How bubbling issues can impact your business reputation, and what you can do prevent it from happening.
Your reputation is by far the most valuable asset you will have as a business. It is a culmination of how you are perceived by everyone who interacts with your business or product/service from the general public to customers, staff, investors, and other people important to you biz.
In this episode, you will learn
- What reputation impact is
- How to implement a simple 6 step process to spot, monitor and mitigate potential reputation issues in your business
- How by pre-empting bubbling issues and managing them effectively you can avoid a crisis hitting
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Full Transcript
Emma Drake:
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Communication Strategy That Works, with me, Emma Drake. In this episode, I’m sharing with you how to spot, monitor, and mitigate potential reputation impact in your business.
Now, you might be wondering, “What the hell is brand reputation impact, and why should I be worrying about it?” Well, if the pandemic of 2020 is anything to go by, one thing we know now is that we cannot plan for acts of God, but many bubbling issues within organizations were there when the pandemic hit, and what happened is it unveiled lots of these under the radar issues that have been hidden just beneath the surface. And what lots of businesses realized at this point is actually they had to supercharge their operations to deal with some of these issues that actually were there and could have been dealt with previously.
These might be things like HR processes that perhaps were not as tight as they could have been, or supply chains that were just not quite as set up as they could have been, or may have had some risk in there, or maybe factory or product development issues that were left on notice because they weren’t huge issues, but actually did need dealing with. Or maybe IT systems that were failing, but they were left as an afterthought until that point, when everyone had to go and work from home.
Or maybe you run an online business and actually what you discovered was that you needed to suddenly automate more of your business and you had to source that software, you had to source those skills, maybe had to bring additional skills into your business. And that all happened really quickly because you may have had to take your personal resources somewhere else if you run your business. Homeschooling, or maybe lots of people have unfortunately been very poorly with COVID-19 or have had to isolate.
I think it’s a really good example of how you can be really quickly thrown into a situation where you need to really act quite quickly and understand how to implement something really fast. I’m sure some of these issues sound familiar, and it’s not that people don’t want to deal with these issues. It’s just that sometimes they don’t have the time or the right process to be able to handle them effectively and simply.
Now, it’s easy to forget that when you’re promoting your growing business or startup, that you also need to plan for when things may not go to plan. And I’ve already mentioned that acts of God is something that you can’t plan for. None of us can plan for that at all. Maybe the army plan for World War Three and that’s all they change train for, but actually you’re the average person in a business is only going to plan for what they know.
Now, there are lots and lots of bubbling issues that you can plan for. Lots of these can be spotted and they might have a small reputation impact or bigger reputation impact, but actually what you can do, if you have the right processes, you can look at how you can protect your reputation by having a very simple and very accurate process to spot, monitor, and mitigate them.
I’m really interested in this topic and passionate about it, and I’ve studied it as well. So I wanted to distill all of this knowledge for you today into this short episode, so that I can give you some really quick and simple tools that you can use and implement after listening to this episode, that will help protect the reputation of your startup or growing business. So you’ll learn today, what reputation impact is, how to implement a simple six step process to manage it in your business, and why you want to preempt a crisis hitting by doing this upfront work. So let’s dive in.
So what is reputation and how can it be impacted in your business? It is by far the most valuable asset you will have in your business, your reputation and what you do. It’s a combination of how you are perceived by everyone who interacts with your business or product or service from the general public to customers, staff, investors, and other people important to your business. Unfortunately, if you are unlucky enough to have damaged your reputation in some way in your business, and that could be through service provision, through customer service, through maybe funding, ethical funding sources, or unethical funding sources, management practices, staff treatment maybe, or anything that can really impact how you’re perceived.
It can impact the trust in your product or your business or your service, and this lack of trust leads to lack of engagement sales. So fundamentally this can affect your bottom line. And this has been proven with big businesses. It’s no different for small businesses. And that’s my point today is that there are big companies with big brand reputations, and the impact is big, but they have processes to deal with it.
And this is why I’m really keen for growing businesses that have ambitions to be much bigger companies one day, understand how to do this simply so that you can avoid this mistake. So I’ve talked about trust in a previous episode actually. There’s something called the Edelman Trust Barometer, which is used widely. It’s a global survey, and they did a sense check in June, 2020, where trust came only second to price for why people buy products. So this is a pretty big one. This is something you want to address from the start.
There are ways of means to measure reputation. There are tools that companies use, big brand companies, pharma companies for example, RepTrak is something that they use to manage perceptions and trust. You can use social media analytics, which can help with measuring something called sentiment, which is you can set some parameters for how people are talking about your product in a positive, negative, or neutral way. However, it’s a fairly abstract thing to measure, right?
So what one of the ways you can approach this is to have a robust way of getting ahead of the crisis curve by having a process in place to discover where those issues are in your business, to monitor them closely, and potentially mitigate issues before they become a reputation problem. So let’s move on to the six steps on how to implement this process.
Step one is you need to be able to spot the problem. So that means taking a bit of time to look for the signals in your business. Just pause, which is really tricky at the moment, I get that. I started this podcast in 2020, and obviously we’ve been in a pandemic that entire time. So people don’t often have the times take out to reflect to do this piece of work, but actually some of these issues will be more obvious, I think now. So it’s a good time to perhaps just spend even 10 minutes thinking about those things on the side of your desk, that you know, where those issues are. Maybe you have a risk register if you’re a product led business or manufacturing business. So have a think about what those issues are and start to list them out.
Step two is all about getting under the skin of that issue. You need to be asking everybody that you need to about what that issue is. So if that’s a customer issue, you need to speak to that customer. You might need to talk to someone in your supply chain, if it’s about supply, for example, all people that handle your finance or your automation, any software that you have, or that you rent or that you buy in. You really need to get under the skin of what that issue is and potentially everything about it and what you might need to do to mitigate it.
Step three is about having that long list of issues, well, hopefully it’s a short list. Having that list of issues and prioritizing them. You need to think about, “Well, what’s the one I need to get right? What’s that most important task?” There’s some that are going to need immediate attention. And there’s some that will need a watching brief, I guess, which is just keeping an eye on them and checking in.
Is that still a problem maybe? You know in a couple of years or six months, you need to change your it system, but actually there’s no issue there, but it’s a potential issue, because if you can’t deliver customer service or front-end business, if you’re an online business in particular and you need to tighten up on some of those service providers or it issues or cloud-based services that you’re using, are they still releasing updates, software updates, if it’s cloud-based? Or do you need to be planning to change that so you can maintain your customer contact effectively?
Step four is about writing down an answer to the question. And the question is, well what is the issue and why is it a problem for us, and how are we going to deal with it if it happens now? This is a short statement and it’s something you can use if you need to to explain to people, but it gets your mind in that place of, okay, how would I talk to somebody? How would I talk to my customer? Let’s take the front end sales pipeline or customer contact part of your business if you’re an online business. If that fails, what am I going to say to people? How am I going to deal with that? What does that look like?
And how am I going to answer those questions I’m going to get? This is all about planning. This is a planning session. So you don’t want to be in crisis. You don’t want to be on the back foot. You don’t want to be, when the heat is already on, trying to think about what to say. This is about planning, because you know, it’s an issue, you know it’s potentially going to happen and it could potentially have an impact on your reputation. So you’re planning to mitigate that by having an answer prepared, and thinking about that.
Step five is all about implementing it. So do you need to step into action? What do you need to do to mitigate that issue? What are the actual steps you need to take to, let’s take the same example, if you know that software update is not going to be coming, what steps do you need to take now to implement that new change in your business so that you can have a smooth change rather than a problem where the front end of your business falls over because you can’t have your customer contact effective at that moment.
And step six, the final step, is about monitoring. You need to have this log of issues, and this is something you could do in a Google sheet. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You list them out, and you have your column for each of these steps, and you monitor it every month, every couple of weeks, depending on where your issues are and what you need to do with them. It’s something you just need to revisit.
And in terms of reputation management, you just need to make sure that you’ve got those answers ready, and you’ve thought about how it’s going to impact your business. And you’ve thought about how you’re going to deal with that. And you’ve got a robust answer for if you need to talk to people, if that happens sooner than you would like, or if it’s forced on you, for example.
So what we want to avoid here is we’re trying to avoid a crisis for your business. So this simple planning and following these simple steps will help you avoid getting to the point where you have, this is out of control for you. And that point is where it becomes public. So when it moves from an emerging issue into a current issue for you, that is the point where it starts to come to crisis, and it very, very quickly, once it becomes a current sort of in the moment issue, it becomes more difficult to influence.
It becomes harder to resolve. And it ordinarily, that is the point it becomes public. There is a preceding period of where that is a potential issue, and it moves into an emerging stage where you have quite a lot of time to influence. There’s an opportunity to influence whether or not that becomes a crisis.
Now, it might be that you are mitigating something that goes away completely, or it might be that you’re having an opportunity to just super prepare for something that is going to happen. You don’t want to be in crisis mode. Crisis mode is not good for your mental health, it’s very difficult to handle, you need experts in to do that, and handled badly it can have longterm damage for your business. You don’t want to be in that situation. So what we’re trying to do is avoid being in a crisis by planning and preparing. And this is, as I said, about protecting your reputation as well as promoting your business.
So today you have learned what reputation impact is. You have learned a simple six step process on how to manage it in your business, and by preempting bubbling issues and managing them effectively, you can avoid a crisis hitting.
So finally, thank you for listening to this episode of Communication Strategy That Works. Don’t forget to check my show notes for those links that I mentioned, and I’d really love it if you would subscribe to my podcast and leave me a review. And also if you think there’s someone that could benefit from listening to this podcast, please share this within your networks. So I’ll just say bye for now and see you next time.