I. Case introduction
On one occasion, an American journalist named Kitty came to Odak Yu Department Store in Tokyo, Japan. She bought a Sony record player for her husband who lives in Tokyo as a meeting gift. The shop assistant was very polite and specially selected an unopened machine for her.
Back in the office, when Kitty started the machine for trial use, she found that the machine had no internal parts, so it could not be used at all. She couldn't help flying into a rage, and prepared to negotiate with Oda Yu early the next morning, and quickly wrote a press release entitled "The True Face Behind the Smiling Face". .
The next morning, before leaving, Kitty suddenly received an apology call from "Odak Yu". Fifty minutes later, a car arrived at her residence. The assistant manager and the staff with suitcases jumped out of the car. As soon as I entered the living room, I bowed my head and said I came to apologize. In addition to a new qualified record player, they also sent a box of cakes, a set of towels and famous records.
It turned out that at 4: 30 yesterday afternoon, when checking the goods, the salesperson found that a hollow sample was sold to the customer by mistake. She immediately reported to the company security and asked for a quick search, but it was too late. This is a serious matter. After receiving the report, the manager immediately called relevant personnel to discuss. At that time, there were only two clues to follow, namely the customer's name and a business card of "American Express Company" left by her. Oda Yu Company started a series of actions that were tantamount to looking for a needle in a haystack overnight: it made 32 emergency calls and inquired about the major hotels in Tokyo, but there was no result. Then I called the headquarters of American Express Company in new york, and got a call back in the middle of the night, and got the phone number of the customer's parents in the United States. Then it called the United States and got the phone number of the customer's in-laws in Tokyo. Finally, it found out the address and telephone number of the customer during his stay in Tokyo. During this period, there were 35 emergency calls.
All this deeply touched Kitty. She immediately rewrote the press release entitled "35 urgent calls".
Second, the case analysis
This incident was once recommended by the American Public Relations Association as a model of public relations in the world. In less than 20 hours, "Oda Yu" can properly calm a storm caused by its own mistakes, which should be said to be due to a strong sense of public relations crisis and timely public relations measures.
When a swift horse stumbles, it is difficult for an enterprise to make a complete and accurate prediction of all possible situations in its operation because it is operating in an extremely complicated realistic environment. In this way, mistakes will inevitably occur and the organizational image will naturally be damaged to varying degrees. The question is, once things happen, how to treat "Oda Jade" is worth learning by enterprises, and enterprises should treat their own mistakes. We have set up a correct attitude: better late than never, show the public the sincerity to solve the problem, and seek the public's understanding and cooperation, so as to minimize the damage to the organizational image caused by mistakes and turn passivity into initiative.
Once mistakes occur, the corporate image will begin to be damaged. Therefore, in order to make the work of correcting wrong public relations fruitful, we must have a strong sense of "fire fighting", find it in time, correct it in time and improve it in time. The word "timely" is the most critical. The efforts made by "Odak Yu" to solve the problem are very timely. They took action immediately after finding the problem. Its purpose is to solve the problem before customers realize the public. For example, "Odak Yu" passively waited for customers to come to negotiate and missed the opportunity. Once "the true face behind the smiling face" appeared in newspapers, Oda Yu's life was sad. It can be seen that any enterprise must be clear about this public relations truth: error correction is like "fire fighting"