When you hear the term “crisis management plan” it can send shivers down your spine and cause you to worry. For just as in the economy of a country, a health crisis, or even in a marital relationship, a business crisis can shake the structures and generate many uncertainties.
Even if a crisis is unwanted, we can look on the positive side and transform it into an opportunity if we manage to identify it in time and manage it adequately, implementing emergency plans with good practices.
So, if the situation described above is your personal or business case and you want to seek advice for future problems, here are some recommendations:
According to ISO22301 it is defined as: “a situation with a high level of uncertainty that affects the core business and/or credibility of the organization and requires urgent action”.
The crises referred to in this article are those unexpected and unavoidable events that can affect the assets, financial structure and human talent of a company, eventually causing irreparable damage and impacting the survival of the company, which would be forced to make abrupt, urgent and weighty decisions in order to survive.
It is important to bear in mind that crises do not always imply the interruption of the business activity or a direct threat to the property or assets, since in most cases the impact on the reputation and image of the brand is more significant.
A crisis management plan in public relations is the process that seeks to correct the negative impacts caused by adverse factors of internal or external origin of an organization, and that through an adequate analysis, diagnosis, planning and execution of tasks, we can minimize the damage, preserving the reputation of the brand, finances, work environment and the stability of the organization’s workforce.
Regardless of the foresight that organizations have in trying to prevent negative circumstances that threaten the business, some crises really are inevitable.
For this reason, it is advisable and essential that you structure a communication plan that can be developed by an internal team, or even by a public relations agency and/or communications office, to help you deal clearly and promptly with all kinds of situations that may arise.
In many cases, a crisis committee is created, which could be formed by several or even all the administrative and/or mission areas of the organization, such as legal, financial, human talent, communications, marketing, etc., choosing a leader responsible for coordinating the team to overcome the challenges that arise in the emergency.
You should also keep in mind that there are companies that have previously developed a crisis manual to which they can turn to in order to seek an orderly and concrete business recovery.
As you have seen throughout this content, a brand crisis can occur in any business, time and place.
For this reason, it is important that you determine the necessary actions that you and your business will need to take throughout a crisis situation, which will allow you to:
- Act quickly and efficiently as everyone will know their role and function during a crisis.
- Generate opportunities to maintain your good reputation with customers, partners, competitors, media and industry leaders.
With timely crisis management planning, you can use good business practices to reverse adversity, and your organization’s image may even improve, since today’s users recognize your transparency and ability to find solutions to problems.
Crises can be prevented or positively managed, as long as organizations carry out periodic management analysis and are constantly working on risk scenarios.
Before the crisis
It is highly recommended that you carry out a preventive crisis management plan, even when nothing has happened, as this will help you to identify possible scenarios and adversities in which you could be involved.
That is why, in this pre-crisis phase, it is advisable to analyze the factors that could generate a threat, for example:
- Low customer loyalty and satisfaction;
- Difficulty in customer service;
- High employee turnover and bad working environment;
- Lack of innovation in the different areas of the company;
- Repetitive complaints in social networks and PQR channels;
- Poorly structured communication channels or communication channels that are not enabled;
- Questioning of product and/or service quality;
- Dissatisfaction of shareholders, partners, customers and employees.
The above are some scenarios that could be analyzed early and that with a periodic evaluation and adjustment you could overcome without much difficulty.
During the crisis
In this scenario, you will surely have already identified some problems such as:
- A large number of negative mentions about the brand in social networks or media;
- Requests for answers or explanations about situations questioned by investors, partners and shareholders;
- Attacks on the company by customers, activists, influencers, opinion leaders, websites, newspapers, radio, television;
- Sales declines and reduction of customers;
- Decline in stock value or estimated brand value.
At this point, you should be in permanent contact with your reputation and crisis management team and together with them establish the actions, communication channels and spokespersons that will deal with the situation.
Some of the main actions you could take are:
- Effective communication through social networks;
- Issue a press release;
- Hold a press conference;
- Keep your employees constantly informed about the progress and solutions that are being carried out to solve the situation;
- Establish some communication on the website.
Bear in mind that a good crisis management practice is to recognize that there is a situation of vulnerability, and do not pretend that nothing has happened.
After the crisis
After implementing the crisis management plan and carrying out your strategies, the post-crisis phase is characterized by the following:
- Decrease in brand mentions in social networks and mass media;
- Re-establishment of sales and brand value;
- Recovery of relationships with stakeholders;
- Normalization of activities both internal and external to the organization.
After the crisis, it is time for you to take stock of the practices that worked and those that did not, in order to establish an action plan to prevent problems from recurring and to define the organization’s actions in adverse moments.
The first thing you should know is that PR stands for Public Relations. The professionals who are part of this area are experts in strategic communications and brand positioning through mass media.
That is why the term “Crisis Management” is widely used in the area of Public Relations to refer to managing a crisis situation through different processes that seek to correct the impacts and minimize or avoid the damage it may cause to an organization.
In this way, its main objective is to preserve the reputation of a company in a moment of adversity. For this, it is essential to have an expert team in crisis management to analyze the factors that cause these breaking events and identify the strategies that can be implemented to get out of them without any damage to the image or reputation of the brand.
As a public relations agency with a national and international reach, we can give you a global vision of your work environment and work with qualified teams to:
- Anticipate the creation of a crisis management plan;
- Have an interdisciplinary team to provide you with advice from different areas of work;
- Advise before, during and after the crisis, providing tools for crisis management;
- Identify scenarios and stakeholders in a crisis situation;
- Conduct risk assessment audits;
- Media training for spokespersons who will deliver key messages to the mass media and internal public of the organization;
- Identify, train and create access models for a crisis response team of internal spokespersons;
- Create effective monitoring and notification systems;
- Conduct proactive media and social media outreach;
- Oversee internal engagement and reassurance campaigns;
- Develop content aligned to strategy;
- Provide post-crisis analysis and ongoing reputation recovery measures.
