The Beginner’s Guide to Best Crisis Management Strategy

As there are a lot of different situations which can cause great damage to your company no matter your industry, size or resources, it is important to be prepared for these unplanned events by implementing the best PR crisis management plan and ensuring that you have the right people by your side to help you manage and work through the crisis. So what do you do? You immediately pull breaks and apply strategies to manage the crisis!

A Business Crisis is an event or a series of events that cause a major disturbance for a business. It has the potential to threaten the success and health of a company by tarnishing its reputation, damaging its business operations, negatively impacting its finances, or harming its employees. Generally, in this situation, the decisions are taken quickly as the time is short.

Crisis Management is the process of preparing for and managing any emergencies that have the potential to harm stakeholders, employees, customers and revenue. It is an important part of Public Relations.  So are there any steps? Yes! You follow a Crisis Management Process.

Now, let’s get into the primary process of crisis management.

1. Pre-Crisis: The first step involves preventing any potential crises. This involves creating a crisis management plan, hiring and training your crisis management team, and conducting regular practice exercises for implementing your plan. It also involves drafting any crisis communication messages that you may have to relay in times of crisis. Writing these messages in advance saves time when an emergency happens.
2. Crisis Management and Response: This stage deals with the process of dealing with responding to different stages of the crisis. It means putting the plan into action in which initial messages are released.
3. Post-Crisis: This stage usually comes when the crisis passes or subsides and crisis management work is hardly finished. It is necessary for the crisis management team to remain in contact with the employees, customers, and stakeholders and remain available to answer any questions. This stage is also important to review and analyse the strategy and how it may play during a real emergency.

Why the Crisis Management Plan?

To protect your organisation from any unplanned event that may lead to a dent in the reputation, negatively impacting its finances, or harming its employees, a crisis management plan is needed. Check out the following reasons why you need a crisis management plan:

• It helps you in maintaining your reputation with customers, competitors, and industry leaders during and post the crisis.
• It Improves the safety, health, and well-being of everyone who works for and does business with your company.
• Provides you with peace of mind as an employer and company — you’ll be ready for any situation that comes your way.
• It Increases productivity during and after the crisis. Everyone will know their role and function throughout a crisis so there’s less downtime, more action, and quicker resolution.

For an effective crisis management plan, you must consider having one of the best PR agencies in Gurgaon.

Steps for Creating an Effective Crisis Management Plan

Now, let’s have a look at the following steps to create an effective crisis management plan.

1. Identify all types of Crisis: The first step is to identify all possible types of crises that could happen to your specific business. There are different types of crisis like financial crisis, personnel crisis, organizational crisis, technological crisis and natural crisis. Hire the best digital PR agency which can alter your strategy according to the type of risk.
2. Evaluate the impact of each type of crisis on your business: The second step is to evaluate the impact of each of these events that could have on your company, employees, and customers. For Example; Customer dissatisfaction, reduction in sales, destroyed reputation, increase in expenses and many more. By evaluating the impact each crisis could have on your business, you’ll be able to understand each possible angle of a threat or catastrophe and, therefore, prepare for it accordingly.
3. Review the necessary actions to resolve the crisis: Review the necessary actions you and your business would need to work on through a crisis. Most-used common methods include:
   • Responsive Crisis Management: When a business has a prepared response to a specific type of crisis that they can roll out at any point in time. This response strategy can handle any unforeseen event.
   • Proactive crisis management: When a business anticipates a specific type of crisis occurring and proactively prepares for it. For example; A natural calamity.
   • Recovery crisis management: When a business manages a crisis that blindsided them because that was unexpected. For example; Technological crisis.
   With identifying all types of crisis, the decision-making committee must develop a business continuity plan. If you are struggling to maintain your brand reputation, consult some of the best PR agencies in New Delhi which will help you in developing PR strategy as well as communication which will improve your reputation among customers and competitors.
4. Decide the team members you need to take in each scenario: As you have considered the impact of each type of crisis and the actions you will take to resolve them, it’s time to think who you will be requiring to carry necessary resolution plans and actions. It may include expertise in different areas of business, HR, public relations, and anyone else you see fit based on your specific situation. Also, consider consulting assistance of lawyers, consultants, or first responders.
5. Formulate resolution plans: Initiate formulating plans based on the information collected in the above steps. As each resolution plan will differ based on the situations here are some common questions to consider while developing any type of crisis resolution plan:
   • a) Maximum time to resolve the crisis
   • b) Tools and resources, will you need
   • c) How many people, and which people, did you determine will be involved?
   • d) Will you need to address your customers directly?
   • e) What is the cause of the crisis and how can you prevent it from happening again?
   Consult the best integrated digital marketing agency which can help you tackle your organisational crisis through the best PR crisis management strategy.
6. Initiate Training and Preparation with formulated plans: It is important for everyone involved in your crisis management plans to be trained in the role they’re expected to play. This can be done through meetings and presentations.
   Employees who may not play a role in resolving a given crisis will still be impacted by its occurrence. They should be informed of the actions they’re expected to take as well.
7. Update your plans Regularly and when necessary: As your company grows, you might increase your number of employees, open offices in new cities (or countries), or change the structure of your business operations, it is necessary to revisit and update your crisis management plans to ensure they still apply and work for your company.

These are the steps that will help you in tacking the organisational crisis the best way. As you focus on your core business operations, let some of the best branding agencies in New Delhi take care of PR crisis management strategy.