Sometimes organizations in Saudi Arabia adopt such ways of doing business that spins one’s head. Many, if not all, tend to ignore some very basic concepts of management and customer service that causes immense damage to their reputations.
I can cite a very recent example in this regard. The first is about the shortage of cooking gas in some cities, mainly Jeddah and Makkah, most probably caused by a chaos in distribution.
All of a sudden, residents of Jeddah found themselves part of long queues outside gas stations to secure a cylinder or two for their households. Under normal circumstances, any activity that usually take less than five minutes turned into a nightmare for Jeddawis who found themselves running from pillar to post to get one cylinder even at a price six times higher than the actual.
You do not need to consult any public relations (PR) book to anticipate that the company responsible about this product should go out, face the public, discuss the issue with its customers, and lay out its plans to rectify the situation. The National Gas and Industrial Company (its acronym is GASCO) remained silent for two days, giving us the feeling that all the things happening in the market have nothing to do with it at all. Actually, that was exactly what the company said when it started issuing public statements; this is not our fault, there is a downtime in the supplier refinery and it is affecting the quantity and availability of the product in the market. Aramco, the supplier running the refinery, did not take long to come out and confound these statements, assuring that the company has provided GASCO with enough supply, and the downtime at the refinery has nothing to do with the problem.
The fact of the matter is that GASCO is reportedly going through some internal problems. It would be a waste of time and space to repeat what has already appeared in a section of press. Anyway, there is a lesson for all in this incident. Fix your internal issues before it is too late and you start losing the market, and when a disaster knocks on your doors, be brave enough to go out and face it, listen to your customers and talk to them.
It is very important for any organization to keep an eye on its target customer or consumer base. One has to tread very carefully so as to avoid any problem and in case of a crisis, there should be a proper crisis management strategy to control the damage.
In any business, or a project, identifying the stakeholder is one of the very basic steps that you have to do. Each and every stakeholder has a way to affect the business in one way or the other, depending on his power or impact and relevance. A good project manager or a business owner should know how to balance all stakeholders.
