Don’t wait until it’s too late
by David Pickering, Eclipse Marketing
Stories about consumer product safety are almost never out of the headlines. In last year’s ‘summer of recalls’, leading manufacturers in the toy, electronics and confectionery sectors were caught up in extensive and very public incidents. Who’s next?
So manufacturers should be thinking could it happen to us, but how well will we react when it does? With the European Commission reporting a 56% increase in consumer safety alerts from EU member states in 2007, it is more important than ever that manufacturers are prepared.
Businesses should be gearing themselves up in readiness, investing time and money in developing incident management procedures, because fast reactions are essential to limit the potential for damage. When an emergency occurs, robust processes have to be in place to swing immediately into action – like setting up recall helplines in a matters of hours from the first alert.
If the worst should happen and a recall has to be carried out, the food manufacturer needs to provide the recall agency with prepared statements, marketing material and any other information they need to do their work. All activity from this point must conform to previously agreed crisis management and escalation processes to ensure issues are resolved as soon as possible and at the appropriate management level.
The standard of the service provided by agents operating the recall lines must, of course, be of the highest quality. For the concerned consumer, the recall contact publicised must be more than just a phone number. An efficient, in-depth service must lie behind it.
The bottom line is, when consumers call the helpline, what they want to know first of all is: ‘Is my product affected?’ If the answer is, ‘Yes, it may be,’ then agents need the skills to deal extremely sensitively with the situation.
Callers to recall lines are often in a highly emotional state – angry, agitated or worried about having purchased a product that is potentially unsafe. Given these circumstances, agents have to be selected and trained to provide much more than the just pragmatic information on the returning or retrieval of affected products.
What consumers need during a recall programme is reassurance to restore both their peace of mind and their faith in the manufacturer’s product. By passing on the relevant facts, outlining the preventative nature of many recalls and explaining that the manufacturer is fulfilling its duty of care responsibilities by ordering the recall, agents play a vital role in setting consumers’ minds at rest.
While this is going on at the recall centre, in supermarkets and retail outlets, products are being withdrawn from the shelves.
If product recalls are not handled well, they can have a significant and long-lasting effect on a brand’s reputation, profitability and costs.
Handled well, companies can recoup considerable public and media goodwill, and even occasionally enhance their reputation for providing customer care above and beyond the normal, turning a negative into a positive.
Companies that don’t prepare for the worst have only themselves to blame. They are the ones who don’t realise they have a problem … until they have a problem. By then, of course, it’s much too late.
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