Crisis Communication

While reading the article How to Communicate in A Crisis, I realized how important it is to plan for different problems and different scenarios before they happen, in order to be prepared when they do. When a problem happens in a huge company, like the telecommunication company I work for, they need to be prepared to handle it, especially when they have a large customer base and that problem can affect those customers. As Diana Pisciotta said in her article, a crisis communications plan should consider the answers to these questions; What could go wrong? Who’s in Charge? What’s the strategy? Who are the spokespeople?.

I saw such a failure in a crisis communication happen a couple of years ago in my company. My company was one of the most successful companies in the region for years, and they were living under the illusion that “nothing bad will ever happen to (or around) their business or they assume that whatever the crisis is, it will be so unexpected that planning won't do much good.”


Unfortunately something bad did happen. There was a glitch in the system and customers were being billed for services they did not request, or were being over charged for the services they did. When the complaints were brought to the attention of management, they decided to wait it out, mainly because they did not have a plan on how to handle the situation. The problem reached all media outlets and took the company a very long time to figure out what to do. The main reason was they didn’t know who would be the spokesman and represent the company in this situation and if that person should go out in public and give an apology.

Because they were not able to communication well in that crisis, and were not able to realize how critical it was to address the problem as soon as it happened, the company lost a large number of their customers and a huge percentage of their annual profit. They lost their customers trust and loyalty and until this day they are trying to gain it back. 

Organizational Memo

Dear Employee

Telecom ltd. confirms that again we assume the lead as the largest telecommunications operator in the region for its sophisticated services and its advanced achievements at the local, regional and international levels.

A decision of applying a new organizational structure, adopted by the Board of Directors, comes in line with an ambitious plan of the leadership strategy. We aim to focus energies and efforts to take advantage of the emerging opportunities and the willingness to face challenges of the future. It will help in keeping up with developments of the telecommunications market, which accelerated remarkably and require a great ability to adaptation so as to maintain the leading and developed position of our company.

My dear employee, these new developments are a commitment to continue our excellence and leadership in providing the best and latest services to the satisfaction of our customers. This will be achieved only through the cooperation and determined efforts of all employees who have in the past provided creativity and innovation.

We are proud to find that the young leaders, the members of the Telecom ltd. family, are in positions of responsibility to continue our pioneering success locally and globally.

Bad Organizational Communication

I work for a Telecommunication service provider company. The department that I work in has specific tasks that are required to be running 24/7. The department manages the network, which makes us the center point in term of coordinating with other departments. We operate the network through different complex technical systems, and provide technical support to other departments at a certain level.

The example of the bad organizational communication in my department is that management tends to forget how important it is to know about any problems with the network as soon as they happen. The failures in planning how to communicate these problems seem to cause a lot of problems in my department. The head of the department seems to think he has to sign on each memo and email before it goes out. Such protocols take too much time and by the time the email or memo reaches the person evolved, the time, effort and costs to solve the problem would have doubled.

To make it more clear, when the engineer on site who is faced with an issue with one of the network equipment, and needs the issue to be resolved as soon as possible, he would need a reconfiguration from the control center. But he would not be able to simply send the request directly to the control center, instead he has to send it to the head of the department and then the head of the department signs off on it and then resends it to the control center.

What could take 5 minutes to get resolved would take up to 20 minutes or more in some cases. In a telecommunication company every second costs money, and this failure in communication is definitely costing the company a lot of money.