Consumer Notification
Successful recall management demands that all affected parties must be identified and notified. They include consumers, processors, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, regulators, and healthcare professionals.
It is one of the most challenging steps in the product recall process and certainly one of the company’s most critical responsibilities.
Especially when drug recalls or medical device recalls or food recalls pose a public health or safety risk, the communications must be immediate and unambiguous. In fact, product recall communications can define product recall success. It is the key to compliance and a guarantor of the company’s reputation going forward.
To be sure, communicating with retailers and consignees can be a logistically formidable task. Regulators must also be kept informed at every point during the recall process.
But the definitive challenge is to reach consumers, and to do so with clear, necessary action points. The task is all the more daunting today, amid the information clutter that can bury even the most urgent health and safety messages.
There’s another serious challenge affecting many product recalls. Some of the recalled products may already be in the homes of consumers’, which ratchets up the urgent need for optimal communications a hundredfold.
In such situations, manufacturers should personally contact consumers whenever possible. For example, consumers who are on record as having purchased the recalled products should be contacted directly. Enticing rebates or replacements are effective motivational tools. Consider compensating consumers, not only for the price of the product, but for their inconvenience as well.
Stericycle ExpertRECALL’s Document Center processes hundreds of thousands of notifications to consumers, and all other parties of interest, as part of our recall assistance. Notifications are targeted and communicated via phone, fax, email, Internet, or direct mail. Every notification is catalogued for reporting and compliance purposes.
ExpertRECALL takes immense pride that, after spearheading over 2,000 recalls, the FDA has adopted ExpertRECALL’s standard notification document package. Today, this document package is widely used and recognizable throughout the industry.
