Well, it’s part of business, isn’t it! We all have nightmares in our jobs. But those we call “PR blunders” seem like to be the worst of all. PR blunders usually arise from customer dissatisfaction and the worst thing about them is that when you look back, they could all have been avoided. Now, relax and read the following scenarios which we hope you never encounter in your business.

1. Great expectations
Many companies create unjustifiable at times exorbitant expectations in their potential customers. Today with the help of social media, businesses have the chance to hold sweepstakes, games and promotions and draw the attention of many prospects. If you embark on this journey, keep going. Social media are thought as channels for two-way communication, but when companies fail to do so, customers easily get dissatisfied. Of course, it is hard to support many communication channels when you are a small business. So if you are small, keep perfect communication along one channel rather than poor communication in many channels.

2. Untrained team
Inexperienced, unqualified or incompetent for their position, the front-end team need to be perfect. You might have an impeccable product and service, but if the person who answers the phone was not born to communicate, then your whole business will suffer. Don’t let this happen. Your customers need to have the feeling that they are talking to someone who knows what they are doing, someone who is also open to criticism.

3. Failure to deliver on time
Imagine someone is having a stag or hen party and they have ordered their party costumes, fancy dress and various party supply from your online shop. The party is tonight and everyone’s ready for a grand time. But you fail to deliver the products on time, although you’ve guaranteed to do so. Provided there are tens of reliable transport companies, and there is no blizzard outside, you have no excuse to fail the customer. Place meeting promises as priority No. 1 in your business strategy.

4. Wasting precious time of your customers
Would you be happy spending hours on end sending emails and calling someone on the phone just to get something done? We doubt it. Sometimes PR blunders might arise exactly from the fact that it takes hours and hours for you to figure it out what went wrong, instead of simply fixing the problem.

5. Lack of feedback
Have you ever sent an email and never get an answer? Even to someone whom you know in person and who is expecting your email? In B2C communication, this shows lack of respect for your customers’ time and will certainly reduce their desire to buy from you. If customers send an email with a request, big or small, if you don’t pay attention to if and fail to return a reply, you will most probably lose this customer for good.

6. Standing in your team’s way
The worst PR blunders arise from bad management. In B2C there is often a discrepancy between the work of the employees whose tasks are related to face-to-face communication with customers, on the one side, and the opinion of the management, on the other. This discrepancy may result in inadequate decision making, training, establishment of wrong work procedures and so on. The best solution for this problem lays in regular meetings with every department and with very competent team leaders whom you can trust.