By Ebo Aneju, a researcher and writer at Pearl Lemon PR

Many tech companies at the moment don’t see crisis management as an integral part of their business, and that can be a costly mistake. In this past decade, we’ve seen the biggest tech companies experience massive drops in share prices due to crises that they were unable and unprepared to handle.

In fact, there should be a focus on crisis management in the technology market because of the amount of consumer data and privacy involved with it. In just a few months, losing the public’s trust can see profitable businesses burn out.

So how do you prevent these scenarios from happening?

Tech companies will need to prepare for crises that may arise for them readily. But it can be pretty challenging to know what to do in a situation that you’ve never had to experience before.

To try and improve your crisis management systems, here are some actional tips that businesses can take to prepare for or manage potential crises. This will help your businesses grow pretty smoothly and remove some of the possible bumps along the way.

Ensure Consumer Data is Handled Correctly

Most tech companies will rely heavily on consumer data to function. In the past few years, government regulation has clearly focused on consumer data and how it is handled.

Companies such as Facebook have previously had crises forming purely from how they handled consumer data after the public discovered that they had released private data from millions of their customers. This scandal led to a drop of around $120 billion in Facebook’s market cap. 

Many issues regarding data are easily preventable if you ensure that your company is always adhering to regulations regarding data. This means you should constantly be checking both government rules and how your consumer data is being handled.

This will prevent any issues regarding privacy breaches and the unauthorized release of data.

Delegate a Team for Crisis Management

When a crisis arises, a quick response is always needed. However, you need to make sure your company’s response makes the situation better than worse!

Therefore, you should have a team ready that can prevent and respond to crises. That can be done by hiring a crisis PR agency or mange it in-house. Your team should involve employees from different areas of the company so you will get an unbiased and broad evaluation of the scenario.

To respond correctly to a crisis, you’ll need a detailed crisis management plan. This plan should represent your company’s core beliefs while also taking into account the possible backlash from the public.

You need to remember that all situations will be different- there’s no ‘one plan for all.’ You’ll need to tailor your plan for crises your firm is most likely to face. This is why focusing on data is very important for tech companies.

Regulations and consumer sentiment are constantly changing. Therefore, your crisis management should always be changing, so it’s suitable to be used at any moment.

Training your employees

Tech companies have the potential to grow to enormous sizes. The largest companies can have hundreds of thousands of employees. So as you grow, it may be harder to make sure all your employees act according to your crisis management guidelines.

This is why it’s crucial to ensure your employee training in your earliest stages involves details about your crisis management plan and how employees should act to follow this. 

All your employees should be readily notified about any changes to your crisis management plan.

Ensure Technology is Reliable

As a tech company, it’s clear that you will rely on many different systems to function. For example, your app or website going down for just a few hours can have detrimental losses of revenue and consumer confidence.

Furthermore, outdated technology can make you subject to cyber-attacks and put your consumers at risk.

This crisis is different from others. It can be pretty hard to spot and basically unavoidable in most cases. Some system failures can come up out of nowhere and take a while to fix.

However, you can take steps to prevent this by constantly updating software and performing routine checks of any hardware that may be susceptible to failure. Furthermore, if you’re involved with any third-party businesses providing technology, ensure you’re only dealing with trusted and reliable sellers.