BE PREPARED
It is more than a little ironic that the initials of the company responsible for what is likely to be one of the greatest man-made natural disasters of this decade, is the same as the two that begin the phrase “be prepared” i.e. BP. They most certainly were not in this instance.
As each day passes, the scale of the problem facing the company and those in the path of this disaster becomes clearer and clearer. The PR machine is in full operation, country leaders are calling each other to pacify fears, engineers are working frantically to come up with solutions. Unfortunately, nothing so far is fixing the problem at hand and it will be some considerable time before it is brought under control.
Now I’m no engineering expert or oil rig risk analyst but surely someone, somewhere has asked the question “what do we do if there is an under-sea blow-out caused by..” and the answers have already been considered.
So it should be with our own businesses. While the majority of our businesses are unlikely to affect the world on such a scale as the BP problem, the overall impact will feel just as bad to those who are affected. The pressure it will put on you as the business owner/manager and your team will be just as intense as those engineers trying to find a solution. Your impacted customers will feel just as aggrieved as those suffering from the oil approaching the coastline and destroying their livelihoods.
Your ability to predict risks to your business is a key prevention tool, but so is how you react when things go pear-shaped. At a minimum you should have;
- A communications plan in place for your customers. Tell them what’s going on and what you are doing about it. Doesn’t really matter how – phone, email, web-site, social media.. whatever is the appropriate medium for addressing the situation.
- Consistent updates on where you are at in resolving the problem. I know that I get really frustrated when I call a service providers automated helpdesk and get “there is no estimated time of resolution for problem X”. It would be far better to say, “we currently have no estimated time for resolution, but we’ll update this message at <time>”. At least this way, we know when to check back for an update.
- A strategy in place for how to deal with customers who potentially have lost business/data/sales as a direct consequence of your inability to deliver. There is always the possibility of being sued. How will you deal with it? Are you sufficiently protected by your insurance?
- Once you have fixed the problem, an update should be sent to your customers explaining what happened and what you are doing to try and prevent it happening again. It doesn’t have to be a multi-page report in most instances, just a simple paragraph or two. A small thing that can have a huge impact on your customers loyalty.
Shit happens! How you manage your business when things go wrong will ultimately determine your ability to recover and continue to run a successful business.
Have you a basic strategy in place to manage things when they go wrong?
Tags: business management, communications plan, communications strategy, customer feedback, customer relationship management, effective communication, effective management, Risk Management
[...] Management Problems” will give you a very timely, short, compelling blog post called Be Prepared, which suggests how businesses ought to consider immediately some of the lessons of the BP [...]