Crises are an unavoidable part of life, including business. This applies to every industry, even those in heavily regulated sectors like construction and their affiliated support businesses. Providing supplementary services doesn’t exclude you from having to deal with crises.
It just changes the type of crisis you’ll likely experience.
You can minimize risk left, right, and center, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s impossible to preemptively address all threats to your business. That’s why you must take your efforts one step further and invest in crisis management.
If you keep your entire crisis management process internal, however, you risk souring your relationship with your construction clients. That’s why you also need crisis communication.
Introducing Crisis Communication
Crisis communication is the bridge between your business and others. In some cases, crisis communication will need to be focused on the general public, but for businesses dealing with construction clients, the focus will usually be internal.
Crisis communication can help you maintain trust with your clients by keeping them in the loop about what is going on, what you are doing to stop it, and, eventually, the overall damage.
Having a great CPaaS (CPaaS meaning communications platform as a service) can help you efficiently manage all communication needs. However, to really master crisis communication, you need to leverage tools like CPaaS with a practiced plan of action.
Why You Need a Crisis Communication Plan
One of the most common reasons why you would need to roll out such a crisis communication plan is due to a cybersecurity attack. Cyber attacks are only becoming more common. In 2023, there was a 72% increase in data breaches compared to 2021 alone. Data being stolen, held ransom, or operations disrupted can all impact your relationship with your clients.
Businesses with an active crisis communication plan also fared better than those that didn’t during and post-crisis.
In a Capterra study, only around 49% of respondents claimed they had a crisis communication plan. Of those who have used such a plan, however, 95% state it was effective and essential, 84% are going to increase their practice in advance, and 78% are going to increase their use of communication tools.
Image sourced from Capterra
Benefits of Having a Crisis Communication Plan at Your Fingertips
A crisis communication plan offers many benefits for your bottom line, client management, and future success.
Additionally, incorporating a hybrid work policy into your crisis management strategy ensures continuity and flexibility, allowing your team to maintain effective communication and operations regardless of physical location.
Improves Trust with Your Construction Clients
Keeping your construction clients in the know and fully informed is how you assure them their concerns, business, and information are paramount to you. The last thing a client wants to hear is that their financial data has been leaked online, and the information didn’t come from you.
If any news comes out, it should be from you first. This lets you set the tone for your relationship and salvage the trust.
Keeps Crisis Resolution Moving Quickly
A crisis communication plan is just one part of your overall crisis management strategy. Having both at hand lets your entire team quickly move and respond to the crisis promptly, which, in turn, mitigates the damage. Your crisis management plan limits how much physical or digital damage is caused, and your crisis communication plan limits your reputation damage.
Rescues Your Business Reputation
Your reputation is at risk every time your business or clients are in crisis. The good news is that simply being communicative can help salvage a relationship. Clear communication is a key part of subcontractor management, public relations, and, most critically, client relationships.
An excellent crisis communication plan can even help your brand escape blame. In a study focused on the hospitality industry, 67% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that a strong communication strategy can remove blame, and 78.2% believed that a business’s reputation could be protected by its communication strategies.
Image sourced from Research Gate
What’s Included in a Crisis Communication Plan?
A solid crisis communication plan outlines who is involved, the best business phone service for their needs, and their step-by-step strategy for communicating through a crisis with your clients.
To succeed, however, you need a fully realized crisis management plan for multiple eventualities. You will also need a fully prepared and practiced crisis communication team, a checklist of steps that the team needs to take, and all the tools needed to effectively send and receive messages with your clients or the wider public.
Utilizing a desktop time tracker helps ensure that each phase of the crisis response is executed swiftly and within the necessary time frames, facilitating better management of team activities and resource allocation.
Top Strategies to Improve Your Crisis Communication Plan to Maintain Trust with Your Construction Clients
You can add many strategies to your crisis communication plan to help you maintain the trust of your construction clients.
Identify Key Stakeholders
You need a fully realized crisis communication team, but that team doesn’t need to sit on their thumbs waiting for a crisis to work. Your team can be made up of your PR executive, parts of your legal team, division heads, and outsourced crisis experts. So long as everyone is prepared and practiced, they can and should be able to pivot quickly without stretching their overhead.
Identify Hazard Scenarios
Crisis communication means nothing if you don’t have a plan of action to fix the crisis. When creating crisis management strategies, start first by identifying hazard scenarios applicable to your business. See what your competition has had to deal with, and make plans to tackle those issues. Write it down, and make it widely available to those in your crisis management team.
It’s also useful to monitor one’s own personal vulnerabilities. Sometimes, something as simple as using audit trails can help enhance accountability while giving crisis managers greater insight into weak points that might break in the future.
Draft and Practice Crisis Resolution Strategies for Each Scenario
Create actionable steps to deal with each hazard scenario. No plan survives contact with the enemy, but you can address the crisis quickly if you have a frame of reference. More importantly, you have an immediate plan of action you can communicate to your clients to assuage their concerns.
Create Your 15-30-60-90 Timeline for Each Scenario
In today’s digital world, you need a 15-30-60-90 communication timeline. This means:
- 15 Minutes: Acknowledge the incident and assure your clients you are responding.
- 30 Minutes: Provide more in-depth information about the nature of the crisis.
- 60 Minutes: Have a dedicated spokesperson provide an in-depth statement about the crisis and how you plan to respond.
- 90 Minutes: Hold a press conference or virtual meeting with your clients. During this time, clients should be able to ask questions and receive direct responses.
Maintain Honesty Throughout Your Communication
You need to maintain full honesty throughout your communication. Part of this honesty needs to include education. Customer education, even during a crisis, can help ensure that every client better understands what is going on and why the steps you are taking are the right ones for the moment.
Create a Crisis Communication Channel for Live Updates
You need to hear from your clients and the wider public as well. With that in mind, you will want to open a crisis communication channel (for example, a dedicated email or chatbot) and use social listening tools. Use this information to understand what your clients are most upset about and to uncover the full extent of the crisis so you can fix it correctly the first time.
Use All Available Channels to Get Your Message Across
Small businesses with a limited number of clients should open direct communication channels with every client they hold. If you have too many to effectively use this one-on-one approach, however, you need to consider which channels you focus on.
In general, you’ll want to use:
- Every social media platform
- Your business LinkedIn account
- Email communications
- Phone calls
- Texts
Using all available platforms increases the chances of every client seeing and following the news.
Continue with Post-Crisis Communication
You aren’t done when the crisis is over. Now is the time to offer your heartfelt apology for the crisis. This is key since it sets the tone for relationship rebuilding.
Don’t follow in the footsteps of CloudStrike’s CEO George Kurtz, whose initial apology was widely criticized for feeling disingenuous. Thankfully for CloudStrike, their chief security officer, Shawn Henry, stepped up and provided a heartfelt apology, which their clients responded to.
A good follow-up communication strategy needs to:
- Fully acknowledge the issue and what happened, including where your business went wrong.
- Express a heartfelt, sincere apology.
- Reference your previous good standing to highlight how this is just a blip in your otherwise stellar reputation.
- Personally connect with your audience to build that emotional connection
- Showcase how your business is committed to rectifying the problem so it never happens again.
This can be done widely if you have hundreds or thousands of construction clients, or it can be done personally if you have only a handful.
Final Thoughts
Communicating through a crisis is essential to salvaging your relationship with your clients. Communicating well, promptly, and with a full action plan at hand can help you do so much more than just salvage the relationship; it can also help your business maintain your clients’ trust. Be honest, prompt, and sincere, and you can move forward with confidence.