A crisis can hit your company at any time. It could be a badly marketed campaign, a failed event, an executive scandal, a data breach, or a negative review!
When faced with a crisis in any form, your company needs to act fast with carefully crafted responses to limit damage and protect the brand’s reputation. Failure to handle a crisis well could ruin years of hard work.
Forty-eight percent of respondents in a survey said that a crisis ruined the company’s reputation and employee morale. Forty-one percent said it affected sales and thirty-nine percent believed that it affected productivity.
It’s when your company receives negative, damaging, and humiliating publicity. A crisis has the potential to disrupt your bottom line, affect the company’s workflow, and destroy your brand reputation. Today, with the prominence of social media, a crisis spreads fast and globally. Writing a Crisis Plan that works will help your company cope with the challenges.
Before coming up with a crisis management plan, you must determine whether a situation warrants to be called a crisis. Negative reviews and mocking social media posts are annoying, but you can respond to them without turning them into a crisis.
Use social media monitoring tools to find out how consumers feel about your brand. If the comments are shifting towards negativity, prepare for a crisis, and handle it before it escalates. Target responses and continue monitoring. Take note of reactions from prospects, influencers, customers, and the industry.
Every company needs a crisis management team and a crisis management plan in place.
Don’t hide behind a mask!
During a crisis, you need to have a response team in place so that the right people are responding to the situation on behalf of the company. The team should consist of in-house professionals with crisis management training and external experts who can tackle the issue from a media perspective. Choose a spokesperson to speak on behalf of the company with one voice.
Come up with a plan that protects the company, the brand’s renputation, and individuals entangled in the crisis. Writing a Crisis Plan that includes specific actions to be taken is a good idea. A lot of foresight is required for this stage since it’s hard to predict when a crisis may befall your company. Be aware of stakeholders, customers, employees, and how the situation will affect them. Come up with a plan that caters to all parties and keeps them in the loop. Write down the plan and actions to take. Modify it as you go and involve the financial and legal experts in your company.
The team should collect data and facts from different sources about the crisis to help frame a great response. The message transparently addresses the situation and how the company will handle it. Be honest and open with your audience, employees, and stakeholders. Apologize as soon as possible, admit the mistake and clearly state that it will not happen again. Have the CEO apologize for the mistake to make the messaging personal and visual.
However, if an apology becomes an admission of guilt, especially in legal situations, do not respond immediately. It will make the cleaning up of the company’s online reputation even more difficult as statements released will be shared and reshared online.
Keep an eye on all incoming responses and track what people are saying about the situation. One negative review or article on the first page of search results loses the company 22 percent of the business. Monitoring systems should be in place to track negative trends and tackle them before they become bigger problems.
Once the crisis is over, review how your team handled the situation and how to avoid a similar situation in the future.
The key to handling any crisis successfully is anticipating it even before it even happens. Every fire, every hire, unsatisfied employees, office gossip, industry changes may be the one that spikes the crisis fire.
Before taking any step, think of the consequences.
