carl
It’s fair to say that unplanned commercial downtime is something no business wishes to deal with. However, almost all will at some point in their operational history. Even big companies can see suspensions of service through means both in and out of their control. And while there’s so much more out of your control in the world, this isn’t necessarily defined by your behavior either.
However, many a commercial drone survey following weather damage has taught us that often, having helpful and quick review systems in place, improving communication and having a set process is better than anything else.
In this post, then,we hope to discuss a few ways to respond even after you suffer commercial downtime, and what to do after all such circumstances take the wind out of your sails.
Keep Everyone Informed, Even If There’s Not Much To Say Right This Moment
It might sound pretty clear, but one of the most helpful things you can do during downtime is just to tell people what’s going on. That includes staff, clients, customers, contractors, and anyone with a stake in what you do. The longer you don’t respond, the faster people start imagining the worst, and that doesn’t help anyone. You often see this online when people will puzzle over if a service is down for them or anyone else, then it makes headlines, then the company responds.
Luckily it’s okay to just give a simple update, such as by saying “we’re aware of the issue, here’s what we know so far, we’ll update you again in an hour.” It’s not super informative but it does show you’re working through the issue.
Review What Happened While It’s Still Fresh
Once things are fixed, you may just want to move on and never look back. The problem with that is you risk missing important details that could help prevent the same thing next time, and also give the impression that you don’t think a suspension of service was a big deal to your customers. It’s worth having a short review while it’s still fresh in everyone’s mind and also using that to message.
For instance, you can ;ook at how long the outage lasted, where the limitations over recovery were, and if anything about your response could be bettered. You can put together a post-action report and then put out a statement with a strong apology and an action plan you’ll put in place to stop in happening again.
Don’t Let The Disruption Define You
It’s true that any kind of stop or failure can feel like a big deal. But remember that most people aren’t just judging you based on what happened, they’re also watching how you deal with it. There’s a chance to come out of it looking even better. That means if you keep your cool, communicate clearly, and get back on your feet with a steady hand, most will respect that more than if nothing ever went wrong at all, and they’ll know you’re the kind of service they can rely on.
With this advice, we hope you can respond with confidence after suffering commercial downtime.
