Handling a Crisis
Right from the top, I want to make it clear that this post is not intended to minimize the events ongoing at Penn State University. Who knows what the end result will be, and the process of proving guilt or innocence must be allowed to continue unimpeded. It is a tragic situation that has impacted many, and those who have suffered deserve support and justice.
But based on what has happened thus far, the events offer a cautionary tale in handling PR during times of crisis.
At one point or another, every company comes face-to-face with a lit fuse or a recently exploded bombshell. I remember one job where we had sent out a marketing email that, for some unknown reason, just kept getting sent to the same list over and over again. Some recipients got the same email 10 times during the course of an hour. There were a lot of unsubscribe requests that day.
This is not to say that an email that won’t stop sending is on the same level as what has been uncovered at Penn State. My point is that crises can come in many different forms and can come out of nowhere.
Auto finance firms are not immune from being caught up in a scandal. Lenders have had to deal with accusations of predatory lending, redlining, dealer reserve markups, and aggressive collection practices, just to name a few.
How a company responds to these kinds of incidents defines success or failure as an enterprise, in my opinion.
The internet acts like a megaphone for disgruntled consumers who are unhappy. Google has made it easy to find complaints voiced on forums and blog posts, and it’s not a good strategy for lenders to try and fight these battles on foreign turf. One company I know, for example, was having problems with its telecommunications. Numerous calls to technical support yielded an appointment two weeks down the road. But a well-worded post on the firm’s Facebook page yielded a call within 30 minutes and an appointment 48 hours later.
I’m reading Dale Carnegie’s classic, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” and a key theme throughout the book is to kill people with kindness. Never argue. Never contradict.
Penn State, after what many PR experts consider to be a number of poor decisions, finally hired a firm that specializes in crisis communications.
Brands are priceless commodities, especially in auto finance. The level of trust has to be higher and more explicit between consumer and lender because of the size of the transaction, the length of the relationship, and the nature of the interaction. Damage to a brand can take years to repair. That’s why it’s so important to be open and honest, and to communicate your way through a crisis.
I’d love to hear stories of how you or someone you know dealt with a crisis. If we get enough stories, I’ll share them in a subsequent post (but be sure to keep names and companies out of the conversation).
