For an industry built around communication, there can be few things more frustrating than suddenly finding ourselves unable to, well, communicate.
This week’s global email outage, which has already been dubbed the ‘Microsoft meltdown’, demonstrates how heavily businesses, public bodies and individuals rely on email. The disruption spread around the globe, and while organisations across virtually every sector have been affected, email outages pose a particular challenge for PR and communications agencies.
Our business is about communication. Whether responding to an urgent journalist enquiry, securing client approval for a press statement, coordinating a campaign or managing a developing crisis, email is at the heart of much of what we do.
When it stops working, a missed media deadline can mean a lost opportunity while an unanswered client enquiry or delayed crisis response could have serious reputational consequences.
A global technology outage like this allows us to reflect on how well prepared we are to manage two critical challenges: maintaining communications while systems are down and managing the recovery when they come back online.
Managing the outage
Email should never be the only means of communicating, either internally or externally, and alternative channels such as phone, text messaging and secure messaging platforms should already be in play.
Now might be the ideal time to ensure you have multiple communications channels with key contacts because when a crisis breaks, nobody wants to waste precious time working out how to get in touch.
However, alternative channels must be secure and appropriate. Sending confidential client information through personal email accounts or unapproved messaging applications could create an entirely different set of problems.
Could this crisis also be the catalyst to rediscover that the age of the phone call is still here…or at least it should be.
Where clients are waiting for important information or journalists are working to tight deadlines they need to know that the urgent work we are doing is continuing and that’s where the phone comes in.
Many journalists now prefer to communicate almost exclusively by email, and with newsrooms under increasing pressure due to staffing cutbacks, avoiding telephone calls provides some protection against unwanted interruptions.
But this outage has highlighted the importance of maintaining communications, particularly when deadlines are looming or critical information needs to be shared.
Having an agreed telephone contact, or another reliable means of reaching the newsroom and vice-versa, can make an enormous difference when normal communications fail but if we want journalists to remain accessible by phone, we must respect their time and preferred ways of working.
Using phone calls to chase irrelevant press releases, pitch poorly targeted campaigns or demand immediate responses to routine enquiries simply encourages journalists to stop answering.
The telephone should never be an excuse to bypass the filters journalists have understandably put in place and keeping those channels open requires PR professionals to recognise that the phone call should be worth the interruption.
Managing the recovery
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of a major email outage is what happens afterwards.
When systems are restored, businesses could face an avalanche of delayed messages, some urgent, others already overtaken by events.
Important emails sent during the disruption may never have been delivered, and even those showing as ‘sent’ may have been delayed, rejected or left waiting to send. For communications agencies, this makes the recovery period every bit as important as the outage itself.
Rather than working through hundreds of emails chronologically, teams should prioritise critical client communications, media enquiries, deadlines and outstanding approvals.
Important messages sent or expected during the outage should be checked, with delivery confirmed directly where necessary. IT teams may also be able to establish whether messages were successfully processed.
A team debrief, identifying missed enquiries, outstanding actions and communications that need following up, could be just as valuable as clearing the inbox itself.
The bigger lesson is that business continuity shouldn’t be regarded purely as an IT issue. Communications agencies routinely advise clients to prepare for crises, establish clear responsibilities and ensure they can respond quickly when something unexpected happens.
We should apply exactly the same principles to our own operations by having a contingency plan that is understood by everyone, tested occasionally and which covers both the disruption and the recovery which follows.
We cannot control when a global technology platform fails but we can control how we respond and how effectively we pick up the pieces afterwards.
This week’s disruption is a timely reminder that the phone remains a key tool for PR professionals, our clients and journalists to keep in touch, but before reaching for that keypad, make sure that your call is one the person on the other end will want to take.
Five practical steps every communications agency should take when the email goes down
- Establish alternative communications channels. Make sure staff have secure, accessible contact details for key clients, journalists and stakeholders, together with an agreed method of communicating if email fails.
- Agree who takes responsibility during an outage. Identify who will coordinate the response, inform clients, manage urgent enquiries and monitor developments until systems are restored.
- Keep a record of critical communications. Track important messages, deadlines and approvals affected by the outage so nothing is forgotten when normal services resume.
- Prioritise and verify emails during recovery. Check outstanding enquiries, confirm delivery of critical messages and follow up directly where necessary. Don’t assume an email has been received simply because it appears to have been sent.
- Review what worked and what didn’t. Once the immediate disruption is over, identify any communications failures, update contingency arrangements and make sure everyone understands the lessons.