The digital world is open 24/7. So it follows that digital consumers expect IT and customer service to keep the same hours. These exceedingly high expectations mean that no issue is too small or common to frustrate customers, from broken code to site-wide outages. The data analytics company Splunk reports that many companies experience incidents like these about five times a month, with each offense costing more than $100,000—and annual IT downtime costing enterprises $700 billion in lost productivity.

With Slack, anyone in the company can “pull the fire alarm,” which automatically alerts on-call engineers and incident commanders, and get a response any time of day, seven days a week. By using automation and creating a central location where all stakeholders can quickly view relevant context around the issue at hand, we can not only shorten the incident but reduce its impact.