By Russ Mate

1) Being placed on hold endlessly. Don't you just love it when you call a company and they place you on hold, leaving you to listen to their latest on-hold, recorded sales pitch, over and over again. Would you think it normal business practice for a retail store clerk to ask you to "wait a minute" while they disappeared into back of store for ten, fifteen, thirty minutes or longer? People do things over phone that they would never do in person. It's bad business either way to leave a customer hanging without at least coming back to let customer know how much longer they'll be holding.

2) Getting rude with a customer. As saying goes, even if customer's wrong, customer's always right. There's never any reason to get rude with a customer. If a customer gets rude with you, let them blow off steam and remember that their behavior is not an attack directed against you personally. Always keep in mind that as long as you remain calm and in control, you can address reason behind customer's anger.

Managers Who Spend PR $$ Wisely

If you are a department, division or subsidiary manager, your budget is a precious possession whether you work for a business, a non-profit or an association. So why stand by while your public relations team spends too much time and treasure on tactics like press releases, column mentions and brochures? Especially when you could be using an aggressive PR blueprint to persuade your most important outside audiences to your way of thinking, then move them to take actions that lead to your success?

The good news is, that aggressive blueprint shines PR spotlight directly on those outside groups of people who have a large say in how successful you’re going to be – namely, on your key external target audiences. It reads this way: people act on their own perception of facts before them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which something can be done. When we create, change or reinforce that opinion by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action very people whose behaviors affect organization most, public relations mission is accomplished.

Look at kinds of behaviors that are possible using such a blueprint. A big jump up in capital contributions, increased membership queries, new prospects showing up, more current buying and even repeat purchases occurring, and even new proposals for joint ventures.

Spending your PR $$ wisely implies that you are getting serious about your public relations by changing emphasis from communications tactics to a workable plan for reaching those outside groups of people with a large say about how successful you will be. I refer, of course, to those key external target audiences of yours.

What do they think of you, anyway? Ask your PR staff why they believe that’s important to you? Hopefully, they’ll agree that target audience perceptions usually do lead to behaviors that can help or hinder you in achieving your operating objectives. In other words, is your PR team guided by solid fundamentals rather than mechanics like special events and communications tactics?

Next, decide together, then prioritize exactly which external audiences have most impact on your operation, and let’s do some work on audience at top of that list.

Since you must monitor perceptions by interacting with members of that audience, you can elect to join your PR folks as they ask some penetrating questions: “Do you know anything about us? How do you feel about our services and/or products? Have you had any contact with our people? Did it work out to your satisfaction?”