Don’t Get Too Obsessed with Recent Airline Customer Service Incidents – There are Bigger Sharks in the Risk Waters

Chris Britton writes:

Target is a great place to shop. I love going there, and I bet many of you do too.

But I also find the company fascinating because over the past few years it has provided huge debating points for those of us who make a living managing issues and crises.

Until United Airlines recently showed how to turn a crisis into a disaster and created learning points for years of lectures, Target’s handling of its 2013 data breach was the poster child for “what not to do in a crisis” workshops.

More recently, and a little less clear cut in terms of best practice, Target has been in the spotlight ever since it published a blog post in April 2016 welcoming transgender employees and customers to use the restrooms and fitting rooms corresponding to their gender identities.

While we all got obsessed by the United tragi-comedy over recent weeks, a couple of studies were published which suggested that the Target bathroom issue is the one we should examine most closely.

There is growing evidence that managing risk from cultural, social and political issues is the biggest emerging challenge for all kinds of organizations.

One of those recent studies was from The Institute for Crisis Management (ICM). It published its annual crisis report in which it tracks six hundred thousand crisis stories in the news worldwide.

Mismanagement (malpractice, misconduct, negligence, unethical practices and so on) was top of the charts accounting for nearly 30% of crises.

But look what was number two on the list with a bullet.

Discrimination stories skyrocketed to around 20%, with ICM’s report citing news articles involving Papa John’s pizza, the restaurant chain Noodles & Co and the North Carolina bathroom bill (which is when Target published its now infamous bathroom blog).

By comparison natural disasters accounted for just one per cent of crisis stories in 2016 – and stories about data breaches just five percent.

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