What Is Crisis Management?
Crisis management is how a business or an organization deals with a sudden emergency. It involves decision-making, including restoring order and safety, preventing damage to the organization or a third party, maintaining control over event communications, and effectively updating stakeholders.
You can manage ongoing risks by taking preventive measures to mitigate potential pitfalls before they happen or by re-planning for contingencies. It often includes risk evaluation, analysis, response planning, and communication plan implementation.
How Does Crisis Management Work?
It is a combination of five interrelated steps:
Step 1: Identify Roles in Crisis Management
The first step is to identify the roles in the organization’s different departments that will work together to communicate and respond during a crisis. A crisis does not necessarily happen at your place of business. It can also happen at an institution or an organization. Therefore, you need to involve other departments such as Human Resources, Risk Management, Legal, and Accounting and Finance.
Step 2: Develop a Crisis Communication Plan
The next step is to develop a crisis communication plan for every crisis stage. The plan identifies who does what during each stage, from the first information leakage about the crisis until it is finally resolved. Like any other communications planning, the objective of this step is to ensure that you have identified all the stakeholders and addressed their needs in a way that meets your corporate objectives.
Step 3: Walk Through the Crisis
Risk management professionals will often conduct a walk-through rehearsal of the crisis. The walk-through will ensure that all those involved are aware of their roles and responsibilities. Each role is clear about how it will communicate during the crisis.
Step 4: Monitor Progress
The fourth step after implementing the plan is to review progress against it periodically. You should also re-plan for any changes in events or developments that may affect it. The changes can include new information, additional needs, and broader audience needs.
Step 5: Roll Out the Crisis Response Plan
Once all the plan elements have been implemented, ensure that your employees are trained in their roles. Training will ensure that they are confident, know what to do, and act with speed and competence when a crisis occurs. Then, monitor your progress against the plan to make sure you have achieved its objectives.
Tips and Methods to Identify Crises Before They Happen
NetBaseQuid offers the best crisis management solutions there is. By using NetBaseQuid as a business analysis platform, you will identify a crisis and prepare for any fallout.
NetBaseQuid can aid crisis management in the following ways:
1. It Lets You Understand Your Brand Exposure
NetBaseQuid will help you analyze your data sources such as social media and customer care to identify where problems lie.
2. It Lets You Be the First to Know About the Crisis
When it comes to crises, the time taken to manage them is essential. Usually, brands take more than 21 hours to respond. This is detrimental to the reputation of the brand. NetBase helps you by improving your response time.
3. It Enables You to Be Quick to Act and Control the Chaos
Usually, crises bring along a lot of noise and lamenting from various customer engagement channels. This noise is extreme on social media. It can be confusing to develop quick and wise responses to these lamentations.
To know how and when to respond to the noise, you need to use the NetBaseQuid platform.
4. It Enables You to Understand How Crisis Impacts Your Competitors
Many factors can affect your market. These include important industry events and regulatory issues. How you respond to these factors directly impacts your competitive position in the market. It would be best to improve your responses with NetBaseQuid to stay relevant in your market.
5. It Helps You Measure the Impact of the Crisis on Brand Intervention
If the crisis is internal, such as a crash involving one of your products, NetBaseQuid can give you an indication of the extent to which it has damaged your brand reputation.
