How do you stop crises? You cut off what’s causing them.

When a fire breaks out in your kitchen, you have to act quickly to contain it and put it out. If you don’t, you risk losing your entire house. Crisis in your organisation – missed customer deadlines, a customer complaining about being treated badly in your office, a supplier not showing up – is like a fire break out. You have to contain it or risk losing your whole business. Some crisis situations can be avoided altogether.

How do you better handle crisis in your business?

Have a clear plan for assessing and handling potential problems. Having a clear plan is akin to having a roadmap to get you to where you want to go. So, what goes into a good plan?

A good plan is first of all special to your organisation. It is not a copy-paste of something you got off the Internet or saw your competitors do. It is tailored to fit the customers you are serving. It’s special to you. To come up with a good plan:

1. Do more research into customer needs, trends, dislikes and train your team in managing your customer’s experience. BONUS: Remember that customer needs keep evolving.
2. Understand the skills, tools and assistance you will need and then acquire these skills, tools or assistance. For example, to avoid being let down at the last minute, have several suppliers or require that your suppliers meet your service standard.
3. Keep your eye on the clock. Decide the speed at which you need to serve customers and work in a reasonable buffer time into your delivery times. Buffer time allows you to recover when things don’t go as planned.
4. Finally, have the confidence that you can actually be really good at the service you offer your clients.

So, how do you stop crisis? You cut off what’s causing them. You anticipate the things that could cause problems or that could go wrong and avoid them with a clear plan – deliberate actions that get the job done correctly the first time!