If you heard your company had to do a product recall, how would you feel? Would you be trudging across the metaphorical fields into which the horses have bolted—the sound of a slamming stable door ringing in your ears—wondering how you can retrieve the rapidly dispersing animals, before they run past the meadows within your reach and escape into the unknown?
If the product recall process doesn’t run smoothly, a business is at risk of:
1: Damaged Brand and Financial Costs
When products fail to meet appropriate quality or safety standards, companies need to act quickly to ensure they are removed from circulation. Depending on the severity of the product’s shortcoming, a failure to act swiftly and decisively may damage the company’s reputation. There may also be longer-term economic harm from a reduction in future sales, plus any court costs, fines, and compensatory payments to affected customers.
2: Unhappy Customers
If a general product recall communication doesn’t manage customer expectations of the recall process, the company could field far more inbound contacts within a short time period than they can cope with. If this happens, customers may be put on hold or be kept waiting in an online chat facility for longer than is either usual or acceptable.
3: Unhappy Employees
The flipside of unhappy customers is unhappy employees. A company’s infrastructure capacity will affect the way in which inbound calls and contacts arising from a product recall event are dealt with. Without an appropriate procedure in place for systematic and managed contact of hundreds or thousands of affected customers, considerable stress may be placed on customer service and operations teams.