Jason S. Bradshaw delivers a live-stream edition of "Talking Points With Jason" focused on crisis management using the recent Optus nationwide network outage as a case study. He outlines four crisis-response principles: build confidence quickly, communicate regularly with clear update cadences, prepare customer-facing teams with key messaging, and apologize while showing concrete steps to prevent recurrence. Bradshaw critiques Optus for inadequate direct customer apologies and for a compensation gesture (200GB bonus data) that he considers insufficient; he recommends stronger, clearly communicated compensation (e.g., a free day of service), testing revised communication plans with customers, and using customer feedback to rebuild trust.
Chapters
Hi everyone. Welcome to Friday or if you're here in Australia, or Thursday if you're somewhere else in the world today. Sorry, I got distracted. I just got started. First of all, I'm Jason Bradshaw. This is my live stream edition of Talking Points With Jason. My Talking Points With Jason newsletter comes out roughly every fortnight and you can subscribe on my website, Jason S. Bradshaw.com or or on LinkedIn, whichever platform suits you best. And each day I'm going to come to you live with some insights and thoughts around current events that are happening in the world of customer and employee experience and business transformation and growth. If you have any questions during the live stream, feel free to pop them into the comments box on whatever platform you're watching and they should come through to me on my system here to be able to respond to you. So yesterday I talked about the crisis that Australia's second largest telecommunications company had, which was a complete network outage coast to coast. Over 10 million customers were impacted. That company, of course, is Optus and it's been an evolving situation. All services were restored after 12 or 14 hours. There's some conflicting reports there, but nonetheless it was a significant outage. Over 10 million customers directly impacted. And of course anyone in, anyone trying to contact those customers were also impacted. So a significant event, you could not describe it any other way as anything else other than a crisis. And yesterday I shared with you the four key ways to manage through a crisis. First of all, you have to build confidence quickly that you are doing what you need to do to resolve the situation to make the problem go away. Remember, customers want you to get it right, but if you don't get it right, they want to know that you're going to make it right. So you've got to build confidence as quickly as possible that you are making it right. Secondly, I said you need to communicate regularly and provide clear milestones on when the next update will come out. For example, every two hours I'm going to give you an update on the hour on our progress on resolving the situation. Three, you need to prepare your customer facing teams and the organization as a whole with key messaging during the event, during the crisis, and also for how to respond once across crisis or the problem itself is resolved because the crisis event will often last longer than the problem depending on how well you handle it of course. And finally, you need to apologize. You need to tell customers what you're doing to minimize or prevent a repeat occurrence of the problem. And you need to demonstrate that you care. Now this last one I Thought was the simplest of them all, apologizing to your customers and demonstrating that you care. Well, as of right now, and I've spoken to a couple of Optus customers because as I told you yesterday, as soon as I could, I turned away and stopped being a customer. But I've spoken to a couple of customers of Optus and they, as of now, they've not received a direct apology via email or SMS from Optus. It baffles me. I cannot understand why you would not send an SMS or an email or heaven forbid, both to customers within 24 hours. In fact, one customer, or, sorry, one colleague who is an Optus of customers received communication from them saying that now their services are restored, it's time for them to return to the store and return their phone that they're upgrading. So Optus has not only missed the chance to apologize to this customer, and I'm sure she's not the only one, but not only missed the chance to apologize and to make it right. They put their own self interest ahead of the customer, they delayed the customer doing the right thing in the first place, and yet now it's their problem, the customer's problem. Like I said, it absolutely baffles me. There are a couple of other learnings though, and I want to share those with you. In an interview yesterday, the CEO of Optus was quizzed or questioned on the amount of communication that was coming out during the crisis, saying that it wasn't enough. Now, the CEO responded directly, saying that they felt they communicated a lot. They were. The individual was very defensive, saying that ultimately that they had communicated more than enough. In fact, well, I'm not going to play that interview for you now, but that's not how I would handle. So in that situation, and if you are in a crisis, you're going to be given questions with people challenging what you did. Right? So here's how I would have responded if I was asked that question. So I would have said that during the evolving situation, we took a number of steps to communicate. But it is clear from the feedback from our customers and from the community at large that we didn't do enough, we didn't communicate enough. I'm sorry. What I can do is tell you what we're doing as a result of this feedback. First of all, we're implementing A, we're implementing B, we're implementing C, and we're sending an email to our 10 million customers asking them for their feedback about our revised plans going forward. We want to know if how we're proposing to Communicate in challenging times is what our customers expect. We think A, B and C are the right things to do based on the feedback that we heard. But we're going to test that with our customers. And so over the next couple of days, everyone that is a customer of ours will receive an email asking for their direct feedback on these steps. You'll see there. I did a couple of things. The key learnings, first of all, I acknowledge the feedback. The and I and I didn't become defensive. I stated the facts, but I acknowledged the feedback. I remained calm. And then the next thing that I did was I moved the conversation forward to what am I doing as a result of the feedback. Because there is no winners if you just defend what people are saying wasn't good enough. So let's acknowledge it, state the facts as you see them, and then talk about what you're doing to move forward. And in the example I gave, the cherry on the top, if you will, was that you're going to test those plans by getting more feedback from your customers. Now, as I said, as of now, Optus also hasn't directly apologized to customers. They have, in fairness, made some press statements apologizing. But the key lesson here is you just apologize to your customers directly. Do the media stuff next, but apologize to them directly. They've also taken a proactive step, you could say, as a gesture. Optus has offered every customer, as I understand it, 200 gigabytes of bonus data that they get a period of time to use. Personally, I don't think it hits the mark. Yeah. You know, in marketing, when you're trying to sell something, you're trying to sell that whatever you're trying to sell, that it's an irresistible offer, that it's the most significant, most fantastic, most irresistible offer in the marketplace right now and people should buy your product because they don't want to miss out and that your customers or potential customers see it and think, wow, the only right thing to do here is to buy. It is so good. This offer is so good. The same is true when you're trying to take a proactive step at scale to manage a crisis or to respond to a crisis. So what I'm suggesting here is that at very least, the gesture of appreciation in the Optus case study is one day free service. That being if you normally bill, if you build normally generated on the first, well, then it would start generating on the second. So you got one free day of service. Yeah, had about half a day, you couldn't use your service. So we're going to give you a full day for free. Now, this doesn't feel like much. And if you work out how much that actually equates to on your bill. It's not a lot in real hard terms, but it is at least somewhat measured against the timescale, at least of what happened. What I'm suggesting is whatever you choose to do, it needs to instill a real sense of making it right for the customer. It should be seen as an amazing gesture. Oh, a little bit more than what perhaps you should do. Yes. Industry leading. You don't have to just keep making the same offers that everyone else makes. In these challenges, how can you differentiate your brand and show that you care and do something a little bit more to rapidly restore trust and confidence and loyalty in your brand? That's what I'm suggesting here. The other thing, and this is the key learning in this area, is that when you're thinking about proactive offers, gestures, compensation, whatever you want to call it, don't think about the, don't purely think about the cost of the offer. Eg, if you gave everyone 10 million customers one free day and that free day cost you $2, it's $20 million really clear to see the cost. Right. But don't just think about that cost. Think about the cost of not offering something that just blows people out of the world and things that great and that they move on. So, for example, what about customer service costs? How many, how many customers, because they're unhappy with the offer or with the situation, are making complaints and contacting you? How much is that costing you to manage in addition to your normal business? How much is it costing you by customers that are just dissatisfied and are leaving because you didn't make it right? How much is that costing you? Quite often businesses keep a track on what's coming in the front door. They don't keep a track of the customers going out the back door. So think about all those hidden costs of not making the right offer straight away. And then while I'm thinking about it, what is the cost of making the wrong offer? You see, if you make the wrong offer, and I'm saying the Optus offer is the wrong offer, when you come back, if you come back with a second offer, it's going to cost you a lot more. Because people's expectations are growing as a result of their dissatisfaction. They're disgruntled by the situation. You didn't make it right. You haven't apologized to me. I want, I want, I want how you need to defuse that. So think about all those hidden costs. Make a great first offer, an offer that people didn't expect, that then becomes the story about how much you cared and made it right. So finally, as I leave you here today, a couple of things. Firstly, Jason S. Bradshaw.com is my website, Jason Sbrecher on all social platforms. Wherever you're watching this, you can leave a comment, ask a question, and I'll to get back to you. Feel free to reach out to me if there's something I can do to help your business grow, to help you manage your situation, to help you break through and have business success. But before I let you go, here's an idea for Optus. Why don't you spend no money on marketing, on advertising, I should say, for the remainder of November, and take that money to make an irresistible offer of goodwill to every single customer so that the media cycle for the next 20 days is about how you made it right in a way that no one expected and that your customers feel valued and that leaving you would not be the right decision. I'm Jason S. Bradshaw. It has been my absolute pleasure being with you today here on Talking Points and I look forward to catching up with you next tomorrow. Take care.
