Crises happen in every organisation. From your website experiencing glitches to broken links in your supply chain, big or small, it’s not a matter of if but when your company is faced with its next crisis.
Prepare your company in advance to be able to detect and manage crises right from the start and prevent your operations from stalling altogether.
3 Stages of Crisis Management
We look at the key phases of crisis management. Asterisks (*) indicate that you can facilitate AI software to assist you in creating a state-of-the-art crisis response, which we cover in more depth below.
Pre-Crisis
Preparations for your next crisis should start now. Though you cannot know for certain what it could be, with the help of crisis management software you can run risk assessments, plan ahead and even prevent crises from occurring in the first place.
1. Identify risks
Compile a complete list of all of the potential threats to your organisation. Consider:
● Human error / carelessness
● Poor data handling
● Bad security practices
● Poor hiring practices
● Technological errors
● Risks from third parties such as vendors, distributors, etc.
● Bad customer experience*
● Misinformation spread online*
● Maliscious actors including unhappy employees,* ex-employees, terrorist threats, hackers
● Natural disasters
2. Run due diligence*
Determine the immediacy of each threat by running due diligence checks.
3. Plan
For each potential crisis, put together a contingency plan. Establish levels of response according to the severity of the crisis. Prepare protocols and make sure they are in line with regulations and standards. Consider who would need to be included in your crisis management team.
4. Train employees
Make sure that everyone involved is briefed of their responsibilities and feels confident in how to respond during a crisis.
5. Use AI for early detection*
Get a headstart on your crisis management plan by using AI software for early crisis detection and prevent crises from escalating.
Crisis
It’s crunch time. Put your plans into action, monitor progress, and make adjustments where necessary. Even the best laid plans sometimes don’t work out, so be prepared to adapt original plans.
1. Monitor the situation*
Things can rapidly change. Monitor the situation throughout your crisis response and see how your plans are impacting change. Make sure to communicate updated statuses to all internal and external parties.
2. Adapt your plans as necessary
In response to the evolving situation, make sure your crisis team meet regularly and make necessary course corrections.
3. Adjust business operations
Consider the knock-on effect of the crisis on, for example, supply chain requirements. You may need to increase your resources or employ a third party to meet your temporary requirements.
4. Monitor employee well-being*
Employees will feel the burden in terms of stress, increased responsibility, and may even be expected to work overtime. Don’t take employees for granted. Their health and well-being must still be of utmost consideration.
If the crisis itself directly poses a health risk to your employees, ensure they are informed of the precautions needed and supplied with necessary equipment to enable them to maintain their health while working.
Use AI to monitor employee reviews, pulse surveys and analyse communications to detect struggling departments and take steps to mitigate employee churn at this crucial time.
Post crisis
Your crisis response doesn’t end as soon as the core issue is resolved. In the aftermath, you’ll have to deal with fallout and repercussions such as damage to customer sentiment and loyalty. The post-crisis phase also entails evaluating and revising your crisis response in light of events.
1. Transition to business as usual
Your crisis team will need to evaluate when and how to transition ease off on emergency procedures, call a halt to extra resources and transition back to normal operations.
2. SWOT analysis & reporting
Evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that came to light during the crisis. Meet to evaluate and make changes to your crisis management plan. Create a full report of findings and recommendations.
3. Reassess your position within the market*
The crisis may have had a dramatic impact on your organisation and its position within the industry. Compare your performance against your main competitors. In light of events your competitors may be more of a threat to your company than previously.
4. Rebuild customer trust*
How did the crisis impact customer sentiment and loyalty? Find out to what extent the reputation of your organisation has been damaged and continue efforts to monitor and rebuild trust among consumers.
*Applying AI Software At Different Crisis Management Stages
Symanto is at the forefront of natural language processing (NLP) technology which can be applied at various points throughout each of the crisis management stages.
Our text analysis software can be used to analyse vast amounts of textual data from social media, employee review sites, internal communications, news sites and more.
Keep a pulse on what the public, your employees and the media are saying and how they feel about your organisation.
Pre crisis
● Employee due diligence
Unhappy employees post a PR risk to your company. You can use our advanced text analysis technology to monitor employee reviews, pulse surveys and social media to pinpoint the issues impacting employee satisfaction.
Identify branches and departments with poor sentiment and work to improve satisfaction and minimise the likelihood of poor PR or even malicious leaks from unhappy employees.
● Customer satisfaction
Use Symanto technology on social media conversations and customer reviews to identify key topics impacting public sentiment towards your brand.
● Early detection
Use NLP technology to keep track of new and fast emerging topics being mentioned online regarding your brand or your industry. Pinpoint exactly when the problem started to help you track down the original source of the issue. This is particularly useful in instances of misinformation or data leaks.
Crisis
● Monitoring
Monitor conversations about your brand for sentiment and emotion. Use Symanto to run regular searches and find out how conversation around your brand is evolving.
● Communication
Use our communication style detection technology to determine what people expect from your brand.
Our emotion text analysis API can help you detect whether people are responding emotionally to the situation. If so, you will need to adjust your messaging to address people empathetically and minimise negative sentiment.
● Employee wellbeing
Analyse employee communications to check for signs of distress and strongly negative sentiment. Intervene where necessary to keep teams from burning out as a result of the crisis.
Post crisis
● Competitive analysis
The Symanto Insights Platform makes it easy to run fast and accurate competitor analysis using publicly available data from social media, news and review sites.
Find out what people are saying about your organisation and how it compares to your key competitors. Using like-for-like data, you can identify which of your competitors have the best reputation online, in which areas they excel, and in which areas you have the advantage.
● Rebuild customer trust
Using a combination of sentiment and psychographic analysis, our technology can identify what proportion of your customer base are loyal promoters of your brand versus what proportion are detractors who speak negatively about your brand online.
Use this measurement to track the impact of your post-crisis marketing and communications strategies.
Get Started With Symanto
Find out more about each of Symanto’s products and how they can be integrated to help you at all stages of your crisis response. Get in touch or book your free personalised demonstration.
