OPINION

Here’s a handy crisis management tip for any business executives suffering a catastrophic service failure – don’t mock your customers.

This might sound like crisis management 101, but it’s a lesson Optus chief executive
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin needs to learn after the telco’s mobile and internet network suffered a 12-hour outage last week.

The failure left more than 10 million Australians without mobile phone, landline and internet services. It left hundreds of thousands of small business unable to take card and phone payments from customers; emergency services uncontactable by Optus customers; and shut down Melbourne’s entire train network during peak hours.

Optus customers woke up on Tuesday morning the week before last to discover that they were without communication services.

Naturally, they tuned into their radios and turned on breakfast TV to find out what was going on.

The found TV and radio hosts telling them they had asked Optus for answers, but Optus hadn’t responded. This was another mistake. Crisis managers advise the best way to manage a crisis is to communicate and be ubiquitous to try to control the narrative.

But Optus was missing in action and left a vacuum to be filled.

Without any word from Optus, the media filled the airwaves with bewildered customers and angry politicians, such as Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, who said Optus needed to “step up and communicate”.

Nine News TV found Jacob Azar, manager of North Sydney Barbers, who told them he’d had to turn customers away and shut up shop. “Basically, I can’t use the register, so I can’t charge customers,” he said.

When Bayer Rosmarin finally fronted up to the media seven hours after the crisis began and was asked about Azar’s comments, she decided the best course of action was to mock him.

“I’m disappointed that a barber couldn’t do haircuts today. That’s one of the few things you can do without connectivity,” she said.

It might have occurred to viewers that other things could be done without connectivity too, such as apologising and taking responsibility for your mistakes.

Not content to let the matter rest, journalists went back to Azar for his response.

“If she could do her job, I could definitely do my job, and I don’t appreciate getting bagged out by someone who can’t do their own job,” he said. It was a demonstration of succinct, to-the-point and effective messaging that Bayer Rosmarin and her team of PR flacks would do well to heed.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should reveal that I am also an Optus customer. Personally, I was happy to be unable to make or receive any telephone calls for most of the day, but then again I could catch up on my work later, so I wasn’t foregoing any income.)

But there were more lessons to come from Bayer Rosmarin’s masterclass in how to completely mishandle a crisis.

She did another interview and defended the company from allegations it had failed to adequately communicate what was going on.

“We’ve had messages out on our website,” she said in a deadpan voice that didn’t reveal the richly comic absurdity of the statement.

Clearly, no one had explained to Optus its internet customers wouldn’t be able to see the message on the Optus website telling them their internet wasn’t working because… well… because their internet wasn’t working.

‘Clown show’

It’s little wonder the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry labelled the Optus response “a clown show”.

Bayer Rosmarin denied this, and refused to reveal what went wrong because it was very technical.

“There is no soundbite that is going to do it justice,” she said. (In other words: “Our customers are too stupid to understand.”)

On Monday, she said a software upgrade by an “international peering partner” – an overseas phone network it exchanges traffic with – triggered the outage.

Two days later, she revealed the peering partner was Singtel, which just happens to be Optus’ Singapore-based parent company.

And here’s another lesson – don’t obfuscate, particularly if you’re going to get caught.

What’s really extraordinary about the way Optus mishandled this crisis is that only 13 months earlier, it suffered a massive data breach that revealed the names, birthdates, home addresses, phone numbers, email contacts and passport and driving licence numbers of a third of the Australian population.

Clearly, it hadn’t learned anything.

This most recent failure will push more customers away from Optus and puts Bayer Rosmarin’s job in doubt.

If there was any silver lining for Optus in the outage, it was that most of its customers were unable to access online news and video to watch as the debacle unfolded.

Christopher Niesche is a Sydney-based business writer. His former roles include NZ Herald business editor and Australian Financial Review deputy editor (national).