plan-a-service-recovery

name	plan-a-service-recovery
category	start
description	Design a fair operational and customer recovery after a service failure with containment, remedy, communication, and prevention. Use when responding to an outage, broken promise, delivery failure, harmful interaction, or repeated support breakdown.

plan-a-service-recovery

Repair the customer's practical loss and the system that produced it. Match remedies to verified harm and customer need instead of applying the same apology or credit to every case.

Inputs

• Gather the failure timeline, affected customers, known harm, current containment, policy, and incident ownership.
• Identify contractual, safety, accessibility, privacy, financial, and regulatory obligations.
• Confirm the authority and budget for communication, credits, refunds, replacement, and operational work.

Procedure

1. Define the failure, impact window, affected journeys, and confidence using current evidence.
2. Contain ongoing harm and preserve customer access, data, records, and available alternatives.
3. Segment affected customers by actual impact and recovery need, not commercial value alone.
4. Set remedy principles for restoration, correction, replacement, refund, credit, or individualized review.
5. Build an action matrix with segment, remedy, owner, approval, channel, timing, and verification.
6. Draft communication that states what happened, current state, available action, limits, and next update.
7. Create escalation paths for severe, disputed, vulnerable, or policy-exception cases.
8. Coordinate support tooling, scripts, staffing, and case records before broad outreach.
9. Verify delivery, redemption, restored function, unresolved exceptions, and customer feedback.
10. Feed root causes and recovery failures into owned prevention work with due dates.

Boundaries

Never conceal material harm, blame customers, discriminate in remedies, or promise compensation without authority. Do not expose incident details or customer data beyond the approved audience. Legal notices, regulated incidents, and safety harms require their designated owners.

Done

• Ongoing harm is contained and affected groups are identified with evidence
• Every remedy has an owner, approval, delivery method, and verification check
• Customer communication is accurate, accessible, and consistent with the operational state
• Unresolved exceptions and prevention actions remain tracked to completion