COM 657 4-2 Short Paper
National Grid is a utilities company, providing both electricity and gas to its customers in Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and the U.K. (National Grid, n.d.). It is likely, therefore, that its customers span various demographics, including age, gender, community, family status, and income level. Assuming that a significant type of crisis at National Grid would likely involve the loss of electric and gas service to customers, it is crucial that National Grid should be able to contact all affected customers as quickly and as easily as possible; while it may not be possible to give customers warning before the fact, once the crisis has occurred, it is imperative that the company be able to provide customers will regular updates on the status of service restoration, with some attention paid to the ongoing safety of said customers.
It is clear that National Grid has a crisis management plan in place. While the consumer-facing website contains a number of everyday, innocuous elements such as account information, bill payments, scam alerts, and FAQs, it also features “Outage Central” prominently on the front page (National Grid, n.d.): not only does it appear in small type but vivid color at the top of the page, using figure-ground contrast to good advantage to catch the user’s eye (Kostelnick & Roberts, 2011); but it also appears in the centrally located featured/rolling slides, complete with vivid imagery and color. Service outages are not—anedotally speaking—a very rare occurrence, which makes it reasonable to assume that most customers will seek information regarding policies during an outage either when signing up with the utility or once an outage has occurred. Outage Central provides guidelines not only for customers to contact the utility in the event of an outage (National Grid, n.d.), but as a form of pre-crisis strategy (Coombs & Holladay, 2010), also outlines in some detail (and taking visual design and rhetoric into account (Kostelnick & Roberts, 2011)) what consumers can expect once an outage has occurred, including what steps the utility will be taking. The utility also provides a number of outbound tools, such as an outage map, storm notifications, emergency contact information, social media, and email alerts (National Grid, n.d.) as part of pre-crisis and preparation strategies (Coombs & Holladay, 2010); similarly, it provides inbound tools as well, including options to report outages and, again, the use of social media—it should be noted that the messaging app on National Grid’s Facebook page suggests that the utility responds to consumer queries within a few hours (National Grid, n.d.); while it is to be hoped that during a crisis situation, National Grid’s crisis management response strategy would include faster responses to social media queries, that the response time is reasonably short during non-crisis times is a good indicator of the utlity’s responsiveness overall.
National Grid’s flyer likewise provides clues as to the efficacy of the utility’s crisis management and communication plans (National Grid, n.d.): a flyer would likely be mailed out to consumers, thereby forming an important part of National Grid’s pre-crisis and preparation strategies (Coombs & Holladay, 2010): as National Grid would have all consumer addresses on file as a prerequisite to provide utility service, mailing such flyers out would be an ideal method of reaching all of the customer base (assuming that emergency notifications such as these would still be sent to those consumers who have opted out of receiving mailed marketing messages). This method of outreach, however, may not achieve its intended outcome: inexperienced or incompetent Emergency Managers (EMs) may assume that simply transmitting, however superficially, this information their client base concludes their pre-crisis plan (Chapter 11); non-compliance resulting from a reluctance to peruse what can be perceived as junk mail and lack of recall would interfere with this strategy. It is conceivable that since the flyer is not generalized and addresses a specific potential crisis with some measure of immediacy—the flyer refers to inclement weather expected over the following 36 hours (National Grid), and assuming that consumers are generally attuned to local weather conditions at it affects commutes, daily schedules and activities, and business activities such as construction and retail—it may be reasonable to assume that consumers will pay the flyer attention. Being made aware of a potential and/or impending crisis may attune consumers more sensitively to outgoing communications from the utility, having been forewarned: this would help reach informed consumers on a more timely manner.
The flyer also lists much of the contact information and information disbursement tools found on their website: the assumption is that if consumers are made aware of an impending threat to their safety and comfort, that they will take the initiative to sign up with the various services National Grid offers: the multitude of communications methods is significant; in an electricity outage, for example, one may find one’s cellphone has run out of battery, but that a landline (according to a 2016 government study, over 45% of the U.S. population still have landline telephones in their homes (Associated Press, 2017)) is still a reliable method of communication. If the household has a battery-powered television, it may be able to receive weather updates and communications over the air from the local television station, even if no phone service is available.
The majority of these methods depend on the consumer’s taking action during the pre-crisis phase (Coombs & Holloway, 2010), which is by no means certain unless the utility can spare the human resources to personally follow up with each consumer individually; this being the case, the likelihood of being able to communicate with affected consumers quickly decreases significantly. Emergency services (in case of a life- or health-threatening situation) will also be hampered by the same communications framework: even a fully charged cellphone may have trouble making an emergency call if inclement weather has rendered cellphone towers inoperable.
National Grid takes these challenges into account in the flyer (National Grid, n.d.) by exhorting consumers to themselves be prepared and to pay attention—so far as is possible—to the plight of neighbors and others in the immediate community, but again, without a more robust method of two-way communication that does not rely solely on the consumer’s instigating contact, the efficacy of such admonition seems to be in doubt.
Though the author of this short paper lives in balmy North Carolina, her employer—thanks to the benefits of telecommuting—is based in the Canadian province of Ontario. Comprising an on-site staff of approximately 500 and an off-site staff of approximately 100, the loyalty marketing company has a multipronged crisis management plan in place, which was pressed into service as recently as March, 2018. An ice storm resulted in widespread power outages, resulting in the closing of the business for three days until service was restored and the roads were again navigable. The audiences that had to be reached were all on-site staff, external vendors visiting the premises (including daily food suppliers and cleaning service), and off-site staff who, even if they did not need to visit the actual building, still relied upon services and technology housed in the building, such as computer servers.
A component of the crisis management team’s plan is to monitor weather forecasts and utility communications on a 24/7 basis during the winter season; the electric utility was able to notify the team fairly quickly that a power outage had occurred during the night’s storm, and that power was not expected to be restored for several days. The crisis management team then put crisis communications into action: as part of all staff orientation (including off-site employees), employees and contractors are required to have cellphone numbers on file for such situations. Automated voicemails as well as text messages were sent out to all personnel on file. The main business line voicemail as well as the “emergency” hotline were set up to relay the same information to anyone calling in. Departmental heads individually contacted all vendors and visitors to their departments, including the cafeteria and off-site contractors, in the event that their numbers had not been on the list of automated communications. Both on-site employees and off-site contractors such (as the author) were contacted by designated back-up server operators and provided with log-in credentials to the back-up servers to access required materials in an attempt to continue working, though it was made clear that the company did not expect unreasonable accommodation.
The outage lasted three days, and repair crews took a fourth to render the building accessible. On the fifth day, full access to the building was restored, and off-site contractors could once again use the default servers to access information.
This was not the first time that this particular crisis management plan had been executed, but there were still certain elements that need to be improved upon. For example, one visitor had been in flight when the initial communications were sent out, and therefore was unreachable. The visitor neglected to check his voicemail, and was not aware of the crisis situation at the office, and did manage—almost inexplicably—to reach the building, albeit an hour later than planned. Rather than phoning the office or his contact at the company (thereby not receiving the automated messages), he had simply sent a text message from his Uber ride. During the post-crisis phase (Coombs & Holladay, 2010), a plan was proposed to add visitors’ phone numbers to an alternate list—but only during the winter, keeping financial resources in mind—which would be set up to have repeated automated phone calls made until the recipient responds.
Overall, however, significantly in part because of the technological nature of the business and its existing reliance on digital communications, the crisis management and communications plan—developed over years of similar experience of weather conditions and outages—worked fairly well to keep all staff and most iterant audience well informed of developments as they happened, and thanks to back-up solutions already in place as a component of disaster recovery plans, business operations were not completely crippled. It was, the leadership team concluded, as fair an outcome as may reasonably have been expected.
References
Coombs, W. T., & Holladay, S. J. (Eds.). (2010). The handbook of crisis communication. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell
Associated Press. (2017, May 4). Why nearly 46 percent of households still have landlines. Retrieved from New York Post: https://nypost.com/2017/05/04/why-nearly-46-percent-of-household-still-have-landlines/
Kostelnick, C. & Roberts, D. R. (2011). Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators. Pearson Education, Inc.
National Grid. (n.d.). A message from National Grid. Retrieved from National Grid: http://snhu-media.snhu.edu/files/course_repository/graduate/com/com557/com_557_module_four_national_grid_sample_flyer.pdf
National Grid. (n.d.). About National Grid. Retrieved from nationalgrid: https://www.nationalgridus.com/Our-Company/
National Grid. (n.d.). Landing Page. Retrieved from National Grid: https://www.nationalgridus.com/MA-Home/Default
National Grid. (n.d.). National Grid. Retrieved from Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nationalgrid
National Grid. (n.d.). Outage Central. Retrieved from national grid: https://www.nationalgridus.com/MA-Home/Storms-Outages/Outage-Central