A crisis management firm is a firm that helps businesses, organizations, or individuals prepare for, respond to, and recover from unexpected situations that are threatening their reputation or operations. Its specialists are well-equipped with industry knowledge to create crisis management plans that can help clients build their resilience in facing potential issues and risks.
Crisis management companies cover five areas of crisis management. They deliver end-to-end solutions to businesses in some or all the following areas:
- Crisis preparedness: The foundation of effective crisis management. It involves taking proactive measures to identify potential risks, assess vulnerabilities, and formulate comprehensive strategies to mitigate and manage crises. Crisis preparedness also includes creating crisis management protocols and response plans.
- Crisis response: Solutions implemented during a crisis to minimize the impact on a business, organization, or individual. They involve immediate decisive actions and real-time incident reporting to maintain public trust.
- Crisis communication: Setting an open communication line with internal teams, stakeholders, media connections, and the public to ensure effective damage control and avoid misinformation.
- Crisis recovery: Steps taken in guiding organizations through the aftermath of a crisis. This includes assessing the damage, implementing corrective actions, and ensuring accountability to start restoring normal operations.
- Crisis evaluation: Learning from past crises to improve future crisis management capabilities. By evaluating a crisis response, crisis management firms gather data to analyze response performance and use it to create data-driven changes to an organization’s resilience plan.
Businesses face a wide range of crises, spanning from unforeseen to predictable. PwC’s Global Crisis and Resilience Survey found that 96% of businesses have faced disruption in the past two years. According to a PRNews survey, ethics and compliance crises top the list, with 55% of respondents saying those affect their industries the most. Extreme weather crises follow with 41%, while mismanagement and cyberattacks crises are at 39% chance of affecting an industry.
PwC also pointed out that the lack of expertise presents a significant challenge for organizations, with 31% of respondents facing difficulty building a team of their own with the right skills to create or execute a strategic crisis management plan.
Hiring a crisis management company removes that burden as it offers a ready-to-deploy team of professionals who can handle and monitor your crises to protect your business’ reputation. The following case study is an excellent example. Namely, a leading company in the natural resources industry struggled with a bad publicity crisis; a minority shareholder used strong media connections to promote negative articles about the company.
Percepto addressed these challenges by highlighting the company’s strengths previously unknown to the public, such as good employee benefits, innovative products, and its focus on sustainability. It also revamped the client’s website to enhance user experience (UX) and implemented SEO improvements to boost organic traffic and results.
The crisis management team implemented major content updates highlighting the company’s achievements and philanthropic efforts. Through a niche website, it provided a platform focusing on company news, human resources, and career opportunities. The Percepto team also added profiles for its stakeholders to connect with the audience on a deeper level and created a personal website for the majority shareholders to increase company transparency.
The crisis management strategy that Percepto executed has helped the client establish a positive reputation, diminishing the public’s negative perception of the company after 14 months of the campaign implementation.
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