How Rogers Communications bungled its messaging and issues management around the outage is going to be a textbook case in communications for years to come. But not in a good way. Opinion by lloydrang
I’m not talking about the one that left millions of Canadians without cell service, cable or Wi-Fi and businesses unable to take electronic transactions. I’m talking about the corporate communications failure that left Canadians uncertain and suspicious about what was going on and led to anger and seething resentment at the company.
Every company has a bank of goodwill it can draw from when things get tough. For Rogers, though, that bank was pretty much empty when the crisis started. It had just recovered from a recent, smaller outage, had been through a Game of Thrones-style internal leadership bloodbath and was trying to grow by merging with Shaw Communications. So, it started this crisis as the bad guy.
Obviously, it’s difficult to contact customers when they have no internet or cable or phone – but Rogers could have distributed regular updates to media to keep people assured it was on top of the issue. That information would have filtered by word-of-mouth to Rogers users, but instead customers were entirely in the dark through much of Friday.
In the same email, Staffieri also told customers they would be credited automatically for the outage. Customers scoffed at that one. As one Twitter user wrote: “I’m sure they’re gonna offer all of us a $10 refund and then, in mid-September, raise their monthly rates by $20.”Over the course of 48 hours, Rogers somehow managed to reinforce and amplify every possible negative sentiment about the company brand — which is impressive, as failures go.First, with generosity. Rogers earned $1.
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