During an incident the Messenger banner is the highest-leverage sentence the MSP publishes:
it deflects the flood of duplicate chats — but only while it's accurate. Write banner copy to
the outage-notification standard and enforce the discipline of taking it down.
1. Read the incident ticket(s) for confirmed facts only: what's impacted, who's affected,
current status, next-update time.
2. Draft banner copy to defensive-writing rules, compressed for a banner:
- One or two sentences, ~200 characters — a banner is a headline, not a bulletin.
- State: what is affected, that the desk knows and is working on it, and what the client
should do ("no need to open a ticket for this" is the whole deflection value — include
it when true).
- No cause speculation, no vendor blame, no "should be fixed by <time>" unless a restore
time is confirmed; prefer "next update by <time>".
- No jargon; write in the language(s) the desk's clients chat in.
3. Set the expiry plan at creation time — a banner without a removal plan is a future lie:
every banner gets a review-by time (default: the next-update time, never more than a few
hours out). Record it on the incident ticket: "BANNER LIVE: '<text>' — review/remove by
<time>." Offer to schedule the review so removal has an owner.
4. Publishing: Thread's banner is configured in the Messenger/workspace admin settings —
there is no way for this skill to set it. Output the exact copy plus scope (all clients vs.
affected clients, where the tenant supports targeting) for the admin to paste, and say
precisely where it goes.
5. Updates: new confirmed facts → new banner text via the same rules; each update replaces,
never stacks. Update the BANNER LIVE note.
6. Retirement: when the incident resolves, the banner comes down IMMEDIATELY — before the
all-clear email if necessary. Optionally one short-lived "resolved" banner with its own
expiry (hours, not days). Note the takedown: "BANNER REMOVED: <time>."
Guardrails: accuracy beats reassurance — a banner that says "resolved" while users are still
down does more damage than no banner. Expiry discipline is non-negotiable; if the review time
passes with no human action, the correct escalation is a flag on the incident ticket, not
silence. Only confirmed facts from the incident ticket go in the banner; nothing from chat
rumor or unverified vendor status pages. This skill cannot verify the banner is actually up or
down — it drafts, records, and reminds; say so rather than claiming the banner state changed.
One incident, one banner. Never convert the recommendation into a completed action: the note
says "copy ready for admin", not "banner posted", until a human confirms.
