Imagine a hurricane slowly moving up the coastline, causing floods and damage as it travels from city to city.
Or a river rising as the rains come down day after day. Eventually, it surpasses its banks and creeps into offices and housing complexes that share the same borders.
You can’t stop Mother Nature. When events happen beyond our control, you simply have to wake up the next morning and deal with the aftermath.
People understand that. And if Mother Nature impacts your business, people will give you a little leeway to make things right.
But what if a hacker gets into your databases and compromises your customer files? What’s it going to take to keep your customers happy in this situation?
Unfortunately, large and small companies alike are finding out every day.
Customer-friendly companies are finding themselves in a unique catch-22 situation. On the one hand, it’s important to keep security issues confidential and work issues and problems internally as quickly as possible. On the other hand, if you don’t share what’s happened quickly and thoroughly and your customer base finds out without your input, your reputation can be severely destroyed.
Nothing loses trust with your customer base faster than a data breach. The way you act from the moment you discover it sets the stage for everything.
Transparency
While it’s difficult to recover from a data breach, it’s not impossible. If a company acts with integrity and total transparency from the beginning, it can build a stronger customer base throughout the process.
Where do you start?
With your customer messaging.
You can’t hide. You can’t ignore. All it takes is one person finding out the truth, and they can hit social media in an instant. Within minutes, a tidal wave can occur throughout sites like Twitter or Facebook.
Even before you have a data breach, you can begin to build trust by letting your customer base know your security plans. Show them your commitment by talking about upgrades. Send a clear message that security is everything.
If a data breach occurs, begin the campaign to tell your customers where the problem lies as soon as you possibly can. The message should be clear: something happened, and we won’t stop until we fix it. Because hiding problems will get you nowhere. Even giants like eBay have learned the hard way, when it didn’t release information on a security breach with its customer data.
Then talk about the problem throughout the clean-up process. What should your customer base do? What steps are you taking to ensure it never happens again? Remember your customer base is on multiple channels. If you’re where they are, they will be more accepting of the process. That means through print, mobile, and online technology.
Today’s threats and challenges are real. How you respond to them even before a crisis happens sets the stage for your continued growth.
What message are you sending your customer base?
