I do not know about you, but sometimes it is very easy to feel short changed by the service and products that we pay for.

Bear with me a little here, for a company to cut telephone service that you have clearly paid for, to be stuck with a modem that can never get you online, to buy a product only to have it blow on your face is to be short changed. It is unfair and frustrating.

Why? Because you paid the full price and you should get nothing less than your money’s worth.

See, companies have been able to get away with this in the past because bad experience has ended at one person. Earlier a bad experience in a hotel or coffee shop has ended at you lining up for a doctors appointment alone and in pain. Previously a Taxi or moto could get away with overcharging you or dropping you off before your gate.

It does not mean you didn’t have a voice then to reject being short-changed; you were just a bit handicapped in expressing your bad experiences.

Fast forward 2011, now on you finger tips; you have a giant mega phone that can broadcast to the world about this experience in the name of new media. With these new communication tools, a customer is a reporter and his audience is growing daily.

What does this mean for companies, it means that your customer just became bigger than that billboard you have anchored at a main street; it means you don’t need to pay media fees to have your company’s name plastered on everyone’s face.

If Kigali life group, alone, receives thousands of comments daily imagine if one day people decide to just have a negative conversation about your firm. The thing about today’s customer is that he will not stand bad service, or experience because he is enabled to report about it and to warn people off your offering.

Customers are now listening to each other more than they would care to listen to a TV ad. So adapt to all these new channels, may it be facebook, twitter google plus. Bad experience happens but only your firm can correct them and make them right.

What this means for businesses, is that they can no longer be ignorant of their clients’ ability to make or destroy them, instead they have to tag along in every avenue that their brand names are likely to come up, and provide accurate information and solutions to arising problems with their brands.

To cope with this new client/customer, firms will need to develop mechanisms that travel with their clients along, answering their questions, and guiding their action.

So don’t hold out about having that new social manager, or enlarging your PR department to cope with the new communication models. Own all your clients communication mouthpieces by being there when they are talking about you. It can be bad or good but be there.

In the end only your firm can tell the true story of your brands.
 
The writer is a PR Manager at The Advertising Company (TAC)