The View | Everybody makes mistakes, but a deft touch can make it quickly go away. KFC is a case in point
When KFC ran out of chicken at more than two thirds of its outlets in the UK recently, it quickly acknowledged its failure and applied a light touch to diffuse the situation
What happens to a fast-food chain that specialises in chicken but has no chicken to sell? This sounds like a version of the “why did the chicken cross the road” joke but for KFC’s UK subsidiary it’s far from being a joke because distribution problems forced two thirds of its outlets to temporarily close as chicken supplies dried up.
The problem was that KFC’s new distribution agent, DHL, somehow managed to cock things up, or as the company previously known as Kentucky Fried Chicken ruefully explained in a tweet: “We’ve got the chicken, we’ve got the restaurants, but we just had issues getting them together.”
KFC went further and in a mock Q&A answered its own question of how it ran out of chicken by saying “you had one job at KFC … fix it now”.
The problem was eventually fixed but not before adding greatly to the sum of human gaiety. What was so impressive about KFC’s response to this crisis was that not only did it participate in the gaiety but at no point tried to play down the problem or even shift the blame.
The way KFC handled things might become part of the textbook on crisis management adding to the well-established principle of quickly acknowledging failure by stipulating that it should be done with a deft light touch.
Compare this with how the mighty Apple Corporation responded to complaints about its new iPhone X model, which, according to many of its users, suffers the embarrassing problem of not being able to cope with the simple function of handling incoming calls. Apparently there is a bug that causes a delay for reception of these calls, which in turn causes great aggravation to users.