Not all failures of systems have impact that our customers see - but where they do, the CoE must cleanly and clearly articulate what customers saw, what their experience was, and consider the impact that had on them.
Any financial losses or impact, as a result of the failure, should be clearly stated in this section.
It is important to view any failure or outage from the point of view of customers.
What did they see on our site?
What was their experience of the outage or failure?
If they were directly impacted, how many and what exactly did we do to remediate them?
Not all outages or failures may have a directly visible customer impact - but where they do, this should be articulated in detail. If customers saw an error, were unable to communicate or transact with us, or worse, both of these things seemed to be happening but were not, that should be detailed in the CoE.
It is sometimes the case that failures or particularly, the next actions required, are not priortised or paid attention to. By ensuring we capture the exact customer experience during the failure, we can ensure that their needs and views are taken account of, particularly when it comes to Lessons Learned and Next Actions.
There are many classes of incident that ONLY customers see - in those cases where internal observations or monitoring do not contain details of the failure, the customer impact, the reports they made to us become our primary observations.
CoEs have life and are living documents, issued and revised over time. The full customer impact may not initally be understood.
v0.1 22/01/22