When Systems Fail, Who Approves the Customer Update?
A service goes down. Customers start asking whether their payments have gone through. The technical team is investigating, but someone needs to explain what is happening now.
Imagine operations working on one draft, compliance checking another, and customer services waiting for something it can actually tell people. The pressure grows while the wording travels between teams.
On 7 September 2026, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published lessons from its Defence, Security, and Resilience Lab, held with the Ministry of Defence. Around 120 leaders explored a challenging scenario involving threats including damaged subsea cables and a cyberattack on a cable landing station.
One question deserves attention from communication teams: how would messages need to change if disruption affected several firms, or the whole sector, at once? And how would firms keep communicating over a longer period? The page shares lessons and questions for consideration; it does not introduce new regulatory requirements.
For customer communications, a practical starting point is to prepare the decisions that can be made before an incident:
Prepare useful starting wording. Templates for service delays, unavailable channels and follow-up updates can give teams a head start. Leave space for confirmed facts, customer actions and the next update time.
Agree who can act. Identify the author, reviewer and approver, including cover when someone is unavailable. Practise the handover so people know what to do under pressure.
Keep track of each update. Make it clear which wording is approved for use, what has changed and which earlier message it replaces. Preserve the approval record as the incident develops.
CommsPliant brings templates, version history, and review and approval workflows into one controlled workspace, with approval evidence held in the Evidence Vault. Teams can organise their starting content in advance and check the facts of the incident before approving an update.
That preparation also needs a tested way to reach customers if normal systems are unavailable.
A customer may have to wait for a service to recover. They should not also have to wait while the business searches for the right words.