Crisis management is a fact of life for social media marketing teams.

But that doesn’t make it any easier to handle.

To help you out, we hosted a panel session on handling crises, navigating customer dissatisfaction, and responding to negative sentiment on social platforms, featuring insights from:

They discussed everything from developing decision-making frameworks to improving crisis management strategies through social listening.

Let’s dive into all the key takeaways…

What Does a Crisis Decisions Framework Look Like?

The trouble with crises is that they often come out of the blue, leaving us scrambling to react. But that process gets a whole lot easier if you have a robust crisis decision-making framework in place.

With that in mind, we asked our panelists to share details about their existing frameworks — what they look like and how they work.

Katie Yun explained that Nationwide has built a moderation team comprising legal, customer relations, and compliance (where necessary). They meet once a week to discuss things like:

  • National crises
  • Potential reputational issues
  • Trends in customer queries and complaints

“We come together to look at any situations that are happening at any given time to see what process we need to go through or what resolution we need to take to address that situation,” she said. “We’ve developed really close relationships with this cross-functional team and it’s been working really well.”

Meanwhile, at Broadridge, teams are split into pockets based on specialisms — organic, paid media, and paid social.

“Everyone does some monitoring in addition to that role,” explained Lauren Harbury, the brand’s Head of Social & Paid Media.

Beyond that, Broadridge also has a cross-functional team that meets to discuss crisis response. The makeup of this team varies based on factors like the region in which a crisis is happening or the product it relates to. “We might jump on a call during work, or if it’s happening on a weekend or after time, we also have a spreadsheet of personal numbers and turnaround times to help us assess whether we can get everyone involved outside of working hours and what’s the right way to go about that,” Lauren added.

Encompass Pet Group has a similar setup to Broadridge, with a pocket of community managers tasked with monitoring the brand’s social platforms, plus dedicated paid media and organic social teams. They rely on Microsoft Teams to keep everyone in the loop around live events.

“We have a dedicated Teams channel where, if we have any kind of escalation, all the relevant stakeholders are immediately notified,” said Whitney Duenas Richardson, Digital Marketing Manager at Encompass. “And then we put a plan together, whether it’s during business hours or after hours, because we don’t want to let those situations drag on.”

How Does a Crisis Decision Tree Work?

Crises don’t just come at you fast — they build momentum fast, too. There’s often enough time to plan a detailed response on the fly, so you need to fall back on your decision tree to ensure you get the right communications out in time.

Given that Whitney works at pet products company Encompass, supplements are often a cause of panicked communications from pet parents. “Someone would receive a supplement and their dog would be throwing up immediately after eating it. So of course you’re going into crisis mode, thinking ‘Oh my gosh, what am I going to do?’”

Typically, this happens when supplements aren’t taken with food. But knowing the cause is one thing — communicating it effectively is a whole other challenge.

Their decision tree makes this process a whole lot easier. It tells the Encompass team exactly how to respond when a customer complaint is within specific guidelines, and even includes templatized answers and an escalation process.

“We had that decision tree in place, but we could escalate it to the right stakeholders to make sure that we’re addressing customers in a way that made them feel seen and heard, while also giving them the correct information,” Whitney added. “We know exactly the process moving forward, who to contact, and how to talk to someone in such a critical moment in their pet’s life.”

Lauren at Broadridge agreed that a decision tree is essential to handling a crisis. “It’s one of the first questions — if something does go wrong, who needs to be in the room? And what is the pathway to escalate?”

She also recommended creating a database of common themes and solutions for issues that aren’t quite full-blown crises, but could become one if handled poorly. “It’s super helpful, especially when you have a distributed team. They can feel empowered to answer those, not necessarily crisis-level problems, but issues that pop up.”

Katie recalled a time early in her career at Nationwide where they faced a serious, all-hands crisis and didn’t have a structured process in place. Unsurprisingly, this spurred them to make some big changes, such as forming their moderation team, creating a multidisciplinary working group, and developing a crisis decision tree.

So, in a weird way, that major incident was kind of a good thing for Nationwide. “It might take that crisis to put it in place, but once you have that information and experience, it really helps to build out the process moving forward,” Katie explained.

How To Decide When To Escalate a Crisis

Having a crisis management plan in place is one thing; putting it into practice is a whole other challenge. How do you decide when to handle an issue yourself and when to escalate?

For Katie, it’s simply a case of sticking to your decision tree. “For most situations, we have it clearly defined — if it’s this type of situation or customer complaint, our team can handle it. But if it goes into this realm or takes on a different tone, we need to run it by PR or the wider the business.”

Lauren echoed these thoughts, but added that there’s no harm in running your response past other stakeholders if you’re unsure. “I always lean towards adding in the legal or the PR comms team just to make sure that the answer is what you think it is.”

Whitney agreed that leaning on your decision tree is essential here — that’s why it exists, right?

She explained that the PR team at Encompass got involved when they were first working on their decision tree. “We had all of those high-level stakeholders in the room to form our responses, so moving forward we know if this is a really deep issue that has to be escalated, or if we can leave it and send out a response ourselves.”

Whitney also recommended leaning on AI to handle some of the heavy lifting. Her team uses Sprinklr for social listening and identifying low, medium, and high-priority issues.

As such, she suggested building out your decision tree with your social media management software in mind. For example, whenever Sprinklr spots a high-level issue, it immediately notifies Whitney, who can then decide whether to escalate it further. “Utilizing those tools will alleviate the stress and allow your teams to be more efficient.”

How Do You Decide When To Comment on a Global Crisis?

Up to this point, our panelists had largely discussed internal crises, like customer complaints and issues with specific products.

But what about when a crisis is national or global? Should you keep quiet or get involved? And if you do speak up, what should you say?

For Katie, it’s all about trusting Nationwide’s moderation team and discussing any issues in their weekly meetings. Or, if something happens outside of that meeting, they’ll talk through it via Teams or group chat, or arrange another impromptu meeting.

She gave the recent example of the hurricanes that hit the south and east coasts of the US, during which Nationwide had crisis units helping out in Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

They decided to largely pause organic social activity during the crisis, outside of specific disaster response messaging. “We came together and decided what that messaging was going to look like, and what approach we we’re going to take.”

Whitney explained that Encompass takes a neutral stance where appropriate. At the same time, they adjust their content plan and keep a close eye on wider conversation around the crisis. “If we know anything’s going out, we immediately pause it, and we’re monitoring what the public is saying online and offline.”

Keeping Your Crisis Framework Up To Date

Like so much in the world of social media marketing, building an effective crisis framework isn’t a one-and-done task.

Lauren said her team at Broadridge review their plans at least once a year — including making sure that all the right stakeholders are part of the decision tree.

“Because I come from a financial services background, I’m used to audit processes,” she explained. “So even though I’m no longer in a regulated space, I have this internal clock for process auditing and updating that I keep going with, because it prepares the team should anything happen.”

Meanwhile, Whitney stressed the importance of reviewing your existing messaging based on how customers react to it. “If they’re responding negatively to one of our answers, let’s go back into our framework and say ‘let’s tweak this word because customers are reading it in a different way than we intended.’”

Personalizing Your Response To Customers

When it comes to planning a response to customers, our panelists insisted that authenticity should be a top priority. Or, as Lauren put it: “Knowing that you’re a real person can help.”

Whitney noted that while her team uses templatized messages, they still take the time to add a little personality. “We have the core of what we want to say, but we also make sure the customer feels heard.”

In particular, they always make sure to refer to the customer by name and restate the problem. Not only does this help the customer feel like they’re dealing with an actual human, but it also ensures that everyone’s on the same page.

“A lot of times we find that when we repeat what they’ve said, they’ll come back and say ‘no, that’s not what I meant, I meant it like this instead,’” Whitney explained. “Really getting down to the core of the problem has been helpful for us.”

Katie agreed that customizing templated messaging is important. Although Nationwide is a highly regulated company with some limitations around how they speak to customers, they still try to make their responses as authentic and human-sounding as possible.

In fact, Nationwide has built out platform-specific brand voices. “If it’s X, we’re going to sound different than if we’re responding on LinkedIn. We’re still true and authentic to Nationwide as a brand, but we match the platform a little more.”

Looking After Yourself During a Crisis

Dealing with an endless stream of crises and customer complaints can put a real strain on your mental health. So how do you take care of yourself (and your team) while also looking out for your brand?

For Katie, the best approach is to ensure that everyone gets enough time to switch off. “Breaks are important. I make everyone on my team take the mandatory vacation time, they’re not allowed to leave any on the calendar.”

Beyond this, she’s in constant contact with her team to check in with how they’re feeling. “They know if it gets too intense, we’ve got people we can pull in from across the team to help alleviate some of that day-to-day stress and give them a little bit of a break.”

Whitney, meanwhile, makes sure to mitigate feeling overwhelmed by a crisis by focusing on what her team can control. “If it can’t be fixed instantly, let’s focus on what we can address at the moment. And then once those tasks are delegated off, take some time to yourself to prevent burnout — we can’t fix everything immediately.”

Lauren shared those sentiments and stressed the importance of getting some separation from social media — whether that means taking an afternoon off or simply going outside to touch grass.

However, she accepted this is often easier said than done, especially for early-career professionals. “Everything feels so personal all the time. It sounds so simple to be like, just remind yourself that it’s not about you, but it’s really not.”

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Featured image by Freepik.

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