Without answers to each of these questions – and more – the company will be incapable of restoring consumer confidence. What is the defect? How did it occur? Why did it happen? What should consumers do? How immediate is the potential danger, if any? And most important, the company must find the underlying facts as to why the defect occurred and explain, credibly, why it won’t happen again. Think of all the different components of announcing that bad news.

Thus, the company must gather all the facts, including the bad ones, and formulate accurate responses to the questions about what happened, why, and especially, what the company intends to do to solve the problem.įor example, suppose a company realizes one of its major products has serious defects and must be recalled. A company with bad news to give must anticipate every question it will receive from the media and all stakeholders: e.g., customers, employees, investors, suppliers, banks, or if the company is a listed public company, shareholders. The first step after receiving bad news that customers must be alerted to, is to gather all of the facts about what the bad news is. Those rules can be summarized by the mantra regarding the truth, however tough the bad news is: Tell it early, tell it all, and tell it yourself. Over the course of our careers in crisis management, we have learned that all of these instincts are counter to the three best practices for delivering bad news. The third human reaction when delivering bad news is to selectively reveal details of the matter, so as to minimize the public impact of the crisis.Įach of these instincts, while understandable from a human’s perspective, can all too often make bad news worse. Another natural human instinct is to postpone telling customers what the bad news is, hoping that maybe it will go away on its own. The first is that, instead of speaking in plain language, they will try to sugarcoat the bad news. Specifically, there are three natural, human reactions that frequently guide how companies and organizations deliver bad news to customers. When managing a crisis, communication skills are often contradicted by the human instinct to put the best light on bad news.

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