Inadequate customer service keeps rearing it’s ugly head. The good news is that any company of any size can do something immediate to make their service better. Enter Peter Shankman, the New York Times dubbed “PR all star”, to discuss how being super-excellent may be as easy as “being a little better sometimes”.

Peter attributes his success to “trying to be nice”. In today’s customer service economy, many people expect to be treated “like crap”. Since customer experience is trending as the main thing driving revenue, ensuring that your customers truly feel like they are a part of the company and taken care of must be a driving goal.

Peter’s latest book, Zombie Loyalists takes this idea and runs with it. A zombie loyalist is someone who is in love with your product and who drives much of your business by fighting for your brand. By consciously creating a single positive experience for that customer, you have created a loyalist. They will stick with your brand and fight to refer you, bringing their friends along with them. And since customer service tends to be so bad that consumers expect poor service, the simple act of treating people “a little better than normal” can go a long way.

As Peter points out, customers generally don’t mind when a company screws up, they mind when the company doesn’t respond to fix the problem.

"The only thing that’s worse than a hater is someone who used to be a lover”, says Peter, so ensure that your customers stay loyal by treating them right. After all, it’s nice to be nice—and it's nice to be able to pay the mortgage.

Looking for easy, actionable tips on how to maintain your customers’ loyalty and create a brand that people will love? Tune in!

Peter Shankman is a worldwide connector, presenting radical new ways of customer service thinking. He is a corporate and conference keynote speaker, a consultant for a number of Fortune 100 companies, an Adjunct Professor of Public Relations at New York University, and an author of four books. In his spare time Peter runs a series of business masterminds (not to mention marathons and triathlons).

He was one of the founders of the AOL Newsroom and Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and has been dubbed by the New York Times as the “public relations all star on everything about new media”. Peter has been featured on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and The Wall Street Journal. As if that wasn’t enough, he also advises NASA.

Customer Experience is hot… but are you taking advantage of its huge potential to make your services business more prominent and profitable? Join Service Strategies for an informative Customer Experience Workshop in San Diego on October 27th. You’ll learn how to create customer success while generating profitable revenue for your services business. The workshop is part of the Service Industry Summit event, which bring together leaders from companies like Cisco, Dell and others to discuss the challenges of a changing service landscape. Visit servicestrategies.com to learn more.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

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