6 Ways to Improve Your Incident Management Reporting Process

Every organization faces incidents. These could be simple, such as customers being temporarily locked out of online accounts. Or they could be major incidents that damage your reputation, like a bad customer interaction that gets on the news. Or they could be damaging in another deep way, like a security breach or safety incident in manufacturing. 

Unplanned events are inevitable. How you handle them will make or break your organization. That’s why it’s critical to put a strong incident management reporting process in place—and to continuously improve it over time. This post will cover how to optimize the incident reporting process and your ability to manage incidents. 

During a crisis, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Worry sets in, causing further mistakes. It’s a bad time for employees to decide what to do, when to escalate, and who to communicate with. You want to standardize this process up front and, critically, document it so employees understand how to professionally and calmly handle the issue. 

For any plan, document key elements, such as the types of incidents to report, step-by-step procedures, and the criteria for escalating issues. Include contact information for all relevant personnel, guidelines for internal and external communication, and any legal or compliance requirements.

It’s not enough to simply document processes. For mission-critical processes, training is essential to ensure employees know what to do and which corrective actions to take in different situations.

And even after initial training, employees will need refreshers. And even then, they may not remember everything they learned in the event of an emergency. During a crisis, employees who don’t remember all their training may need to sift through documents, search knowledge bases for exact information, or ask other employees for help in dealing with problems. This slows down the process and can lead to potential errors. 

But emerging technology like artificial intelligence can help. For example, you can train an AI copilot on your critical incident management documents and allow employees to quickly get answers to their questions. An employee could ask, “A caller claims their bank account may have been compromised due to a phishing call. What do I have to do to protect their account?” If trained on policy documents, the AI will answer with specific steps to secure the account, investigate potential fraudulent activity, report to authorities if necessary, and explain which internal groups to escalate the incident to. This saves employee times and ensures prompt issue resolution.

Too often, incident management processes get tracked on an ad hoc basis. Organizations might use spreadsheets to record small shop floor incidents in manufacturing, saving only major safety issues for more official reporting. Other organizations may use out-of-the-box case management solutions to get set up quickly, but this makes it hard to change processes as needed. You may opt to build a case management or incident management system completely in house using high-code technology, but this eats up a lot of IT time and resources. 

The key is to find a strong case management solution that allows you to remain flexible, yet still works out of the box. Find one that allows you to define the key data you need to collect, build out strong incident management workflows and tasks, and offers real-time dashboards to monitor potential issues as they arise.

Technology doesn’t assist only with getting knowledge to people fast. A process automation platform’s automation and data capabilities are also critical. Let’s look at both.

First, automation. A strong platform offers multiple automation tools to help you offload manual processes. For example, these platforms can offer AI that helps classify incoming emails or documents so you can route them to the appropriate department using business rules. For instance, an incoming email that reads “double charged” might be classified as a billing incident and a business rule could route that information to the billing department for escalation and quick remediation. Without this information, a representative would have to read through the entire email, find the incident, know who needs to receive the information, and send it to the right department—all before anything else can occur. Automating this on the back end saves a lot of time and can potentially improve customer satisfaction in the process. 

Second, data. All organizations have data silos of some sort. Whether that’s each department having their own way of tracking projects and work or teams all having their own different methods of reporting, tracking, and managing incidents. But keeping these systems separate causes nightmares for IT teams and can lengthen incident response times. Instead, a data fabric allows your organization to integrate data across the enterprise in a virtual layer without having to migrate data from existing systems (thus keeping your initial investments in that software intact). This can also help foster collaboration across teams and departments.

Business processes should never remain static. This applies to incident management as much as it does to any other process. You’ll want to consistently work to improve your processes—whether through incremental improvements or periodic overhauls. 

For starters, create an open door policy for employees to offer suggestions on how to improve incident management processes. This could look like holding open forums or creating suggestion forms. Getting regular feedback on incidents will keep your processes sharp. 

Also, try using process intelligence tools to check on specific processes. These tools can give you critical information on the efficiency and effectiveness of your processes—whether that’s finding bottlenecks in processes or demonstrating data on incident reporting times. If you’re noticing patterns, it may be time to re-optimize the process. 

Finally, when large-scale incidents occur—such as a data breach or a major PR problem—make sure to hold a post-mortem on the problem. Find out what went well, what needs improvement, and any suggestions for how to handle it in the future. Many post-incident meetings focus on the content of the problem, not the form of the response. It’s definitely important to capture what went wrong so you can implement prevention policies and figure out how to communicate in the future. But don’t forget to take stock of the process itself. For instance: Did it take a while to craft a strong response to those affected? Did it take too long to discover and report the problem? Were there any parts of the process that could use less red tape? Or those that need more oversight? This is a subtle difference that can get lost in these meetings, but make sure to devote ample time to process questions so you are in good shape for whatever comes your way in the future.