Crisis Communication!

What’s Next?! The crisis has hit Tiffany & Co. now what do we do? It is good that we have already put together not only a crisis management team but also a number of different crisis management plans. We have made a number of plans for many different families of crisis and thankfully we now can handle our crisis in a somewhat organized manner.
The first step for us to do is to communicate with our internal stakeholders this would be anyone from the owners to the managers and employees of those stores involved. We must keep them all on track with what is going on within the company and with the crisis itself. It is very important that we have a command center set up so that when any questions arise it is very easy to contact those in charge, with letting all the internal stakeholders know where the command center is is very important. Having the general employees informed about the crisis is also essential because they are always in the spotlight. They will be some of the first people that will have questions asked to them and they need know how to answer or if to answer these questions at all.
When dealing with our external environment we must first designate the spokesperson that will be the main contact for this particular crisis. Three main externals we need to deal with would be our customers, the news media, and the internet. We want our customers to be well informed about what is going on so that they do not have to make up stories in their head about what is actually happening. It is best to always communicate with the media is quick as possible so that they do not mix the story up and make the crisis worse than it actually is. When the media asks a question we always need to be ready to respond. The internet is very important as well because the internet is a main source of information for a large amount of customers. Negative information on the internet will spread quicker anything. That being said the internet needs to be monitored extremely closely.
After the crisis is over and all the stakeholders are well informed it is necessary to conduct the post crisis analysis. Here we can finally see how the crisis was dealt with and if it was dealt with in a positive way. We must decide if the outcome of the crisis could have been less damaging then it resulted in or if the results are of good standing. After evaluating this we can decide what needs to be changed for next time.