impacted users know what’s going on. Using Atomic’s customer segmentation we can target the specific users who we know are experiencing that issue and let them know how to workaround it or remind them how to get in contact with us.

Since users receive the card in the Atomic Workbench, they will see it before running in to whatever the issue is, so they are warned beforehand - this is a huge advantage to in-app communication (for all but the most extreme incidents).

Once we are satisfied that the issue has been resolved we can remove the initial card from our customer’s feeds, so we don’t scare anyone that didn’t see it when they next come to the Atomic Workbench. We can then send a follow-up to only those that did see the initial card to let them know the issue has been resolved.

This method is just one way that you can use Atomic to keep your customers in the know and save yourself a bunch of help-desk tickets!

As a bonus, we can understand in near real-time which customers saw, and responded to message, or who missed the message, and use this to dial in our follow-up communications.

Like to see what you could do to minimise the impacts of unplanned incidents through Atomic in-app messaging? We’d love to show you, reach out for a demo.