Incident Management Communications
Communicating with Customers When an Incident Affects Your Business
It is 2 am in the morning and you have just received an urgent call from your call centre, informing you that your company’s critical business systems have just gone down, affecting hundreds of customers who depend on them. Customers are starting to call, demanding to know what has happened and when the problem will be resolved. What do you do in this situation? How do you resolve the problem? Who should you inform? What message should you send out to your customers?
Setting up an Incident Management Plan
No matter the size of your business, an incident management plan, which involves procedures for communicating internally with staff and externally with customers and suppliers, can be vital to its survival. When setting up your incident management plan, you will need to find answers to the following questions:
- What is an incident? In other words, when is an event serious enough to make it an "incident" that requires involving staff and informing customers?
- Who should handle an incident? Should this be a technical person? Someone on the call centre? A business decision-maker? An account manager?
- Who should write the communications that go out to staff and customers? A PR or communications person? Another member of staff?
- What type of training and support should you provide to staff who handle incidents? For example, training on any special computer or communications equipment? How much do you pay staff for handling an incident? How much should they be paid for being ‘on call?’ How many staff do you need to be on call, at any given time?
- When do you communicate with customers? What is the threshold or criteria for setting this off? How long should you wait, after being informed about an incident, before communicating?
- Which customers do you communicate with? All or a select few? If you have customers who receive their support in another language, do you provide incident communications in that language?
- How do you inform customers of the problem? By phone, by email? By SMS? On your Website? Using automated systems? What systems or methods should you use for doing this?
- What should you say, when informing customers? What should you not say?
- What should you say once the incident is over?
The answers to many of these questions will depend on considerations such as the size, scale and nature of your business, the importance of any incident to your business and customers, how frequently these occur and what channels you have available for communicating with your customers.
In-depth: You can find out more information about incident management, and answers to the above questions by reading this comprehensive white paper.
It pays to plan!
An effective incident management plan could protect your business from lost revenue and compensation claims, and above all – ensure you maintain a good reputation and the confidence of your customers, enabling your business to continue to grow and prosper.
Don’t wait for a major incident to happen to your business before setting in place your plans and processes for handling incidents and communicating with customers.
