Feedback During Incidents: Turning Downtime and Outages into Improvement Opportunities

Summary

Incidents are stressful—for your team and your users. But they're also rare moments when users are intensely focused on your product's value. The feedback collected during and after incidents reveals true priorities, uncovers hidden dependencies, and often creates surprising loyalty when handled well. This guide shows how to collect incident feedback without adding friction, use it to improve, and turn negative experiences into relationship builders.

Why Incident Feedback Matters

Incidents reveal what normal operations hide.

The Unique Value of Incident Feedback

Reveals true dependencies:

• Which workflows break when you're down?
• Which integrations are mission-critical?
• Which users have no workaround?

Exposes hidden users:

• Silent users appear when something breaks
• You discover use cases you didn't know existed
• Critical accounts make themselves known

Clarifies priorities:

• Users articulate what they need most
• Impact severity becomes concrete
• Feature importance is stress-tested

The Trust Opportunity

Counterintuitively, incidents can build trust:

Incident Response	Trust Impact
Silent during outage	-40% trust
Poor communication	-25% trust
Good communication	-5% trust
Excellent communication + follow-up	+10% trust

Users who experience well-handled incidents often become more loyal than those who never experienced issues.

Collecting Feedback During Incidents

Different phases require different approaches.

Phase 1: During the Incident

Goals:

• Acknowledge the issue
• Gather impact data
• Show you're working on it

Status page with impact collection:

[ONGOING] Service Disruption - Dashboard Loading
Started: 2:34 PM EST | Status: Investigating

Affected: Dashboard loading, Report generation
Not affected: API, Data ingestion, Webhooks

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Help us understand the impact:

Are you currently affected?
[Yes, blocking my work] [Yes, inconvenient] [No impact]

What are you trying to do?
[View dashboard] [Generate report] [Other: ___]

[Submit - takes 5 seconds]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Latest update (2:52 PM):
Root cause identified. Deploying fix. ETA: 15 minutes.

In-app incident banner:

const IncidentBanner = ({ incident }) => (
  <Banner type="warning">
    <Text>We're experiencing issues with {incident.affectedAreas}.</Text>
    <Link href="/status">View status</Link>
    <Button
      size="small"
      onClick={() => showImpactSurvey(incident)}
    >
      Report impact
    </Button>
  </Banner>
);

Phase 2: Immediately After Resolution

Goals:

• Confirm resolution
• Understand full impact
• Capture while memory is fresh

Resolution notification with survey:

Subject: Resolved: Dashboard was unavailable for 47 minutes

Hi [Name],

The dashboard issue from earlier today has been resolved.
All services are now operating normally.

Duration: 2:34 PM - 3:21 PM EST (47 minutes)

We'd like to understand how this affected you:

→ How significant was the impact? [High] [Medium] [Low] [None]
→ What were you trying to accomplish during the outage?
  [Text field]

[Submit feedback - 30 seconds]

We'll share more details in our post-incident report tomorrow.

- The [Company] Team

Phase 3: Post-Incident Review (24-72 hours)

Goals:

• Gather detailed impact
• Collect improvement suggestions
• Close the loop on investigation

Detailed impact survey:

Post-Incident Feedback - Jan 13 Dashboard Outage

Thank you for your patience during yesterday's outage.
We're gathering feedback to improve our reliability.

1. How would you rate our communication during the incident?
   [Excellent] [Good] [Okay] [Poor] [Very Poor]

2. What impact did this have on your work?
   □ Missed deadline
   □ Had to use manual workaround
   □ Customer-facing impact
   □ Financial impact
   □ Just inconvenient
   □ No significant impact

3. Is there anything we should have communicated that we didn't?
   [Text field]

4. What would help you during future incidents?
   □ SMS alerts
   □ More frequent updates
   □ Estimated time to resolution
   □ Technical details
   □ Workaround suggestions
   □ Other: ___

[Submit feedback]

We'll share our post-incident report including your feedback themes.

Processing Incident Feedback

Transform raw feedback into actionable insights.

Impact Categorization

Categorize reported impacts:

const categorizeImpact = (feedback) => {
  return {
    severity: calculateSeverity(feedback),
    type: categorizeType(feedback.impact),
    affectedWorkflow: extractWorkflow(feedback),
    businessImpact: assessBusinessImpact(feedback),
  };
};

const impactCategories = {
  blocking: 'Could not do their job',
  degraded: 'Could work but with difficulty',
  workaround: 'Found alternative but took extra time',
  inconvenient: 'Minor disruption',
  none: 'Unaffected',
};

Aggregate Impact Report

Summarize across all feedback:

Incident Impact Summary - Jan 13 Dashboard Outage
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Feedback received: 127 responses

Impact Distribution:
  Blocking:     ████████░░  34 users (27%)
  Degraded:     ██████░░░░  28 users (22%)
  Workaround:   ████████░░  32 users (25%)
  Inconvenient: █████░░░░░  23 users (18%)
  None:         ██░░░░░░░░  10 users (8%)

Affected Workflows:
  1. End-of-day reporting (45 mentions)
  2. Client presentations (23 mentions)
  3. Executive dashboards (18 mentions)
  4. Billing reconciliation (12 mentions)

Business Impact Reported:
  - 8 users reported customer-facing impact
  - 3 users reported missed deadlines
  - 2 users reported financial impact

Communication Rating:
  Avg: 3.8/5 (up from 3.2 in last incident)
  Most requested: Earlier ETA communication
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Pattern Detection Across Incidents

Track incident feedback over time:

const analyzeIncidentPatterns = async (incidents) => {
  return {
    // Impact trends
    averageSeverity: calculateTrend(incidents, 'avgSeverity'),
    averageAffectedUsers: calculateTrend(incidents, 'affectedUsers'),

    // Communication effectiveness
    communicationRating: calculateTrend(incidents, 'commRating'),
    mostRequestedImprovements: aggregateRequests(incidents),

    // Recovery
    averageFeedbackSubmissionRate: calculateAvg(incidents, 'feedbackRate'),
    postIncidentNPSChange: calculateNPSImpact(incidents),
  };
};

Closing the Loop

Users who provide incident feedback deserve follow-up.

Post-Incident Report

Share findings with affected users:

## Post-Incident Report: Dashboard Outage - January 13, 2026

### Summary
On January 13, our dashboard was unavailable for 47 minutes due to
a database connection pool exhaustion. This affected 2,340 users.

### What Happened
- 2:34 PM: Monitoring detected elevated error rates
- 2:38 PM: On-call engineer paged
- 2:45 PM: Root cause identified (connection pool)
- 3:15 PM: Fix deployed
- 3:21 PM: Full recovery confirmed

### Impact (from your feedback)
127 users shared feedback:
- 27% reported blocking impact
- 45 users were affected during end-of-day reporting
- 8 users reported customer-facing impact

We apologize for the disruption, especially to those
running end-of-day reports.

### What We're Doing
1. **Immediate**: Added connection pool monitoring and alerting
2. **This week**: Implementing automatic pool scaling
3. **This month**: Reviewing all database connection patterns
4. **Ongoing**: Improving ETA communication (your top request)

### Communication Improvements
Your feedback asked for earlier ETA estimates. We're updating
our runbook to provide preliminary ETAs within 10 minutes
of incident declaration.

Thank you for helping us improve.

Individual Follow-Up

For high-severity reporters:

Subject: Following up on incident impact

Hi [Name],

You reported significant impact from our January 13 outage,
noting that you missed a client presentation deadline.

I wanted to follow up personally:
1. Were you able to reschedule the presentation?
2. Is there anything we can do to help?
3. Would advance warning of maintenance windows help
   you avoid similar conflicts?

We take reliability seriously, and your feedback directly
influenced our improvement priorities.

- [Name], Customer Success

Track Post-Incident Sentiment

Measure relationship recovery:

const measureIncidentRecovery = async (incident) => {
  const affectedUsers = incident.reporters;

  return {
    // 7-day post-incident NPS
    nps7Day: await getNPS(affectedUsers, { daysAfter: 7 }),

    // Compare to pre-incident
    npsChange: await compareNPS(affectedUsers, incident.date),

    // Churn tracking
    churnRate30Day: await getChurnRate(affectedUsers, { daysAfter: 30 }),
    expectedChurnRate: await getBaselineChurn(affectedUsers),

    // Engagement
    loginRate7Day: await getLoginRate(affectedUsers, { daysAfter: 7 }),
    loginRateBaseline: await getBaselineLoginRate(affectedUsers),
  };
};

Proactive Incident Communication

Don't wait for users to find out.

Proactive Notification

Notify before users notice:

const incidentNotificationStrategy = {
  severity1: { // Critical
    channels: ['status_page', 'in_app_banner', 'email', 'sms'],
    timing: 'immediate',
    updates: 'every_15_minutes',
  },
  severity2: { // Major
    channels: ['status_page', 'in_app_banner', 'email'],
    timing: 'immediate',
    updates: 'every_30_minutes',
  },
  severity3: { // Minor
    channels: ['status_page', 'in_app_banner'],
    timing: 'within_10_minutes',
    updates: 'on_change',
  },
  severity4: { // Cosmetic
    channels: ['status_page'],
    timing: 'best_effort',
    updates: 'on_resolution',
  },
};

Preemptive Feedback Collection

For planned maintenance:

Upcoming Maintenance - January 20, 2-4 AM EST

We're upgrading our database infrastructure to improve
performance and reliability.

Expected impact: Brief intermittent slowness
Expected duration: 2 hours

Help us schedule better:
Does this maintenance window work for you?
[Yes] [No, I typically work during these hours]

If this timing is problematic:
What time would work better? [Dropdown: time options]
Why is this time problematic? [Text field]

[Submit preferences]

Building Incident Resilience

Use feedback to prevent future incidents.

Feedback-Driven Reliability Investments

Prioritize based on incident impact:

Improvement	Incident Feedback Support	Priority
Faster failover	45 mentions of duration	P0
Better status updates	38 mentions	P1
SMS notifications	32 requests	P2
Workaround suggestions	28 requests	P2
Mobile status page	12 requests	P3

Reliability Dashboard

Track reliability metrics alongside feedback:

Reliability + Feedback Dashboard - Q4 2025
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Uptime: 99.94% (target: 99.9%)
Incidents: 3 (down from 5 in Q3)
Mean Time to Recovery: 34 min (down from 52 min)

User Feedback During Incidents:
  Response rate: 12% of affected users (up from 8%)
  Avg communication rating: 4.1/5 (up from 3.4/5)
  Blocking impact rate: 23% (down from 31%)

Post-Incident Recovery:
  NPS change: -2 points (improved from -8 points)
  30-day churn: 1.2% (baseline: 1.1%)
  Re-engagement rate: 94%

Top User Request: Earlier ETA communication
Status: Implemented in December
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Key Takeaways

1. Incidents reveal truth: Users articulate true priorities, hidden dependencies, and critical workflows during outages.

2. Collect in phases: During incident (quick impact), immediately after (detailed impact), and 24-72 hours later (reflection).

3. Keep it brief during crisis: One-click impact reporting during active incidents; save detailed surveys for after resolution.

4. Aggregate and share findings: Summarize impact across all feedback and share publicly in post-incident reports.

5. Close the loop: Follow up personally with high-severity reporters; share what you're doing to prevent recurrence.

6. Track relationship recovery: Monitor NPS, churn, and engagement after incidents to measure trust impact.

7. Turn feedback into reliability: Use incident feedback themes to prioritize infrastructure investments and communication improvements.

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User Vibes OS integrates with incident management tools to collect and analyze feedback during service disruptions. Learn more.