Nightmare Scenario

When Murphy's Law Strikes: Surviving a Nightmare Scenario Where Everything Goes Wrong

As a business owner or service provider, we all have clients that we work with on a regular basis. For most of the time, things go smoothly, and we are able to provide high-quality services without any hiccups. However, sometimes, we experience a "nightmare scenario," where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and it all happens to one client. 

This was the case Aurora Assist where we had one client, XYZ Ltd, who was experiencing multiple issues all at once. It seemed like everything that could go wrong was happening to the company. It must have been very disheartening for the founder of XYZ Ltd along with their staff members as this all played out very publicly due to the nature of their business. 

Firstly, XYZ Ltd's website had been hacked, causing it to go down for a few days. Then, when the website was restored, it had been compromised, and customer data had been leaked. This led to XYZ Ltd losing trust with its customers and negative publicity. 

Secondly, the company's social media accounts were then hacked and taken over by a third party, who had posted inappropriate content, further damaging XYZ Ltd’s reputation. 

Following this their email marketing campaign had been flagged as spam, leading to its emails being blocked by email providers and even solicited emails not reaching their customers. 

Perhaps as a result of all this, their PPC advertising account had been suspended due to a violation of Google's advertising policies, leading to a loss of sales and revenue. (PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click advertising, which is a type of online advertising where advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their ads. A PPC advertising account with Google is an advertising account that allows businesses to create and manage their PPC ads on Google Ads.) 

Finally, perhaps as a result of the chaos they were in, one of XYZ Ltd's employees in attempting to resolve some of the above problems, had accidentally deleted most of their customer data, leading to a significant loss of valuable information. 

XYZ Ltd’s staff were understandably distressed and frustrated by the situation - they had tried to handle things themselves only for seemingly everything to go wrong. As a result they approached Aurora Assist.

Our team worked tirelessly to help the company address all of the issues. We worked on restoring their website and social media accounts, improving their email marketing campaigns, and getting their advertising account reinstated. Our IT specialists were also able to recover much of the lost data as possible. Aurora Assist also helped XYZ Ltd to implement a robust contingency policy against any such business interruption in the future, including better data storage.  

Aurora Assist also managed reporting the data loss to the appropriate agencies (they had global client data so a number of different processes were involved). 

In the end, we were able to assist XYZ Ltd in recovering from their horrific situation, but it was a difficult and stressful process for everyone concerned, including Aurora Assist and the client. It served as a sharp warning that anything that may go wrong can occasionally happen, and it can all appear to happen at once. However, by remaining composed and making a concerted effort to address the problems, we were able to assist our client in emerging victorious and carrying on with their business. As a result of all the negative press they had been receiving, we were also crucial in managing their ongoing customer relations and Aurora Assist continues to help them today.