5 Steps for Building an Online Crisis Response Plan

If you followed the steps in our previous post about The Basics of Social Media Reputation Management, you now have a person or team in place that is responsible maintaining your company’s presence online and interacting with your customers and prospects.  You’ve performed an audit of your company’s communications and identified all of your customer touch points, as well as possible vulnerabilities for customers to have a negative experience.  Then you set up a system for monitoring the sentiment for your brand online among your customers, prospects, and the general public, and created procedures for both responding to incoming messages and publishing outbound content and posts.

But how do you mobilize this system when there is a crisis?  Here are five steps for building an online crisis response plan for your company’s social media reputation management team.

1. Identify the source of the problem.  The first step in being able to respond to an online crisis is identifying where the problem originated, and ideally before it has a chance to spread to multiple areas.  For example, if there’s a popular thread on an online forum that is getting a lot of attention for saying negative things about your company, it doesn’t make sense to target your response on Facebook.

   You want to respond with the most intensity wherever the problem originated, with the hopes that you can keep it from spreading to other platforms.  If you’re transparent and forthcoming about the issues, and provide a good response, you will hopefully be able to quarantine the negative publicity to that location.

   That doesn’t mean you can’t be proactive by responding to the issue on other social media platforms before the story spreads there though.  If there is an issue on a forum, posting a tweet that says “Some users have been experiencing an issue with X, we are looking into it and hope to resolve it soon” could help suppress the story there.  People are less likely to complain if they know you’ve found out about the problem and are trying to remedy it.

   Make sure you target the bulk of your resources at the root of the problem, but also proactively respond to the issue elsewhere before customers have a chance to complain to keep the story from spreading.

2. Make sure your team is trained to manage all of your channels, and bring in additional resources as needed.  The last thing you want in the event of a crisis is to have to bring in additional help that isn’t prepared or trained in how to respond to an emergency of that type.  For example, if you have a “Facebook guy” on your team that doesn’t know how to manage your customers on Twitter, if a negative story is spreading about you there bringing him in to help might do more harm than good.  You need to make sure your team is trained on at least the fundamentals of how to manage your customers on all of your social platforms.  That way if there is a problem you can seamlessly bring in additional support to respond to the influx of complaints or questions.
3. Respond quickly and transparently.  When there is a customer backlash, the worst thing you can do is be silent.  If you don’t acknowledge that you’ve heard your customers’ troubles and are working on a solution, it will just cause them to complain louder.

   Think about it from their perspective.  What do you do if you’re trying to talk to someone and they can’t hear you?  You speak up.  The same rule applies with a company.  If your customers think you haven’t heard them, they’re going to complain louder hoping that it will get your attention.  Unfortunately this means more bystanders are also going to hear these negative complaints about your company, too.

   Responding quickly is crucial, even if you don’t say anything else besides “We’ve heard your complaints and are looking into it.” At least your customers know you’re aware of the problem, and they won’t escalate their complaints, which will further hurt your reputation.

   Some companies worry about getting every detail right in their response, and delay publishing it for this reason.  This isn’t smart.  Customers who feel that they have been heard are actually fairly forgiving.  They would much rather you say that you’ve heard them and are addressing the issue, but get some of the details wrong, than have you wait to get your reply perfect and ignore them until you do.  Customers understand that responding to an urgent crisis can sometimes be disorganized, so if you say that in an effort to make sure they were kept in the loop you accidentally published something incorrect, they’ll appreciate that you were being open with them more than they’ll be upset they were misinformed originally.

4. Have a procedure for escalation and prepare a pathway to remedy problems.  When a crisis arises, it’s not enough to just tell your customers you’ve heard them and tell them you’re working on a solution.  You actually have to resolve the problem.  This often means bringing in other departments and teams in your company.  So if you’re a software company, you need to make sure that if there is a major bug in a new release your crisis response plan has contact information for someone on the development team who can mobilize resources to fix the bug and publish a new version.

   Look at your business and think about all of the places customers could encounter trouble, and then make sure your crisis response plan has contact information for someone in each of those departments who has the authority to respond in an emergency.  Make sure you talk to these people in advance so that they are aware of their role, and are prepared to be able to help when the time comes.

   You should also set up a procedure for relaying messages between the department implementing the solution and the social media team, so that updates and setbacks can be communicated to the customers who are waiting for you to resolve their problems.  Responding to customers quickly will suppress their complaints for a while, but as more time goes by they will begin to get restless if they haven’t heard anything.  By communicating updates from the team implementing the correction, you will continue to restrain the customer complaints as you fix the problem.

   Finally, and this should be obvious, once the team that is addressing the problem completes the fix, they need to take whatever steps are needed to make it go into effect and you need to let your customers know when that happens.

5. Run a simulation.  Once you’ve got your plan in place, the best way to be ready to handle a real crisis is to practice responding to a simulated one.  Taking the example of the software company again, you could work with the development team to create a copy of your software with a major defect in it and then pretend it was accidentally published.  You can create a private forum or Facebook group and post a number of negative complaints about the problem with the software there, and then tell your team to respond as if it was a real crisis.

   Your team would then be responsible for replying to these customers and communicating with the developers about the problem.  The developers would check the pretend version of the software and identify the problem, and then communicate what it is back to the social media team to share with the customers.  The developers would then fix the pretend bug, and go through a simulation of publishing an update, which your social media team would also then announce.

No company wants a negative story to spread about them online, but in the hyper-connected world that we live in it’s often inevitable.  Making sure you have a team that is prepared to respond could be the difference between just having a stressful day in the office and dealing with a public relations disaster that, in at least some cases, has cost people their jobs.

Don’t become a cautionary tale, start working on your online crisis response plan today.  Here at Smart SEO Designs, online reputation management is one of our specialties.  We’d be happy to assist you with creating and testing a crisis response plan, so please shoot us an email if you’d like a free quote: info@smartseodesigns.com or fill out our contact form.