The importance of disaster management plans

It all started when a Joburg woman was found trapped inside her Renault for 10 hours after the airbags allegedly inflated while she was driving, causing her to lose control; as a result her car overturned.

With his mother seriously injured in hospital, her son then related to both the electronic and print media the story of his mother’s previous quest to find out why the airbag fault light kept coming on in her car. Renault apparently had examined the car the week before and found ‘nothing wrong’. This story naturally made for good talk show material and the phones rang off the hook on various stations with callers eager to share their stories of bad service with the same company.

The various talk show hosts naturally endeavoured to get comment from Renault, whose spokesperson at the time was overseas and ‘unavailable for comment’.

Four months later Renault released the findings of it tests on the car which established that in fact the airbag had only activated at the time of the crash. But by then the damage to its reputation had been done.

Not only does its new campaign highlight how safe its cars are, but it has suddenly decided to offer such extras as roadside assistance should your car break down - in fact it goes so far as to send a guard to protect you while you wait for assistance. Should you, heaven forbid, have to wait for parts, it will even provide you with a courtesy car and any enquiry will receive a 24-hour response.

Possibly this was part of its long-term plan for its cars, possibly not. The point remains that had Renault responded positively and immediately to the media, it would have ultimately cost the price of some long distance phone calls, rather than the cost of a high powered campaign and extra services being put in place.

The message here is quite obvious. Always have a disaster management plan in place to deal with situations like this and above all never say ‘No Comment’ to the media, because they will then run with the story their way, inviting the public to join them. We all know the cost of a 30-second advertisement on say 702 Talk Radio – well, weigh up the value of a person on air for 10 minutes or so slagging off a product and make sure it never happens to your company.