Tuesdata: Why Optus faces a long journey to reputational recovery
Welcome to Tuesdata, our weekly analysis for Unmade’s paying members.
Today, a fortnight on, we analyse the consequences of Optus’ network crash, and the communications mistakes that cost the company’s CEO her job.
Further down, a slight improvement on the Unmade Index.
‘It's going to take them a couple of years to recover from this’: how Optus botched its crisis response all over again
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
In just over a year, Optus has faced two seismic PR crises that have seen the telco’s reputation shredded in the eyes of the public, politicians and the press.
After beginning to bounce back from its previous disaster, this one will take Optus longer to recover from, PR experts believe.
Last October, Optus experienced a data breach that saw the personal information of 10 million customers - about 40% of the Australian population - stolen and exposed.
Three weeks ago, the telco experienced a full scale outage that saw millions of Australians left without connectivity of any kind. The outage blocked more than 200 emergency triple-zero calls and left many businesses unable to talk to customers or take payments. Yesterday the government announced the terms of a review into the outage which will report back early next year.
After bodging the communications response a second time, it was soon clear that CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin would struggle to survive. Twelve days later, she was gone.
The question now is how quickly the brand will recover from the second hit on its reputation.