How to talk to upset enterprise customers when technical problems hit them hard

“Our infrastructure uses Kubernetes clusters across three availability zones with Redis for caching and PostgreSQL for persistence. The incident occurred when a configuration change to our ingress controller caused…”

I watched a CTO explain their technical architecture to an angry enterprise customer whose business had just lost $50,000 due to a four-hour outage. The CTO thought they were being transparent and professional. They thought technical details would demonstrate competence and build trust.

Six weeks later, that customer had demanded:

• Complete technical architecture review by their infrastructure team
• Approval rights on all production deployments
• Weekly status meetings on infrastructure improvements
• Contractual SLA penalties that would destroy the startup’s margins
• Quarterly security and reliability audits

The customer eventually left anyway, taking a $200,000 annual contract with them. But not before consuming hundreds of engineering hours in audits and slowing product development to a crawl for three months.

The technical incident wasn’t what killed the relationship. The incident was a four-hour outage, recoverable and relatively minor in the grand scheme of enterprise software. What killed the relationship was how the CTO communicated about it.

After 20 years managing enterprise relationships through hundreds of technical incidents, I’ve learned a hard truth: what you say during the first 24 hours of a customer-impacting incident determines whether you keep the customer or lose them.

In this guide, I’ll share the framework I’ve developed for communicating with upset enterprise customers during technical problems. You’ll learn what to say, what never to say, how to write RCAs that rebuild trust instead of exposing vulnerabilities, and how to regain customer confidence after incidents damage the relationship.

The critical first conversation

When a technical problem impacts an enterprise customer, the first conversation sets the trajectory for everything that follows. Get it right, and you can actually strengthen the relationship. Get it wrong, and you’ll spend months digging out of a hole.

The anatomy of a trust-destroying conversation

Here’s what the conversation looked like with the CTO I mentioned earlier:

Customer: “Your system was down for four hours. Our entire sales team couldn’t access customer data. We lost deals. What happened?”

CTO: “We experienced an issue with our Kubernetes ingress controller. We run a multi-cluster setup across three AWS availability zones with automated failover. The problem started when we deployed a configuration change to improve performance. The new configuration caused the load balancer to…”

Customer: “Wait, you deployed a change to production during business hours?”

CTO: “We have a continuous deployment pipeline. This was a minor configuration adjustment. We deploy multiple times per day. The issue was that our monitoring didn’t catch the problem immediately because…”

Customer: “You deploy to production multiple times per day? Without testing? How is that even possible?”

CTO: “We have extensive automated testing. The issue was that this particular failure mode wasn’t covered by our test suite because it involved the interaction between the load balancer, the ingress controller, and our caching layer…”

Customer: “I need to understand your entire infrastructure setup. I’m bringing in our VP of Engineering to review your architecture. We can’t have this happen again.”

This conversation took a recoverable incident and turned it into a business crisis. Let’s break down what went wrong.

The five critical mistakes

Mistake #1: Leading with technical implementation details

The CTO immediately jumped into Kubernetes, ingress controllers, and AWS availability zones. The customer doesn’t care about your technology choices. They care about their business impact and your plan to prevent recurrence.

Mistake #2: Revealing deployment practices that raise more questions

Mentioning “continuous deployment” and “deploying multiple times per day” to an upset customer creates new concerns. They start wondering about change control, testing practices, and whether you’re reckless with production systems.

Mistake #3: Explaining the complex chain of technical failures

Describing how the load balancer interacted with the ingress controller and caching layer signals systemic complexity and potential fragility. You’re giving the customer reasons to doubt your technical competence.

Mistake #4: Admitting to monitoring and testing gaps

Saying “our monitoring didn’t catch it” and “this wasn’t covered by our test suite” sounds like admissions of negligence. Even though every system has blind spots, you’ve just told the customer you have preventable gaps.

Mistake #5: Being defensive instead of accountable

The entire conversation reads as explaining and defending rather than taking ownership and outlining prevention. The customer hears excuses, not accountability.

The trust-building conversation framework

Here’s how the same conversation should have gone:

Customer: “Your system was down for four hours. Our entire sales team couldn’t access customer data. We lost deals. What happened?”

You: “I understand, and I’m truly sorry this happened. A four-hour outage during your business hours is completely unacceptable. Let me be direct about what happened and what we’re doing about it.”

Customer: “I need to know this won’t happen again.”

You: “I hear you, and that’s exactly what we’re focused on. Here’s what happened: we made a configuration change that had an unintended impact on system availability. We’ve identified the root cause and have already implemented changes to prevent this specific issue from recurring. I’ll send you a detailed root cause analysis by end of day tomorrow that outlines exactly what happened, why it happened, and the specific steps we’re taking to prevent similar issues.”

Customer: “What kind of configuration change caused a four-hour outage?”

You: “It was a change meant to improve performance that had an unexpected interaction with our load balancing system. The core issue was that our validation process didn’t catch this edge case before deployment. We’re strengthening our deployment validation and adding specific monitoring to detect similar issues within seconds, not hours.”

Customer: “How do I know your systems are reliable enough for our business?”

You: “That’s a fair question given what just happened. Here’s what I can tell you: this is our first significant outage in 18 months, and our overall uptime is 99.95% over the past year. But numbers don’t matter when you’re the one affected. What matters is that we learn from this and get better. I want to schedule a call later this week to walk you through our reliability practices and the specific improvements we’re making based on this incident.”

Customer: “Okay. I’ll want to see that root cause analysis and have that follow-up conversation.”

You: “Absolutely. You’ll have the RCA by tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll set up time later this week. And again, I’m genuinely sorry this happened. We take this seriously and we’re going to make this right.”

Why this conversation works

Principle #1: Lead with empathy and ownership

“I understand” and “I’m truly sorry” without qualification. No “but” or “however” following the apology. You’re taking ownership before explaining anything.

Principle #2: Promise specific follow-up

“Detailed root cause analysis by end of day tomorrow” gives a concrete commitment. The customer knows they’ll get answers without you dumping everything in this high-emotion moment.

Principle #3: Stay high-level but honest

“Configuration change,” “load balancing system,” and “validation process” give enough information to be credible without exposing every technical detail of your infrastructure.

Principle #4: Acknowledge their concern and reframe

“That’s a fair question given what just happened” validates their worry. Then you reframe with data (99.95% uptime) while acknowledging that numbers don’t erase their pain.

Principle #5: Offer transparency on your terms

“Schedule a call later this week” allows you to prepare a thoughtful presentation of your reliability practices rather than having a defensive improvised conversation.

What to share and what to protect

The hardest part of customer communication during technical incidents is knowing where to draw the line between transparency and over-sharing.

Information you should share

Business impact and timeline:

• When the incident started and ended
• What functionality was affected
• Estimated customer impact (users affected, transactions lost, etc.)
• Current status and when full resolution occurred

High-level root cause:

• General category of the problem (configuration issue, infrastructure failure, software bug, etc.)
• What triggered the incident at a conceptual level
• Why your normal safeguards didn’t prevent or catch it faster

Prevention commitments:

• Specific changes you’re making to prevent recurrence
• Timeline for implementing those changes
• How you’ll verify the improvements are effective

Communication plan:

• When they’ll receive the full RCA
• How you’ll keep them updated on prevention work
• Who their point of contact is for questions

Information you should protect

Detailed technical architecture:

• Specific technologies and versions you’re running
• Internal system names and component relationships
• Database schemas or data models
• API implementation details

Security-sensitive information:

• Authentication and authorization mechanisms
• Encryption approaches and key management
• Network topology and security controls
• Vulnerability details that could be exploited

Process and practice details that can be misinterpreted:

• Deployment frequency and timing
• Specific testing coverage percentages
• Internal monitoring tool details
• Team size and on-call practices

Scope of impact beyond what affected them:

• Other customers affected (unless required by contract)
• Financial impact to your business
• Employee performance or mistakes
• Vendor or partner failures that contributed

The transparency paradox

Here’s the paradox that confuses most technical leaders: customers want transparency, but too much transparency destroys trust.

When you share every technical detail, customers without deep technical expertise start seeing complexity as risk. Every component you mention is another potential failure point in their mind. Every technology choice is something they might question.

I learned this the hard way early in my career. I thought being completely open about our technical stack would demonstrate competence and build trust. Instead, it gave customers ammunition to question every architectural decision and demand explanations for choices we’d made years earlier.

Strategic transparency means sharing enough to be credible and accountable without exposing details that will raise more questions than they answer.

Writing RCAs that rebuild trust

The Root Cause Analysis document you share with customers after an incident is one of your most important communication opportunities. Get it right, and you can actually strengthen the relationship. Get it wrong, and you’ll trigger audits, oversight demands, and contract renegotiations.

RCA structure for customer audiences

Most engineers write RCAs for other engineers. Those RCAs are detailed technical postmortems focused on system behavior, timelines, and technical learnings. Customer-facing RCAs need a completely different structure.

Executive summary (what busy executives will read):

• One paragraph summarizing what happened, impact, and key prevention steps
• Clear ownership statement
• Timeline commitment for prevention work

Incident overview:

• When the incident occurred and was resolved
• What functionality was affected
• Estimated business impact to the customer
• Detection and response timeline

Root cause explanation (high-level, not technical deep-dive):

• What caused the incident in terms customers can understand
• Why this wasn’t prevented by existing safeguards
• What made detection and resolution take as long as it did

Immediate actions taken:

• What you did to resolve the incident
• Emergency measures taken to prevent immediate recurrence
• Short-term monitoring or safety measures added

Long-term prevention plan:

• Specific changes you’re making to prevent similar incidents
• Timeline for implementing each change
• How you’ll measure success of these improvements

Customer-specific commitments:

• Any special monitoring or attention for this customer
• Communication plan for prevention work completion
• Point of contact for questions or concerns

RCA writing principles

Principle #1: Own the problem completely

Bad: “The incident occurred when a configuration change interacted unexpectedly with our load balancing system.”

Good: “We caused this incident by deploying a configuration change without adequately validating its interaction with our load balancing system.”

The first sounds like something that happened to you. The second takes ownership.

Principle #2: Focus on prevention, not excuses

Bad: “This was an edge case that would be extremely difficult to catch in testing given the complexity of the interaction.”

Good: “We’re enhancing our pre-deployment validation to catch this type of configuration issue before it reaches production.”

Nobody cares why it was hard to prevent. They care that you’re preventing it in the future.

Principle #3: Be specific about improvements

Bad: “We’ll improve our monitoring and testing to prevent similar issues.”

Good: “We’re implementing three specific changes: (1) Adding automated configuration validation that checks for this class of load balancing issues, (2) Expanding monitoring to detect this failure mode within 30 seconds instead of 15 minutes, (3) Creating runbook procedures for faster diagnosis of similar incidents.”

Specific commitments are credible. Vague promises are not.

Principle #4: Use customer language, not engineer language

Bad: “The ingress controller’s path-based routing rules conflicted with the upstream cache invalidation logic, resulting in stale route information being served to the ALB.”

Good: “A configuration error caused requests to be routed to the wrong servers, making the system appear unavailable even though the servers themselves were functioning normally.”

If your customer needs a computer science degree to understand your RCA, you’ve failed.

Principle #5: Include timeline and accountability

Bad: “We’ll implement these improvements soon.”

Good: “Configuration validation improvements: complete by January 20. Enhanced monitoring: complete by January 27. Runbook documentation: complete by February 3. I’ll send you an update when each is complete.”

Specific dates and commitment to updates shows accountability.

RCA example: the right way

Here’s a condensed example of a customer-facing RCA done well:

Root Cause Analysis: Service Outage on January 8, 2025

Executive Summary

On January 8, 2025, our service was unavailable for 4 hours due to a configuration error we introduced during a system update. This impacted your team’s ability to access customer data from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM EST. We take full responsibility for this incident and have identified specific changes to prevent similar issues in the future.

What Happened

At 9:03 AM EST, we deployed a system configuration update intended to improve performance. This configuration contained an error that caused user requests to be incorrectly routed, making the system appear unavailable even though the underlying systems were functioning normally.

We detected the issue at 9:18 AM through customer reports and our monitoring systems. We identified the root cause at 11:45 AM and fully resolved the incident at 1:07 PM by reverting the configuration change and verifying system stability.

Root Cause

The incident was caused by our deployment of a configuration change that we did not adequately validate before releasing to production. Specifically:

1. The configuration change modified how user requests are routed to our servers
2. Our validation process did not catch that this change would cause routing failures under certain conditions
3. Our monitoring detected the impact but did not immediately identify the root cause, delaying resolution

Prevention Measures

We are implementing four specific improvements:

1. Enhanced Configuration Validation (Complete by January 20)

• Adding automated checks that validate routing configurations before deployment
• These checks will catch the specific type of error that caused this incident

2. Improved Monitoring (Complete by January 27)

• Adding specific monitoring for routing health that will detect similar issues within 30 seconds
• Improving alert clarity to accelerate root cause identification

3. Faster Rollback Procedures (Complete by February 3)

• Updating our procedures to enable faster configuration rollback
• Target: reduce time from detection to rollback from 2 hours to 15 minutes

4. Customer Impact Communication (Immediate)

• Implementing proactive notification system to alert affected customers within 15 minutes of detected impact
• Providing status page updates every 30 minutes during incidents

Next Steps

I’ll send you an update when each improvement is complete. If you have any questions about this incident or our prevention plans, please contact me directly at [contact information].

We sincerely apologize for the impact this had on your business. We’re committed to learning from this incident and ensuring our service meets the reliability standards you expect and deserve.

What makes this RCA effective

This RCA works because it:

• Takes clear ownership without being defensive
• Explains what happened without drowning in technical details
• Provides specific prevention measures with concrete timelines
• Commits to ongoing communication
• Strikes the right tone: professional, accountable, forward-looking

Regaining trust after major incidents

Sometimes the damage is done. The incident was bad enough, or the initial communication was poor enough, that the customer has lost confidence. Now you’re facing demands for infrastructure reviews, deployment oversight, or other forms of micromanagement that will cripple your ability to operate.

The trust rebuilding framework

Step 1: Acknowledge the broken trust explicitly

Don’t pretend everything is fine or that this is just about the technical incident. Name the real issue.

“I understand that this incident has damaged your confidence in our reliability. That’s a fair reaction given the business impact you experienced. I want to talk about how we rebuild that confidence.”

Step 2: Understand their specific concerns

Ask questions to understand what they’re really worried about:

• “What concerns you most about our ability to prevent this in the future?”
• “What would you need to see to feel confident in our systems again?”
• “Are there specific aspects of our operations you want more visibility into?”

Listen for the real concerns behind their demands. Often, a demand for “infrastructure review” actually means “I want to understand if you know what you’re doing.”

Step 3: Propose an alternative to micromanagement

When customers demand things like deployment approval or ongoing technical reviews, they’re trying to protect themselves. But they usually don’t actually want the overhead of micromanaging your operations. They want confidence that you have it under control.

Bad response: “We can’t give you deployment approval rights. That would slow us down too much.”

Good response: “I understand why you’re asking for deployment oversight. You want confidence that we won’t make similar mistakes. Can I propose an alternative? For the next 90 days, I’ll send you a weekly report on our deployment activity, any incidents or near-misses, and the improvements we’re making. This gives you visibility without creating approval bottlenecks. After 90 days, we can assess whether you’re comfortable with our processes or whether you need ongoing updates.”

Step 4: Deliver on commitments flawlessly

Whatever you promise, deliver it exactly when and how you said you would. This is your opportunity to demonstrate that you can be trusted. Every commitment you meet rebuilds a little bit of trust. Every commitment you miss confirms their worst fears.

Step 5: Proactively communicate improvements

Don’t wait for them to ask. As you implement the improvements from your RCA, send updates:

“Quick update: We completed the configuration validation improvements I mentioned in our RCA. We’ve now validated this catches the class of errors that caused last month’s incident. This is the first of four improvements we committed to, with the next scheduled for completion next week.”

Step 6: Build positive momentum

After 60-90 days of flawless delivery on your commitments, you can start shifting the narrative:

“I wanted to check in on where we are. Over the past 90 days, we’ve delivered all four reliability improvements we committed to, maintained 100% uptime, and provided weekly transparency reports. Are you feeling more confident in our operations? Should we continue the weekly reports or can we shift to as-needed communication?”

This gives the customer an easy path to step back from oversight if they’re feeling more confident.

Handling specific difficult conversations

Let’s address some of the specific challenging situations that come up when managing upset enterprise customers.

Scenario 1: customer demands infrastructure review

Their demand: “We need to do a full review of your technical infrastructure to ensure this won’t happen again.”

Why this is problematic: Infrastructure reviews are time-consuming, expose details that will raise more questions, and often lead to demands for changes that aren’t actually relevant to the incident.

Your response: “I understand you want confidence in our infrastructure. Instead of a full infrastructure review, can I suggest we do a focused review of the specific systems involved in this incident and the improvements we’re making? I’ll walk you through our architecture in those areas, the changes we’re implementing, and how we’re validating those changes. This gives you confidence in the areas that matter without the overhead of reviewing systems that weren’t involved.”

Why this works: You’re giving them what they actually want (confidence that you know what you’re doing) without the open-ended commitment that an infrastructure review represents.

Scenario 2: customer wants deployment approval rights

Their demand: “Going forward, we need to approve any production deployments that might affect our service.”

Why this is problematic: This is a death sentence for any modern software company. You can’t operate effectively with customer approval on every deployment.

Your response: “I understand why you’re concerned about production changes. The incident was caused by a change we deployed, and you want to prevent that from happening again. But requiring approval on every deployment would slow us down dramatically, including our ability to deploy fixes and improvements. Can I propose an alternative? For the next 90 days, we’ll notify you 24 hours before any significant production changes, explain what we’re changing and why, and give you an opportunity to raise concerns. We’ll also send you a weekly summary of all deployments and their status. This gives you visibility and an opportunity to raise concerns while allowing us to operate effectively.”

Why this works: You acknowledge their concern, explain why their specific request won’t work, and offer a reasonable alternative that gives them transparency without giving them veto power.

Scenario 3: customer threatens to leave

Their statement: “We’re seriously considering moving to [competitor]. We can’t rely on a system that goes down like this.”

Why this is critical: This is the moment where the relationship is won or lost. They’re not necessarily decided yet. They’re testing whether you’ll fight for the relationship.

Your response: “I don’t want you to leave, and I understand why you’re considering it. This incident was serious and it impacted your business. Before you make that decision, I’d like the opportunity to show you what we’re doing to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Can we schedule a call next week where I walk you through our reliability improvements and we discuss what it would take to keep your business? If after that conversation you still want to leave, I’ll make the transition as smooth as possible. But I’d like the chance to earn back your trust.”

Why this works: You’re taking them seriously without being desperate. You’re asking for a specific opportunity to rebuild trust. And you’re being realistic that they might still leave, which paradoxically makes them more likely to give you a chance.

Scenario 4: customer wants SLA penalties added to contract

Their demand: “We need contractual SLA commitments with financial penalties for downtime.”

Why this is complex: SLAs with penalties are common for enterprise contracts, but the specific terms matter enormously. Poorly structured SLAs can create existential risk for your company.

Your response: “I understand you want contractual protection against future incidents. We’re open to discussing SLA terms. Before we get into specific numbers, can we talk about what would make you feel protected? Is it a certain uptime percentage? Is it guaranteed response times? Is it financial compensation that makes you whole when incidents occur? Understanding what you’re trying to achieve will help us structure something that works for both of us.”

Why this works: You’re not refusing the request, but you’re also not agreeing to specific terms before you understand what they really need. This lets you shape the SLA toward something you can actually deliver.

Prevention through proactive communication

The best way to handle upset customers is to prevent them from getting upset in the first place. This doesn’t mean preventing all technical problems (impossible), but managing communication so problems don’t destroy trust.

The proactive communication framework

Regular relationship check-ins:

• Monthly or quarterly calls with key enterprise customers
• Not about sales or upsells, just about how things are going
• Ask about their experience, concerns, or challenges
• Build relationship capital before you need it

Transparent incident communication:

• Tell customers about incidents that affected them before they have to ask
• Provide regular updates during ongoing incidents
• Follow up after resolution with what happened and what you learned

Sharing reliability improvements:

• Tell customers about major reliability improvements you’re making
• Frame it as continuous improvement, not as fixing problems
• “We’re adding enhanced monitoring that will reduce detection time from 15 minutes to 30 seconds”

Quarterly business reviews:

• For your largest customers, provide quarterly reviews of your relationship
• Share uptime data, incident history, and improvement initiatives
• Give them visibility into your roadmap and how it benefits them

Building trust before incidents

When an incident inevitably happens, the trust you’ve built through proactive communication becomes your safety net. Customers who already trust you will give you the benefit of the doubt. Customers who don’t will assume the worst.

I learned this from a customer relationship that survived a catastrophic outage. We’d had monthly check-ins for a year. When we had a 12-hour outage that cost them real money, they were frustrated but not panicked. They’d seen us operate for a year. They knew we were competent and transparent. They gave us space to fix the problem and trusted our prevention plan.

Contrast that with a different customer we’d only recently signed. Similar incident, but they’d only known us for six weeks. They had no relationship foundation to fall back on. The same incident triggered contract renegotiations and eventually led to them leaving.

The relationship you build before the incident determines how the incident gets handled.

Common mistakes that make everything worse

After watching dozens of companies navigate customer relationships through technical incidents, I’ve seen the same mistakes repeatedly:

Mistake #1: the technical data dump

What it looks like: Sharing detailed technical architecture, log files, metrics, and postmortems written for engineers.

Why it hurts: Overwhelms non-technical stakeholders, raises more questions than it answers, and exposes details that will be misinterpreted.

Better approach: Share high-level explanations with offers to go deeper on specific questions they have.

Mistake #2: the defensive explanation

What it looks like: Explaining why the incident was hard to prevent, why it took so long to fix, why it wasn’t really your fault.

Why it hurts: Sounds like excuses instead of ownership. Customers hear “we’re not good enough to prevent this” instead of “we’re taking responsibility and fixing it.”

Better approach: Take ownership, explain what happened briefly, focus on prevention.

Mistake #3: the overpromise

What it looks like: “This will never happen again” or “We guarantee 100% uptime going forward.”

Why it hurts: Sets impossible expectations that you’ll inevitably fail to meet, destroying credibility when the next incident occurs.

Better approach: “We’re implementing specific changes to prevent this class of incident and strengthen our overall reliability.”

Mistake #4: the information vacuum

What it looks like: Going silent while you investigate, then dumping all the information at once when you’re done.

Why it hurts: Silence creates anxiety and speculation. Customers assume the worst and start making decisions without your input.

Better approach: Regular updates even when you don’t have complete answers. “We’re still investigating the root cause but wanted to update you on our progress.”

Mistake #5: the blame shift

What it looks like: Explaining how the incident was caused by a vendor, a cloud provider, a contractor, or some other external party.

Why it hurts: Even if technically true, it signals that you don’t take responsibility for the customer’s experience regardless of the underlying cause.

Better approach: Take ownership of the customer’s experience even when external factors contributed. “While the root cause involved our cloud provider, we take responsibility for the impact on you and we’re implementing changes to prevent similar issues regardless of their source.”

Conclusion: communication as competitive advantage

The companies that thrive with enterprise customers aren’t the ones that never have technical problems. Every system has incidents. Every service has outages. Perfect reliability is impossible.

The companies that thrive are the ones that know how to communicate during crisis. They maintain customer trust through transparency without over-sharing. They take ownership without being defensive. They write RCAs that rebuild confidence instead of raising more questions.

This isn’t just about damage control. It’s a competitive advantage. When your competitors inevitably have technical problems and handle customer communication poorly, you stand out by handling it well.

Your enterprise customer communication framework

Before incidents:

• Build relationship capital through regular proactive communication
• Set expectations about incident communication and response
• Document your approach to reliability and improvement
• Make sure customer success teams understand how to communicate about technical issues

During incidents:

• Lead with empathy and ownership
• Focus on business impact, not technical details
• Provide regular updates even without complete information
• Promise specific follow-up and deliver on it

After incidents:

• Send customer-facing RCAs that rebuild trust
• Deliver on prevention commitments flawlessly
• Proactively communicate improvements
• Use incidents as opportunities to demonstrate accountability

When trust is damaged:

• Acknowledge the broken trust explicitly
• Understand their specific concerns
• Offer alternatives to micromanagement
• Build positive momentum through consistent delivery

Final thoughts

The conversation you have in the first 24 hours after a customer-impacting incident will determine whether you keep that customer and on what terms. Get it right, and you can emerge with a stronger relationship. Get it wrong, and you’ll spend months fighting contract renegotiations, audits, and oversight demands that slow your business to a crawl.

I’ve seen technical leaders turn catastrophic outages into relationship-strengthening moments through thoughtful communication. I’ve also seen minor incidents destroy six-figure contracts through poor communication.

The difference isn’t the severity of the technical problem. It’s knowing how to talk to upset enterprise customers in a way that rebuilds trust instead of creating bigger problems.

Your technical competence matters, but your communication competence might matter more. Master both, and you’ll not only keep your enterprise customers through inevitable technical challenges but you’ll build deeper relationships than your competitors who are still explaining their Kubernetes architecture to angry customers.

I’ve spent 20 years building and maintaining enterprise customer relationships through hundreds of technical incidents, from minor outages to catastrophic failures. If your team needs help developing customer communication frameworks or you’re navigating a challenging enterprise customer situation, let’s discuss how to build communication practices that maintain trust through technical challenges.