Behavioral question

Senior client calls you early morning to complain that the B2B product is not working (without providing any details). How would you approach this? (include technical details if applicable)

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What this question tests

Tests incident triage and stakeholder management under pressure with an ambiguous, high-urgency complaint.

First calm and gather facts from the client: what exactly is broken, since when, which workflow, and what error they see.
In parallel, check internal signals immediately: status dashboards, error rates, and recent deploys in the last 24 hours for this client's environment.
Loop in on-call engineering right away rather than trying to diagnose alone, since B2B outages need a fast, coordinated response.
Set expectations with the client: acknowledge, give a time for the next update, and avoid promising a fix time before you have data.
After mitigation, run a blameless post-mortem and document root cause and prevention steps, then follow up with the client directly.

Separates client communication from technical diagnosis and does both in parallel instead of one blocking the other.
Shows technical fluency by naming concrete checks (deploy logs, error rate dashboards, status page) instead of vague 'investigate the issue'.
Manages the relationship proactively with a committed next-update time, which protects trust even before the fix lands.
Closes the loop with a post-mortem, showing this isn't just firefighting but a repeatable incident process.

Trying to diagnose the technical issue solo before looping in engineering, wasting critical time.
Making a fix-time promise to the client before you actually understand the root cause.

How would you handle it if the root cause turned out to be a third-party dependency outage?
How would you prevent this from happening again for other B2B clients?