Only 45% of companies have an incident response plan in place.

From IT service outages to physical security breaches, there is no shortage of incidents that today's companies need to be prepared for, and sometimes, how a company responds to a major incident is even more important than the steps they take to prevent future ones.

In this guide to incident management and resolution, we'll show the exact steps and best practices you can follow to resolve incidents quickly and effectively to help prevent costly downtime at your company.

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What Is Incident Resolution?

Incident resolution is the process of identifying, assessing, and responding to major incidents to limit their impact on your company.

One of the biggest elements of limiting a major incident's impact on your organization is reducing response and resolution times, and they’re something you should emphasize in your incident resolution plan.

In some instances, an incident resolution process will entail pivoting to alternative solutions until you can resolve the problem. These workarounds can enable you to preserve business continuity throughout the incident resolution process.

Incident resolution is often geared toward IT and security teams, with downtime greatly impacting both teams. Staying ahead of downtime is key for both to avoid future incidents, maintain visibility, and ensure continuous security.

Impact of Delayed Resolution

When you fail to streamline your incident resolution process and achieve swift resolution times, consequences are often severe. Extended downtime is one serious consequence of delayed incident resolution and can cost larger organizations as much as $9,000 per minute.

Plenty of companies know these consequences all too well. This includes Facebook, which is estimated to have lost $90 million in 2019 due to just 14 hours of downtime.

Delayed incident remediation and the downtime it can cause are also associated with indirect costs such as reputational damage and reduced customer satisfaction. When a major incident disrupts a company's ability to serve its customers, it leads to lost sales at the time of the incident, but it can also lead to lost sales in the future if customers come to see your company as unreliable.

These direct and indirect impacts of delayed incident resolution make it essential to develop an incident management process that enables you to identify the root cause of the incident and achieve incident closure swiftly.

The ROI of Streamlining Incident Resolution

Streamlining your incident resolution process allows you to limit the multiple forms of damage a major incident can cause. Swift problem management offers a substantial return if and when a major incident strikes. Benefits from this include preserving your business’s continuity so the incident doesn't disrupt your company's ability to serve its customers, to protecting your business's reputation so that future sales are not impacted.    

Best Practices for Resolving Incidents Faster

In incident resolution, speed is the name of the game. To identify, assess, and resolve incidents as swiftly as possible, here are three best practices that your company should follow:

Use the Right Tools and Technology

Having the right tools and technology available can go a long way when it comes to resolving incidents faster. Incident management software is one type of tool that helps companies streamline their incident management process, and communication tools such as SMS platforms are also useful for effective and efficient communication.

But when it comes to responding to physical security incidents such as employee theft, workplace accidents, or security breaches, one of the best tools you can have is a high-quality security camera system.

Having access to video footage gives you the ability to easily investigate and assess the incident, and with the new intelligent video camera systems like Spot AI, you can get even more powerful incident resolution capabilities.

With Spot AI, organizations can create real-time automated notifications and security alerts so they are notified of an incident as soon as it happens. Spot AI also allows you to access video footage from any location, giving you the ability to formulate a response even if you are away from the office.

For a really powerful incident resolution tool, Spot AI offers its advanced video intelligence features. 

With video intelligence, you can automatically analyze video footage for key insights rather than trying to find what you’re looking for by manually reviewing hours of footage. This can dramatically speed up your company's incident resolution process when every minute counts.

Spot AI's video intelligence features also assist with incident documentation by enabling companies to pull clips, add documents and photos, collaborate with internal team members and external parties (such as the police), and share footage, all from within your Spot AI dashboard.

Learn more about mastering incident resolution in an upcoming webinar.

Train your Staff on Incident Response Procedures Regularly

Incident resolution is often an "all-hands-on-deck" process. It involves collaboration between numerous teams and departments, with the entire process dependent on everyone filling their role effectively.

This makes it important to regularly train your staff on incident response procedures. Once you have developed an incident response plan, make sure everyone who is involved in that plan understands their role and what will be expected of them when incidents happen.

Document Everything

Incident logging and documentation is a vital yet often overlooked part of effective incident resolution. The systems you use should enable quick and easy documentation for swift incident resolution. With Spot AI’s Cases feature, users can quickly find footage, collaborate with team members, add other documents, create tags to track and organize incidents, and share with internal team members or outside parties (like police or insurance companies).

Thoroughly documenting the incident is key to building a case should your company decide to take legal action against responsible individuals or entities (for example, filing charges against someone who steals company property). 

The reverse is also true. Incident documentation can also be important for defending your company against legal charges (for example, if an employee who is injured in a workplace accident decides to sue).

Along with being an important part of the legal process, often following a major incident, incident documentation also helps companies create plans for preventing future incidents. Once the dust has settled and it's time to figure out exactly what went wrong, having an incident report that includes thorough documentation of the incident is invaluable for putting a prevention plan in place.

Resolve Your Incidents Swiftly and Intelligently with Spot AI

A swift and effective response to physical security and workplace safety incidents is necessary to limit the damage these incidents cause. 

With Spot AI's industry-leading intelligent camera system, organizations can identify incidents in real-time, analyze video footage automatically for vital insights, and easily create the documentation needed for swift and intelligent incident resolution.

Learn more about the powerful features and use cases of Spot AI's advanced intelligent camera system, and find out what sets us apart from our competition.