malware infects unintended targets. Even small businesses like Betty’s Tea Rooms in York can end up having to deal with the fallout of a cyber attack. Whether you are big or small, whether it’s a malicious malware attack or an accidental outage - people will want to know what’s going on and what you are doing to protect their financial data.
How can you emerge from a crisis with your reputation intact?
The most crucial element of handling a crisis is communication. Projecting competence, compassion and honesty should be the aim, whether it’s a cyber attack, PR disaster or any other mishap.
This was part of the struggle for TSB. TSB’s parent company, Sabadell, made a misinformed statement on their website that they had ‘successfully completed the TSB technology migration,’ when problems very much persisted (and would continue to persist for over a month). Sharing inaccurate information will only perpetuate the idea that you don’t know what you’re doing.
Legal teams may want you to avoid apologies for the sake of not admitting fault, but it can cause further damage. After the Marriot hotel chain had a breach of 500 million customers’ data, they were widely criticised on social media for their lukewarm response. The closest they got to apologising for the loss of incredibly sensitive data such as credit card details and passport numbers was ‘We deeply regret this incident happened.’ The word “sorry” did not appear in their statement at all – perhaps the £99.2 million fine from the ICO helped them understand the magnitude of the situation.
Quantity as well as quality
Getting the message right is important, but so is making sure that your audience hears it. One of the biggest complaints of TSB customers during the IT crisis was that they were on hold for up to an hour before they could speak to a customer service representative. For achieving the goal of competence, compassion and honesty, leaving people in a phone queue for an hour is far from ideal. If thousands more callers were to phone your customer service lines, do you have a service to divert them to or would they be left in phone limbo?
Before you can consider protecting your reputation to the outside world, you need to get your house in order: internal communications can make or break a crisis response. You cannot appear competent and in control if the information your staff are putting out is wrong or poorly phrased. Getting the tone right was a challenge for Starbucks during its ill-fated “Race Together” campaign where they were criticised for using racial tensions as a marketing schtick. However, Starbucks reacted quickly to the bad press and engaged their staff with a memo about the more meaningful equality and diversity efforts they were making and thanking them for their work during the ‘Race Together’ campaign. The memo was also made public and helped the corporation and its employees to shape the discussion into something more thoughtful, successfully protecting Starbucks’ liberal, progressive reputation. You can’t possibly predict every threat that could happen to your business, and the world is certainly becoming a more unpredictable place. However, when a crisis does happen, your employees and clients expect you to tell them what’s going on and have tools in place to respond as the situation develops. When your reputation is at stake, you can’t afford not to.
Looking aſter people, businesses & reputations in a crisis
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