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Crisis Management - Preparing for the Unexpected 

When you are the custodian of hundreds of millions of customer records, including personal data on millions of individuals, it can be easy to get the blame if records are compromised by incidents such as natural disasters or industrial sabotage.  As the leading Australian company in records management and secure destruction, Recall (a Brambles company) recognised that it needed to identify where within it's, and it's clients’ operations, issues and crises could arise.  Recall then approached long-term communications partner Network Communications to help it identify, map and prepare for ‘the worst case scenario’.

With Recall’s Asia Pacific region run from its Sydney head office, Network had to take a regional approach when factoring in the types of crises that could occur and the different media make-up in the various countries in the region.

Our deep and broad experience in B2B industries over more than two decades meant that we were able to bring a solid understanding of not just Recall’s business processes, but it's customers’ industries as well.  

Network’s approach to the task was to develop a Crisis Management Handbook for familiarisation and possible use by all Recall mangers in all Asia Pacific countries. In conjunction with Recall’s Risk Manager and Country Managers, we created a comprehensive manual covering the types of issues or crises that could occur, how Recall and its various audiences could be involved or affected by each, and a set of worksheets to help management gather the facts and present them in the most honest and productive way.

This was followed up by a Network-designed and presented media training course, educating the nominated company spokespeople for possible media interviews.

We then ran a dummy crisis, putting Recall’s Crisis Response Team members to the test.  With Network staff playing the role of customers, employees’ family members, and media, the pressure was on the Recall team.  The result was an awareness that crises can come at any time, but also the confidence that the company was now well prepared to expect and deal with the ‘unexpected’.

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