Quick reaction and the right moves pay off
UK mobile provider O2 found itself experiencing a bit of deja vu when, just months after a 24-hour service disruption left hundreds of thousands without a cellular connection, yet another widespread outage hit its system late last week.
The company actually came out of that incident fairly clean, having issued a quick and public apology, as well as handling the situation in a relatively small time frame. They even successfully redirected stakeholders seeking information to the company Facebook and Twitter feeds when the main website crashed due to overwhelming traffic volume.
Would a second bout of network crisis management knock O2 off course? From the looks of it, not even close. The company was the least complained-about UK mobile network in Q1 of 2012 according to the telecoms regulators at Ofcom, and with complaint about cellular service being honed almost to an art by many, that’s no small achievement.
Although a disruption in any valued service, from cell phone or internet to closed highways, will raise some outraged voices, the vast majority just want to be informed, and for you to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. Once again, O2 pulled through with a near-instant mea culpa, followed up by strong social media customer service. Not to ignore the traditional media, the company also had press spokesmen working hard to answer any questions the major news outlets had.
Improving on this summer’s outages, O2 managed to keep its website live, and even published a running Q&A that used relatively plain terminology to explain quite thoroughly what had caused the outage, and what was being done to fix it.
The dust is still settling from this one, but we feel confident in saying that O2 made the right moves, and despite the brief flare of anger that many customers surely felt, the majority will come out pleased with the level of communication and information coming from the company in the midst of crisis.
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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc., an international crisis management consultancy, author of Manager’s Guide to Crisis Management and Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training. Erik Bernstein is Social Media Manager for the firm, and also editor of its newsletter, Crisis Manager]