Five Steps to Managing Client Service During a Crisis

By Collabry Senior Strategic Consultant, John Pacheco

Consider for a moment all of the activities your business takes on to attract, win, and keep your valuable customers: Product development; consumer experience design; research, development, and innovation to serve new markets; promoting your services to reach prospective customers. Every business from small mom-and-pops to large multinational enterprises is continuously engaged in these activities. And successful business leaders know that none of these undertakings are ever “done.” The time and resources you devote to serving customers is your largest business investment. It makes perfect sense that this is your most sizable investment: serving customers is the reason you went into business in the first place! And serving customers is always good for your bottom line.

As you win each new customer, earning their trust is the key to retaining them and building their loyalty over the long term. How do businesses earn customer trust and loyalty? By making their satisfaction the single most important priority, reliably meeting their needs, and making things right when something goes wrong. So, it’s crucial that you know what to do when something goes wrong.

Think something going wrong can’t happen to your business? Think again.

Natural disasters. Customer data breaches. Identity theft. Denial of service attacks. Employee, vendor, and subcontractor malpractice. These are just a few examples from the growing spectrum of events that can strike with little or no warning, disrupting your service to customers and putting their trust in your business in doubt.

As our world grows more interconnected—with a proliferation of web, mobile, and in-person services—the risk that your business may encounter interruption in one or more customer channels increases. Here’s what you can do to be prepared if a crisis lands on your business’ doorstep.

1. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Make sure crisis risk awareness becomes a part of your everyday workplace culture. Your job as a business leader is to see to it that your employees, vendors, and other key partners are fully aligned and have the resources they need to prevent unnecessary business risk—and that they are following sound processes and escalation protocols to thwart avoidable crises.

2. Have a Plan.

While some particulars can’t be fully known until unfortunate incidents occur, many details can be anticipated and prepared for more generally so that you have a starting point to fill in the blanks when disaster strikes.

Your best defense is to foresee as many “what ifs” as you can. Document your business resolution plan with as much detail as you can reasonably predict. Gather all available resources in your plan so you’re ready to “break the glass in an emergency” and put that plan into action. The name of the game here is rapid response—do as much planning and preparation when things are good so you’re able to respond quickly to an issue rather than starting from scratch when the sky is falling.

One last tip for your plan: Keep it handy and up to date. A best practice is to know where your plan is at all times and review its details at least once every quarter or whenever major business changes occur.

3. Take ownership.

When communicating with your customers and the public about your business crisis, it’s important that your message is honest, genuine, transparent, and accountable for the inconvenience exposed to your customers.

Inform your customers about what happened (assuming they don’t already know). Use clear, simple language to communicate. Let your customers know what you intend to do to rectify all problems and get things back to normal. Be clear on the timeline for your actions and adhere to that timeline. Take accountability by personally putting your name on your message.

No one enjoys receiving bad news. Your customers will immediately shift to high alert, watching to make sure you walk the talk and aren’t using a nice mea culpa letter to camouflage loose commitments. Keeping your word is your first step toward winning back customers’ trust and reminding them why they trusted you to begin with.

A side note: Depending on the nature of a crisis, your business may be exposed to legal/liability, reputational, or other forms of risk. You may find yourself in a position to have to balance what you say against exposing your business to additional damage. The operative word here is balance—weigh the counsel you receive from attorneys, public relations experts, and other professional advisors, and take as much ownership as is reasonable for the circumstances. But always err on the side of being forthright with your customers.

4. Lean hard into customer accommodations.

When an error in your business operations jeopardizes customers’ security, it’s best to be accountable and do everything within your control to make things right for those innocent bystanders.

For example: If your business suffers a data breach exposing customers’ confidential data, take action such as offering affected parties credit monitoring and identity theft protection for a period ranging from one to two years. Don’t merely suggest that customers be on the lookout for fraud by monitoring their credit reports and financial accounts—that approach places the onus for your mistake on them. Begin with what you’re going to do to help them mitigate further problems resulting from your error, then suggest additional precautions they may take.

A best practice is to make sure each year that your business liability insurance coverage levels are sufficient to ensure you’re able to provide error and omission resolution services to customers. Make sure your policy is in line with the size of your business, and your coverage can either fully or mostly meet the cost of these services to limit your ongoing financial obligation.

5. Implement safeguards to avoid repeat events.

After you’ve activated your crisis response plan, notified your customers, and taken steps to ease their burden, it’s time to identify and resolve the incident’s root causes to reduce the risk of recurrence.

Whether the root causes are technological, procedural, human, or some combination of these factors, act swiftly to change all necessary processes to prevent the issue from resurfacing. You may also wish to have a follow-up communication with your customers to let them know what changes you’re making and reinforce your commitment to winning back their trust.

Remember, as Warren Buffett said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”