Post-Incident Trust & Communication Assessment

Welcome! This survey asks about one specific incident from the last 90 days. Your participation is voluntary and you may stop at any time. There are no right or wrong answers — we want your honest perspective. All responses are confidential and will be reported only in aggregate to improve incident response practices. The survey takes approximately 13 minutes to complete.

Please think about the single most recent incident that affected your team or work in the last 90 days. All of the following questions refer to that specific incident.

How much impact did this incident have on customer experience or revenue?

How would you rate the timeliness of incident communications you received?

Compared with before the incident, how would you describe your current level of trust in the affected system or process?

Rank the following areas by how much improvement they need for incidents like this one. Place the highest-priority area at the top.

1. Early detection speed
2. Update cadence during response
3. External/customer communication clarity
4. Decision-making and alignment
5. Ownership and role clarity
6. Tooling/visibility (dashboards, alerts)

Where are you primarily based?

• North America
• Europe
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East/Africa
• Other
• Prefer not to say

Thank you for your time. Your feedback will directly inform improvements to our incident response and recovery processes.

What was your primary stakeholder role during that incident?

• Engineering (dev/infra/SRE)
• Product management
• Customer support/success
• Sales or account management
• Marketing/PR
• Operations/IT
• Security/compliance
• Executive/leadership
• Other

How much impact did this incident have on internal team productivity?

How would you rate the accuracy of incident communications you received?

How long did it take until you were comfortable resuming normal operations?

• Immediately after mitigation
• Within the same day
• 1–3 days
• 4–7 days
• More than a week
• Still not fully comfortable

If you could change one thing to reduce business impact next time, what would it be?

What is your organization's approximate size?

• 1–49 employees
• 50–249 employees
• 250–999 employees
• 1,000–4,999 employees
• 5,000+ employees
• Prefer not to say

How directly were you involved in managing the incident?

• Primary responder/on-call
• Contributor or subject-matter expert
• Informed stakeholder/observer
• Affected but not involved in response

How much impact did this incident have on team morale or confidence?

How would you rate the clarity of incident communications you received?

How would you rate the quality of post-incident follow-up (e.g., post-mortem review, action items, assigned owners)?

We'd like to explore your incident experience in a bit more depth. An AI moderator will ask you a couple of follow-up questions based on your earlier responses.

What is your current job level?

• Individual contributor
• People manager
• Director
• VP/C-level
• Other
• Prefer not to say

What was the business severity level assigned to that incident?

• Sev-1 (critical, widespread impact)
• Sev-2 (high, significant impact)
• Sev-3 (moderate, limited impact)
• Sev-4 (low, minor impact)
• Not sure

How much impact did this incident have on SLA compliance or contractual obligations?

How would you rate the completeness of incident communications you received?

Based on your responses in this survey, is there anything else you would like to share about this incident or the recovery process?

How long have you been with your current organization?

• 0–6 months
• 7–12 months
• 1–2 years
• 3–5 years
• 6+ years
• Prefer not to say

Approximately how long was customer-visible impact present?

• Under 30 minutes
• 30–59 minutes
• 1–3 hours
• 3–12 hours
• 12–24 hours
• More than 24 hours
• Not sure or not customer-visible

Which single channel did you rely on most for incident updates?

• Email
• Chat (e.g., Slack/Teams)
• Status page or incident tool
• Pager/on-call app notifications
• Live briefings/meetings
• Ticketing system (e.g., Jira/ServiceNow)
• Other

Approximately how many separate incidents affected your work area in the last 90 days?

• 1
• 2–3
• 4–6
• 7–10
• More than 10
• Not sure

Overall, how useful were the incident communications in enabling you to do your job?