Crisis Communications

Crisis is something every one can relate to they own life. Crisis may be accident while driving, end of fuel in the car in mid of forest, or any theft happened while shopping etc. crisis is one of the emotions which every one have in their life. Even organizations face the crisis some times. That may be the some scandals like quality problem, packing problem or may be marketing crisis. But one or the other way every organization has its own crisis in its own way.
Even in an organization, crisis can arise at any time and management is expected to be ready for any situation. Management should be ready with their plans to solve the crisis at any point of time because now one can guess when crisis can arise in organisation. A responsible and good manger is always will be prepared to face the public and its constituents at any point of time.
Crisis characteristic
1)The element of surprise
2)Insufficient information
3)The quick pace of events
4)Intense scrutiny

Employees play very important role in crisis situation, who will representative of the company. Along with external constituents it is very much required to communicate with internal constituents. Timely handling the crisis avoids false facts and rumours.
Crisis management
We do not get any tracing before crisis. We can learn handling crisis only during crisis. Some of the crisis management guidelines are as follows assign the teams to responsible for monitoring early-warning signals, maintaining readiness and coordinating responses should a be occur.
Create a crisis portfolio: it is just similar to financial portfolio. It is a tool to analyze and spread rise. For example, there are financial crises (e.g., hostile takeover), legal crises (e.g., losing proprietary information), psychopathic crises (e.g., sabotage) and industrial disasters. While it certainly isn’t possible to have a plan for each conceivable crisis, it is possible to identify those that represent the major threats to the organization. Audit continuously: Crisis management is most effective through continuous process improvement. The best organizations regularly audit their external environment, as well as their operations, technologies and organizational culture. This identifies potential vulnerabilities that could lead to a disruption, incident or crisis.

Example: Intel and the Pentium chip
A math professor working on an obscure problem discovered that the Pentium chip introduced certain errors into his extremely precise calculations. He contacted Intel, but they didn’t acknowledge the problem.
Finally, Intel admitted the problem. Intel damaged its reputation with customers, and ended up spending $475 million to replace all of its chips. The crisis occurred because Intel viewed the problem as minor, while the customer saw it as a major concern. Intel didn’t appreciate that the “customer is always right.”

Personal experience: last year when I went to Goa, I had visited a resort called jungle INN. I asked for the deluxe room but because of the communication problem I have allotted a normal room. I have encountered this problem because of the language problem between me and the receptionist.
Reference: Corporate Communication by Paul Argenti
http://www.winstonbrill.com/bril001/html/article_index/articles/351-400/article354_body.html