Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

The bigger the company, the more important it becomes to maintain a good image in the eyes of the public. But sometimes even the best trained PR staff can slip up. Especially when time is of the essence.

Picture this. You’re the chief operating officer at a big drug company, and you’ve just put the finishing touches on a new label. Within hours of giving the green light, production lines nationwide are already firing on all cylinders. But there’s a problem. The boxes are being stamped with stickers featuring the wrong drug.

Unaware of the mixup, the factory wraps up the drugs for shipping. Upon arrival at the first drug store on route, the pharmacists notice a discrepancy between the labels and the invoice. They immediately pick up the phone to report the problem. However, not all pharmacies getting the drug may have such eagle-eyed staff. In fact, it’s already on shelves in other locations. Not only can this endanger the lives of those who buy the drug for consumption, but the situation can generate a complete PR fiasco for the company.

Hubgets to the rescue

When the call arrives at HQ, everyone goes on alert. Internally, your company uses Hubgets for collaboration and communication. It works wonders for inside affairs, but also has ties to the outside world, because it’s seamlessly integrated with VoipNow, which offers advanced PBX capabilities. Instead of calling every partnering pharmacy in the nation, you can just look up the locations where your mis-advertised product got sent. Hubgets helps you do that fast and easy because it centralizes information across on your operations. People collaborate on specific topics, conversations can be tagged, and information can be instantly accessed and searched for using keywords. So it takes mere seconds to get the names of the pharmacies that were on the receiving end if that drug.

No time to call a meeting…

…but audio and video conferencing is just a few clicks away. You handpick a team to send out in the field. With Hubgets, you can create a topic (i.e. ‘Bad Drugs’) and add to your conversation only the staff involved involved in the matter. Regardless where your team members are, the same building, another city or another country, it’s the fastest way to brief them and organize a quiet recall strategy. Through file sharing and messaging, the newly-formed SWAT team can exchange documents with the location of the pharmacies, information on the drug supplies, etc. Finally, you hand your team step-by-step instructions and proceed to the removal of the product off the shelves.

It’s an unlikely scenario, but one that could happen nonetheless. If it does, you want to be prepared. Ten years ago, only a miracle would have solved this gaffe. But thanks to a tool like Hubgets, everyone is reachable at all times, and every piece of information relevant to your organization is easy to search, track, and use when needed. Best of all, everything in Hubgets happens in real time. In crisis situations, real-time collaboration isn’t just preferable, it’s a must.