Rockies ticket sales fiasco a case study in bad news.
The Colorado Rockies created a case study in how to turn an operational melt-down into a customer-relations disaster.
You may recall that the Rockies decided to sell World Series tickets online only — a decision that had many people scratching their heads in the first place. But community boosters and media hyped it up in good cheer, as fans and ticket brokers spent days gearing up all the technology at their disposal to hit the go button at exactly the same time.
The plan failed. The servers jammed up, ensuring that thousands of people who desperately wanted to buy tickets never had a chance. Then the Rockies made matters worse with a media response that was alternatively dismissive and snippy to people who had gone out of their way to buy their product. (The term “external malicious attack” is going to be one of those roll-your-eyes references to the Rockies for a long time.)
Some local PR folks doubt there will be much fall-out from all this, given the nature of sports fans. That may be wishful thinking. As I told the Denver Business Journal, there are still many angry consumers out there. The Rocky Mountain News ran a color picture of a man crying in front of his computer because the Rockies web site disconnected him as he was paying for his tickets. He couldn’t get back in.
That’s the kind of thing people who matter to the bottom line remember for a long time.
In any case, companies can use the Rockies experience to help remember some basic crisis management principles:
What could possibly go wrong? | Let’s assume that the Rockies had reason to believe everything was going to work fine. But the ultimate cost of a crisis depends on how well leadership is prepared to respond to situations that nobody saw coming. Even TurboTax’s servers went down on tax filing day. These things happen. The Rockies didn’t seem to have contingency plans for a potential operations failure or — even more importantly — how the public would react.
Get the boss out front. | Hyped expectations, ticked-off customers and saturation media coverage. Call me wacky, but this seems the kind of scenario where you immediately put your chief executive out front. There are two reasons for this. One, you’re showing folks that you take matters at least as seriously as they do, even if you’re not sure what’s happening. Second, you take ownership of the situation at a time when news coverage and public buzz are happening faster than the facts.
Answer the hard questions before they’re asked. | The tone of news coverage is less likely to represent the company as ignorant or defensive if you're pro-actively responding to hard but obvious questions that you know people have on their mind. As importantly, you fill the vacuum that inherently gets filled with speculation, misinformation and rumor. You have to prove your company as the only source of reliable information about the situation, even as you’re trying to figure it out.
In short: Hope for the best, plan for the absolute worst. Over-communicate and answer the obvious questions first. Those are the best ways to ensure that your company comes out swinging when you’re getting junk thrown at you.
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- Rocky Mountain News | World Series tickets sold out, but fans remain disgruntled
- TimesCall | How to lose fans and disenfranchise people
- YourHub.com | Colorado Rockies tix: sham or shame?
