What You Need From Your Crisis Communication Solution

“Three in four businesses QBE spoke to felt positive about their ability to deal with unpredictable events, but only 29% had risk management plans in place for such events, while even less (17%) carried out stress tests.” (Airmic, 2020)

When an emergency, incident or crisis occurs, time is of the essence. The speed and the quality of your response could mean the difference between a catastrophic impact to your organisation or a rapid recovery. At the very least communicating promptly with the right solution can help to keep your people safe and save you time and money. 

Read on to find out how the right crisis communication solution can help you with this.

Call To Arms

A crisis communication solution needs to be able to perform multiple functions to support both your internal and external communications and be used holistically across your business.

In most organisations, a crisis is usually managed by a specialised team, such as the Business Continuity, Crisis Management or Major Incident Team. Some larger organisations have a tiered approach to their Business Continuity Management. e.g. Gold team, Silver team and Bronze team. These are the people that convene quickly to effectively manage these types of events.

The first step is to send a message to your response team with a brief message to describe the nature of the incident. From there, you can supply the team with instructions on where, when or how you will convene. In some cases this will be a physical location and for others that could mean digitally via a conference call. 

This process is then replicated by sending communications to the people that are impacted by the incident. This could be a blend of internal or external stakeholders, including temporary visitors. 

It’s important that messages can be sent quickly based on specific criteria such as locations, departments or groups; targeting multiple communication channels/devices.

We spoke to a ‘Head of’ in an NHS foundation recently, who told us that his existing system only targets computers, however, most of the people he supports are not desk-based and need to receive notifications on their smartphones. This challenge is likely to grow as more people work remotely and flexibly following the Coronavirus pandemic.

Sending out messages en masse can be a lengthy and complicated task if the system you’re using is not designed or optimised to do so. This can have a direct impact on the safety of your people, and a measurable impact on the cost of the incident, through lost productivity. For example, in the legal sector fee-earners charge hundreds of pounds per hour. If an incident impacts X fee-earners for Y hours, it’s easy to estimate the cost of the incident. An inefficient communication system can also tie up valuable resources that could be helping out with other recovery activities.

“According to the Index, the world is a less predictable place for businesses. Almost all of the ‘least predictable years’ in the Index have occurred in the past 20 years, with the majority during the past ten years. Interestingly, the research also showed that periods of unpredictability come in five-year cycles and the next peak was expected to hit in 2020.” (Airmic, 2020)

Clarity and Safety In Times Of Chaos

One important point to consider is that not all people will be as comfortable in crisis as a dedicated, trained team such as the Crisis Management team. 

For some, this could cause feelings of panic. When people panic they often need clear and concise instructions so that they can keep themselves and others safe without escalating the situation. That’s why you need your crisis communication solution to allow for pre-planned message templates to be sent at a moment’s notice. This also helps to improve the quality of your communication, since you can create, review and approve these templates away from the pressure of a major incident.

Timely communication also has other advantages too. It helps you focus your attention on proactive activities. For example, if you operate an IT Service Desk, if you communicate promptly and regularly during a major incident, it reduces the number of people that contact the IT Service Desk during the incident, allowing the IT Service Desk to focus on proactive recovery-related activities.

Another important point to remember is how to communicate with your guests/visitors. If your organisation sees a lot of traffic from visitors or the general public, it’s no good simply informing the teams within your organisation. 

Your emergency messaging system needs the flexibility to be able to send notifications to different locations, ideally tiered. So you could quickly send a notification to an entire country or region. Your emergency notification solution should also be aware of timezones, so notifications are presented in the correct local time.

In Case Of System Failure

“Preparation is the key to building resilience. Organisations that survive and succeed in an environment of enhanced unpredictability will be those that are best prepared.” (Airmic, 2020)

Technology has become increasingly integral to the workplace. If an incident causes these lines of communication to sever, it could leave you severely incapacitated. That’s why your crisis communication solution should not only operate on a variety of multiple devices and channels - but should also be accessible when your IT systems are unavailable. That is, ideally, it should be cloud-based and it should be able to function independently of your IT systems, meaning you can communicate even during IT downtime. 

In 2017 I helped a global law firm recover from a major cyber incident that wiped all of its computers and servers. They communicated well during the cyber incident, which helped them keep their business going while the IT team recovered their IT systems. We know catastrophic IT failures can happen. We can no longer keep our heads in the sand, with fingers and toes crossed hoping it doesn’t happen to us. If it does happen, communication is key.

Having access to a centralised console is also a great way of keeping an eye on the situation as the incident develops. 

Also, the ideal crisis management solution will offer a smartphone application to help you save money as SMS text messages can be expensive. Smartphones are pretty much like ‘keys’ these days, in that people tend to carry them everywhere they go. Applications also prevent any privacy concerns that could arise from users having to disclose their mobile phone number. 

Similarly, this will also help to reduce ‘email fatigue’ that many people face. You need your alerts to be seen and not ignored and so sending them to an app is a great way to funnel your communications.

A Softer Side of Communication

Being able to engage in two-way communication is incredibly effective at understanding the status of your people during an incident. Being able to pose questions, and for your people to provide structured responses is important. During the Coronavirus pandemic, a lot of organisations found it difficult to keep track of the status of their people. A good communication solution should facilitate this type of activity. Ensuring privacy is paramount too.

You might be thinking: ‘All this sounds good, however, people can ignore notifications’. The best communication solutions provide you with the ability to target those people that haven’t responded to the notification yet. So you can chase just the people that have not engaged yet, and not bother everyone else.

After the incident has been dealt with, a reputable crisis communication solution should keep a concise audit trail of outbound and inbound messages as well as all activities taken in the solution. This helps you to demonstrate an active duty of care.

This data can be a lot to manage. That’s why it should allow the user to easily export it into a common file format that supports spreadsheets etc.

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So to summarise, these are the things you want from an effective crisis communication solution. You want to be able to reach a large number of people whilst still being able to target specific groups. It needs to allow for pre-approved templates of instructions to be communicated quickly and concisely. It also needs to be able to operate despite IT downtime and support multiple channels of communication and devices. Finally, you need to keep a record of messages sent and received to help you demonstrate a duty of care. 

Klaxon offers Real-Time Incident Communication across dispersed audiences, providing relevant information during critical incidents to ensure business continuity through technology. It is a significantly simpler and more intuitive mass communication solution than its competitors, accounting for multiple notification channel options. 

Be ready for whatever happens today.

Schedule a demo today to see how our platform can solve your challenges to connect any audience to important events as soon as they happen.

For more information on our products and services, get in touch via the contact points below. 

[email protected] / 0333 242 7902