As we begin the regular flu season and send our children to get their flu shots, the media reminds us that this year is an evolutionary year for the virus thanks to the new strain that is currently circulating through the school systems from primary to university level.  The swine flu strain is basically the same type of influenza that we are all familiar with except multiplied in severity by ten.  In the business world, there is a virus strain that is as bad as swine flu and, in my opinion, is far worse because it tends to circulate farther and faster.  It's called bad press.

The quickest way to catch bad press is through the germ of bad customer service.  Bad customer service is the equivalent of not washing your hands after you sneeze.  You inevitably share the nastiness with everyone and then everyone gets sick.  If one customer gets infected with bad customer service, they share their experience verbally with a minimum of ten people.  Then those ten become infected and the epidemic of bad press spreads, because each of those ten individuals tells another ten of their friends, and so on and so on.  Once upon a time, bad press only spread through verbal word of mouth and when it became widespread enough, it spread by newspaper; not so anymore.

The giants of micro blogging-Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter-allow the spread of any kind of press to touch hundreds at a time.  Just one small negative rant that stays on a Facebook post for two seconds is still logged in the activity history and everyone on that individual's friend list can still see it.  Bad press these days spreads faster than a wild fire through prairie land in a draught on a windy day.  Once bad press gets started, it is impossible to stop it.  The only way to stop it is to make sure it never gets started which means you need to get your customer service in order and provide the customer with exactly what they want and need.  We  simply cannot give our customers a mediocre help desk.  Our customers should leave entirely satisfied every time.  One way to start creating a better customer service department is to get PhaseWare customer service software.  With PhaseWare software, the customer has options and your business can stay organized while keeping overhead costs to a minimum.  So take a look at our software.  We know you'll be as impressed with it as we are proud of it.