Not every crisis your business encounters will make the headlines. Normally, the general public will only hear about it if you don’t deal with it in the right way.
Effective crisis and communication management is the key to helping a company overcome a crisis quickly, preventing extensive damage to your reputation, and reducing any negative impact on the bottom line.
Reputation is a business’s most valuable intangible asset
Reputation is a business’s greatest intangible asset so it’s worth protecting. In the event of a disaster or crisis, trust in your business can be eroded as your business reputation tanks.
It’s hard for brands to recover from this. What you do immediately after the crisis can make a huge difference in how your business recovers. If your business is not prepared, the chances are it will respond badly, potentially lose customers in their droves, and suffer financial losses that are hard to recover from.
How can you protect your reputation?
Sooner or later every business will face a reputational crisis on some level, whether it’s the recall of a product, unguarded remarks made by senior leadership, or malpractice being uncovered. Despite this, many fail to actively manage their reputation, instead, they wait until trouble starts before cobbling together a communications response that isn’t as effective as it could be.
The key to survival is a suitable crisis management strategy complete with well-thought-out crisis management media training and incident response planning. Additionally, a human side and a touch of humility can go a long way.
Companies that put a predefined strategy in place stand a much better chance of coming out of any crisis with their reputation and profit margin in the best possible shape.
Robust and timely communications with emergency services, stakeholders, the press and the public, will allow you to limit the fallout of a crisis and contain their potential to damage reputation.
Nobody wants to find themselves in this situation, but there are some steps you can take to respond to a crisis effectively:
Don’t stay silent – get in front of the story whether that’s online, on social media, in print or on television and react with empathy
Apologise early, often and sincerely
Monitor your company online: who’s talking about you and where?
Respond to online comments professionally, personally, and respectfully
Don’t wait for disaster to strike
Managing your brand reputation is a full-time responsibility. You need to be in the market every day listening to your customers, monitoring their engagement, and responding to any issues promptly.
The way a crisis is handled will have a significant effect on your relationship with the public, the media, your customers, and your stakeholders.
Instead of waiting for a crisis to hit, don’t wait, give your business the best chance to protect its reputation by putting together a robust crisis management media strategy that covers everything you need to do, how you need to do it, and who needs to do it.
Kiasu Crisis Management are experts in crisis management media training. Our courses make sure your organisation is fully prepared to deal with a crisis and can protect its reputation, please contact us for more information.
