Show ‘em the Love
Is it just me, or have you noticed that a lot of the people you talk to these days are in a bad mood?
A big part of public relations is spreading a positive message about a specific product, service or business. But recently, I’ve noticed that a lot of business owners, fellow public-relations people and service-oriented folks are sharing a negative attitude instead.
We are all dealing with the ups and downs of the current economy. But now is not the time to take out personal issues on customers, show vanity or crawl into a hole.
Instead, it’s time to make an extra effort to help your customers out. For instance, check out the article at DM News on being “C-Commerce” - http://www.dmnews.com/Think-C-commerce-in-tough-times/article/126677/.
With this in mind, you may want to do a quick review of your customer-service team and see how they are doing. And it wouldn’t hurt to check your own conversations too. How negative have you been lately?
If you have been positive and working hard to make your customers happy, that’s great! If not, please take a moment to regroup. Try to put your personal issues and work problems aside, and give customers the best service you possibly can.
After all, you don’t want to lose customers to your competitors, and Valentine’s Day is just around the corner.
If you have PR or SEO copywriting questions, please let me know here or at www.rembrandtwrites.com. I’m here to help! Happy Valentine’s Day!
February 10th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Great Post, thanks! I totally agree, it’s important to have a set level of customer service and communication standards which shouldn’t be affected by outer circumstances (such as recession). Nothing will give you more trust and positive reviews than uplifting your customers even in not-so-good times.
February 10th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
We feel really fortunate in our business. When people come to us, it is usually a happy time in their life so I don’t notice this sense of gloom with customers but,
I do see that the general public -retail service etc do seem a bit down trodden. I don’t notice any worseing of customer care or service in general, it’s always been pretty weak in my estimation. If anything, the retailers seem to have something in common with the little guy again.
they seem more empathetic with the customer and not as pushy and self serving… like they got taken down a couple notches and are now more eye to eye with the consumer..
while it may seem bad at this moment, this is going to be good for us in the long run and we will be much better people for it… (assuming of course we survive it)
nice post:)
February 11th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Thanks for your comments. I’m glad to hear there are people out there who still place an importance on customer service!
Have a great day!
Melanie
February 11th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Thanks for the reminder.
Yesterday I Stumbled upon this website.
http://improveverywhere.com/2009/02/09/high-five-escalator/
It’s a great experiment on how to make people feel good when they least expect it. In my opinion, this is public relations at its best. But now… how to apply it to commerce?