Like trust, reputation can take years to build but be lost in an instant. That’s as true for a business as it is for an individual. Your company can foster a positive image through various tried-and-tested means – including providing reliable, safe and, all in all, high-quality products and services.
So, what could send that carefully-built reputation crashing down? One good example would be a security breach. Here are various reasons why your company should make a particular priority of safeguarding its security – and, in turn, results from years of hard work on reputation management.
Security and reputation are closely intertwined
If your company currently has a strong reputation, you might have bolstered it largely by delivering great value and positive experiences to your customers and exceeding stakeholders’ financial expectations. However, conditions are attached to the faith these people have placed in you.
One of these conditions is that you keep their personal data secure and confidential; another is that you make sure employees, customers and shareholders alike can continue to safely deal with your company. If you fail to keep up any of these security obligations, reputational havoc can result.
To see how, you only have to look at what happened to the credit monitoring firm Equifax when, in September 2017, it reported a breach affecting personal details of over 140 million people. Equifax shed four billion dollars in stock market value within a week of this report, a Forbes piece recalls.
Prevention is better than cure
As a big-name company, Equifax naturally suffered as a result of its security failure quickly capturing headlines left, right and centre. However, even if your business is relatively little-established or its breach is unlikely to make the evening news, your own customers could remain disgruntled.
These customers could relinquish their longstanding loyalty to your business and disavow it on such public channels as social media and review sites. “Trust is the driver for any business success. If trust is lost, then some businesses may never recover,” cybercrime expert Simon Smith tells IT Pro.
However, businesses have various security tools at their disposal. These companies could, for example, turn to a business – including a Zero Trust tool limiting which employees are permitted to access which apps in a work context.
How should your business react if a security crisis does happen?
This unfortunate situation would essentially force you into a damage limitation exercise as far as your company’s reputation is concerned. You should act quickly to prevent inadvertently leaving an information vacuum that anyone – including inconvenienced customers – could fill.
As advised in an article published by the Free Management Library: “After an event, you should avail a high-level report explaining what happened. The report should be fact-based and well-articulated.”
This would be important for mitigating much of the fear, doubt and uncertainty that can erupt from a crisis – especially if, as is too common after a company suffers a widely-publicised security lapse, outright lies about the situation start quickly spreading.