Incident Management Plan (Tips)
No matter the size of your business, an incident management plan, which involves procedures for communicating internally with staff and externally with customers and suppliers, can be vital to its survival.
When setting up your incident management plan, you will need to find answers to the following questions:
- What is an incident? In other words, when is an event serious enough to make it an “incident” that requires involving staff and informing customers and event patrons
- Who should handle an incident – should this be a technical person?
- Is there a designated event spokesperson from whom all announcements should come from?
- Who should write the communications that go out to staff, customers and event patrons? A PR or communications person or another member of staff?
- What type of training and support should you provide to staff who handle incidents?
- When do you communicate with customers? What is the threshold or criteria for setting this off?
- How long should you wait, after being informed about an incident, before communicating?
- Which customers do you communicate with? All or a select few?
- How do you inform customers of the problem? By phone, email, SMS, or via your website?
- Using automated systems? What systems or methods should you use for doing this?
- What should you say, when informing customers? What should you not say?
- What should you say once the incident is over?
The answers to many of these questions will depend on considerations such as the size, scale and nature of your event, the importance of any incident to your event, how frequently these occur and what channels you have available for communicating with your customers.
