Right in the middle of the busy time of year, XYZ Corporation was suddenly struck by an all-encompassing technology failure. Its main website and internal systems went off-line for over 24 hours, causing an entire shutdown of production. Over the course of the next several days, leadership directed employees to attempt to resume fulfilling orders in addition to responding to customer complaints.
Unfortunately, the volume of work and number of customer complaints overwhelmed staff, leaving numerous orders unfulfilled and complaints ignored. Ideally, the organization needed to respond to each customer in a timelier manner and effectively deploy service recovery. Employees are beginning to lose trust in leaderships’ decision and were facing burn-out from working many extra hours.
Given the current situation, acting as the CEO of XYZ Corporation, how would you proceed in restoring a productive organization? Explain how you would improve employee morale, while still motivating employees to catch up on work that is behind schedule. Help your employees compose responses to the various customer complaints and indicate how you would communicate with those customers. Include anything else you feel is important as the CEO in your response.
