Blog

I interrupt our regularly scheduled blog for an important customer service announcement.

In the last post, we talked about figuring out what your customers want out of a positive buying experience. Today I was going to talk about the concept of Deliver +1 and how this concept can take your customer service to the next level. Instead, I need to share a recent experience as an example of what not to do in your customer service system. 

Over three weeks ago, STX hockey ran a BOGO special. Anyone who knows me knows I love STX equipment. As you can imagine, I was excited. It was the chance for me to pick up their top-of-the-line sticks for $100 or less, which, if you are a hockey player, it’s a steal.

However, when my order arrived, it only had two of the four sticks I had ordered; the box was ripped open. I was shocked. I immediately went online to look up the customer service number. I called no answer; upon listening to the customer service message, it stated that they do not have customer service hours on the weekends and suggest sending an email. 

I left a voicemail and then followed up with an email to highlight my issues and my desire to speak with someone. I expected them to get back to me on Monday. 

Monday afternoon rolls around, and no replay. So I decided to call again, no answer. I leave another voicemail and email. Two days later, I called again. This time added how they could resolve the issue to my satisfaction. (see email below)

I waited another two days and no response. I left another voicemail and an email. At this point, I have created three support tickets and was starting to get frustrated. I am a massive fan of the brand and love their equipment, but the lack of support was ridiculous. 

Once again, the weekend  was approaching, so I knew I could not get a hold of anyone. So I decided to try the hail marry of getting shit done before I just cut my losses and move on, never to buy from them again.

I looked up the CEO, email, and phone number using a prospecting tool, shout out to Seamless AI. I sent a final email highlighting my displeasure and how I would like to see it resolved.

Apr 22, 2021, 9:34 EDT

Hello Kenneth,

I am reaching out as a concerned customer and business owner myself. I have been trying to reach someone at STX customer service for over two weeks. I have left 4 voice mails and sent 3 emails and have not heard back from them.

I had an issue with your recent BOGO sale, in which I only received two of the four sticks I should have received as much as I am pissed that I did not receive what I ordered. I am more concerned about my favorite hockey brand.

I have truly enjoyed using your products, but I am now considering switching because of the lack of customer care. It is ridiculous that not one person could reply to a voice mail or email in two weeks. I hope that you, as the owner, have taken the time to read this email and will hopefully respond to me.

My phone number is (edited to remove personal information)

My support ticket (26556)

Thanks,

David Levine 

Later that afternoon, I got my first response. Now it took me over two weeks of messaging and calling to get a response. You would think they would have taken the time to read my emails and listen to my voice mails, where I spell out my problem.

No, the first thing is two different customer support agents contacted me—each one asking for my order number, which I had shared with them twice in earlier emails.

After giving them the information, they credited my account and have sent me the two missing sticks, which seems like a desired result. I got everything I wanted and then some; however, they still made several significant mistakes. These were the ones that bothered me the most.

1. Their customer service agents were called agents instead of having names, which made the limited interaction feel impersonal. To be honest, this was a characteristic of the entire experience.
2. They were extraordinarily unorganized and failed to communicate how they resolved my problem. Suddenly, I got an email from my credit card company that I had received credit and a similar message from UPS that a package was on the way. 
3. Lastly, no apology. I am glad they resolved the issue, but seriously they took no ownership and left the experience feeling cold. 

As you continue to read this series on customer service, I hope you take my experience to heart while developing your customer service systems. Next week I will introduce the concept of Delivery +1 and the 1% rule.

In the meantime, if you need help building a holistic customer experience that turns your clients into raving fans. Then don’t hesitate to contact me.

Secrets Secrets they Can Be Fun… Let me tell you one.

In the last post, we talked about the first secret to building a solid customer service plan and how to decide what your vision is. 

Today we’ll talk about the second secret in taking your satisfied customers to raving fans. You must know what your customers want. Know who your customers are, and you will know better how to serve them. Having a defined ideal client is really important here. An upper-class woman in her 30’s is going to have completely different expectations than a working-class man in his 50’s.

When considering what your customer wants, there are four main areas to focus in:

• Listen to your client
• Ask Your Customers Sincerely
• Offer More than Just a Product/Service
• Know When to thank them for their feedback 

These are all important when deciding what your customers want out of their experience. 

Listen to Your Client

You need to listen to both what they say and what they don’t say. Clients may say they want one thing and mean something else. For example, if your customers are begging for lower prices, you may find their real priority is quick delivery. Your clients fall into four categories.

First, you have the raving fan; they’re the person who will self-identify with your brand. Take, for example, the hipster that will say I will only use apple products. Most of the time, they love what you do and provide you with positive feedback. This is your 20% sweet spot. However, if you’re looking to grow or pivot, you have to listen to what they say and prod them for negative feedback.

Second, you have the passive client; you need to listen to customers who only reply with “fine.” These customers are so used to bad customer service they only give a monotone response. Think of the client that leaves the 3-star review and writes it was good—clearly, no a lot to go on here. 

Third, you have the silent client. Listen to your “silent” customers. These customers don’t bother to complain because the service is so bad they’ve just given up and don’t feel like their voice matters. They feel unwanted, and when a competitor shows up, they’ll be gone.

Lastly, you have the detracter or “Karen.” These are your clients who had such a negative experience that will actively try to cause harm to your business. This can be in the form of a poor review or youtube rant. It is essential to make sure that you have a plan in place to handle these people. One suggestion is to create a Non-ideal client profile; this will allow you to figure out who that person is before they even have a chance to buy from you.

Ask Your Customers Sincerely

If you aren’t sincere when you ask their opinion, they will see right through you. It is essential to understand why you are asking them for their feedback. Are you truly prepared to take feedback and make changes? If not, don’t ask. Client feedback is not an opportunity to pander to them in an attempt to create some false value. This is your chance to reengage them and keep them as loyal customers.

You need to ask them sincere questions that get them thinking about their experiences. Make them feel like you really care, and you should! 

Extra tip: If you have a plan of how their feedback is being used, share it with them during your review process.

Offer More than Just a Product/Service

Your customer service process does not just start after you have completed the sale. Make sure you are thinking holistically about your client’s experience. It starts from the first contact and continues indefinitely.

Your customers are looking for much more than a simple product or service; they are looking for an experience that makes them feel good. They gauge every step of the process with a value. When you consider this and treat them like people, they will feel like they belong. That is when your product or service becomes a community.

Know When to Ignore Them

First, you must acknowledge that your business is not for everyone and everyone is not your customer. You will sell to people, and people will buy from you that really shouldn’t have. 

It is okay; in reality, you can’t give them everything, and some people you will never make happy. You have to set limits and stick to them. If your vision and company don’t meet the customer’s needs, they will be best suited elsewhere. 

Be direct, tell them this is not working out, and create a process to help them find the right place for them, and then move on to those you can help.

Start Here

• Who is my customer? 
• What are my goals for my customer experience?
• What questions can I ask to make sure I am delivering on that experience?
• How will I use their answers?

Now that you have learned some quick tips and tricks. If you get stuck, I am happy to answer questions. Email me: doogie@ideasactionssuccess.com 

Customer Service Secrets

Customer service is a pretty hot topic and can make or break your business. Consumers have little patience for lousy customer service and quickly get tired of waiting in long lines, trying to get a live person on the line, going through an interrogation to return something, or trying to communicate through a language barrier. 

If you provide them with a simple, efficient, pleasant experience, they will revisit your business over and over. More importantly, your clients will tell everyone they know! 

There are three secrets to good customer service; the first one we’re going to conquer is knowing exactly what YOU want.

You are the captain of the ship and the visionary for your business’s future, so you need to have a clearly defined plan for your business, including customer service. There are three main goals you need to consider:

• Understand Your Road Blocks
  • It needs to be easy for your customers to do business with you. You can do this with advertised discounts, kiosks, your website, and other technology-based programs to help them shop. No matter what medium you chose, make sure you understand all of the steps your asking your client to do. Then make sure you can make them as easy as possible.
• Your Experience Needs to be Like Talking with Mom
  • Doing business with you needs to be a warm and pleasant experience. Your staff has to be knowledgeable, approachable, warm, and patient. Your customers need to feel like they are getting good value for their time and money. Perceived value goes beyond the price of the products and extends to their shopping experience.
• A Penny Wise a Dollar Foolish
  • Change your mindset and ask yourself, “How can I NOT afford to do these things?” This shouldn’t be a question of expenses, but making and keep happy customers. It is always essential to think about customer lifetime value when dealing with complaints, refunds, replacements, etc. Think a penny today is a dollar tomorrow.

With these thoughts in mind, you also need to consider a few things when deciding on the actual programs and standards you’ll put into place.

• Share your customer service vision with the rest of your staff. 
• Empower your staff to make decisions at the moment.
• Connect your incentive programs and bonuses directly to customer service.
• Monitor the level of customer service your staff is putting out.
• Set a time to review and improve your customer experience regularly.
• Know when you can ignore what your customers want.
• Continuously focus on your goals.

Now that you know what you want, you can start thinking about meeting those wants and creating a positive customer service experience. If you’re having a hard time deciding on what you want, the tools, resources, and coaches in our GUIDED TOUR can help you define your company’s wants and needs in relation to customer service.

Business 2.01: Grow the Right Way

Two weeks ago, we talked about the first three of the seven specific areas you need to consider in your franchise prototype process. Here are all seven again:

• Primary Aim
• Strategic Objectives
• Organizational Strategy
• Management Strategy
• People Strategy
• Marketing Strategy
• Systems Strategy

(The first three focus areas were covered in the blog: Business 2.0, please read before continuing)

Creating a focus in these seven areas will get you on the path to creating a business that works for you. Today we are going to cover the last four.

Before we jump into it, think of constructing your business model like planting a tree. At first, it’s so tiny and weak you wonder if it will even make it through the night. But, you keep watering, fertilizing, and nurturing it. Your ideas will grow the trunk, and each of these strategies will extend out like the branches of your now a strong tree. Finding the perfect support staff, employees, vendors/suppliers, and other relationships will make your tree flourish with leaves and flowers to bear fruit. 

Grab your pen and paper, roll up your sleeves; it is time to get to work.

Management Strategy

If I told you, having excellent management is not about finding great people with a lot of experience but about creating a system to cultivate, promote, and train talent. 

The way you structure your management team development is essential to your growth and your employees’ happiness and, ultimately, your customers/clients. This strategy is results-oriented and doesn’t depend on the people but the actual system that’s in place.

A management strategy, in short, includes goals, rules, company direction (mission/vision), standards (supervisor expectation of behavior and performance), skill development. That tells your employees how to act, grow your business, and meet clients’ expectations. 

It is a well-orchestrated procession of actions that allows your staff to exceed your clients’ expectations while fulfilling strategic objectives over and over again. It is your operation manual, your series of checklists, scripts, and action processes. 

People strategy: 

If your management strategy is what you want your people to do, your people strategy is how you get them to do it.

You need to show your employees how you feel about their job performance and dedication to your business. They also need to understand “why” they are doing specific tasks. This helps your employees personally connect to their job, leading to better production and a happier workplace. 

There are several strategies you can use to get the highest performance of your employees (They are in order of effectiveness):

• Constant, regular, and public reminder/thanks of how their work is impacting the community (companies goals)
• Internal education program
• Internal staff dream program
• The innovation game
• A learn this business program:” not just your job.”
• Performance Incentive Programs
• Contests that reward high performance
• An employee of the Month
• Performance/Holiday Bonuses

These are just a few of the ideas you can use. To create a great people strategy is to find the balance between appreciation, education (the why), and directing of staff energy.

One of the best ways to appreciate your employees is by calling a meeting and asking them how they would like to be rewarded. Think about it for a while and put the best strategy into play. Keep it fresh and change up the system you use from time to time to keep your employees guessing. Once they get used to the prize, it’s time for a whole new approach.

You need to build a community within your company. There needs to be support, appreciation, and respect. The more “at home” an employee feels, the better they will perform and the higher their loyalty level.

Marketing Strategy

Marketing is, of course, essential to the success of any business, but it also must work cohesively with the other strategies you’re using. There are two central pillars of successful marketing strategy-the demographic and psychographic profiles of your customers.

The psychographic tells you what your customers are the most likely to buy, and the demographic tells you who they are, which can help you learn why they buy specific items.

With this information, you have answered the pivotal questions of marketing:

• Who are they?
• Where are they at?
• What do they want?

Now all you have to do is speak to them. 

Systems Strategy

There are three types of systems in every business:

• Hard Systems
• Soft Systems
• Information Systems

Hard systems refer to those that immutable they’re opening and closing procedures, your standards of office cleanliness. These are the systems that don’t have any wiggle room and are usually all internal.

Information systems include customer data, product information, financial…anything with data and numbers. This the recording of important information to the operation, use, and success of the business.

The most important of all three systems is the soft systems because it is where your employees have the most flexibility in execution and usually require the most creativity.

The most critical soft system is your sales system. In your sales system, the two keys to success are structure and substance. The structure is what you sell, and substance being how you sell it.

All three systems are essential to the success of your business, and while they all have their particular roles, they all must work together to get the job done. This also goes for your entire business development program.

Recap 

I want to take a moment to recap on the ideas we went over through these business development lessons. We have covered a lot of the series of blogs.

An entrepreneurial myth, or e-myth, is an assumption that anyone can succeed at business with: 

• Desire 
• Some capital 
• Projected a targeted profit

There are essentially three key roles that need to be filled to set your business up for success:

• The Technician
• The Manager
• The Entrepreneur

The four different stages of a business life cycle are:

• Infancy
• Adolescence
• Growing Pains
• Maturity

There are a few things we are going to talk about:

• Business Format Franchise
• The Franchise Prototype
• Franchise Prototype Standards

There are three main areas of business development:

• Innovation
• Quantification
• Orchestration

Seven specific areas you need to consider in your franchise prototype process. Here are all seven again:

• Primary Aim
• Strategic Objectives
• Organizational Strategy
• Management Strategy
• People Strategy
• Marketing Strategy
• Systems Strategy

Question and Actions

If you have been following along over the past few months, I thank you for those who have not; then you have a lot of work to do. Below are guiding questions and action steps. As always, I am here to help.

1. What do I do now? First, identify what role in your business you play. Are you a technician, manager, or entrepreneur? 
2. Where do I need the most help? Take some time to think about the area you need the most help, then start taking the next step in your business.
3. What will it take to get past my ego? As entrepreneurs, we constantly feel we must go it alone, but in reality, once we get past our ego holding us back, we can get the help we need to succeed truly.

I am here to help you work through all of these areas and give your business a jumpstart that puts you ahead of your competition right from the start. Feel free to contact me directly at doogie@ideasactionsuccess.com. I am happy to answer any questions you have and discuss the success of your business.

Lesson Learned from a Toddler

My first career was as a youth professional. I spent over ten years working in everything from boarding schools to summer camps. I learned a lot about people, empathy, behavioral development, but I also learned the most important business lesson.

Let me paint a picture for you. Imagine you are a parent trying to get your child ready for bed. I bet your conversation goes a little something like this:

Parent: “It’s time to brush your teeth.”

Child: “Why?”

Parent “Because we brush our teeth at bedtime.”

Child “Why?”

Parent “Because we want to have healthy teeth.”

Child “Why?”

Parent “So we can…chew.”

Child “Why?”

Parent “Because you don’t want to starve.”

Child “Why”

Parent “Because I am going to throw you out of the house right now if you don’t brush your dam teeth!”

All jokes aside, as a parent, this may seem very frustrating, but as a business owner, this is the most important lesson you can learn that questions are powerful.

Why and Business

Only when you follow the course of question will you discover your business purpose, how to overcome its challenges, and what your client genuinely want. Learning to be curious is one of the essential skills to develop as a business owner.

Being curious should be applied in many areas. We will spend some time exploring a few of them.

Purpose

You should always be asking yourself:

Why am I doing what I am doing? 

Why does this help me to be a better person?

Start with one of these questions and repeatedly ask the same question at least seven times. Going through the seven stages of why will unlock your sense of purpose and correct any sway you might have as you go through your entrepreneurial journey. 

Whenever you’re feeling doubt or unsure, just ask yourself why and keep asking until you can take an action step in the right direction for your goals.

Decision Making/Problem Solving

I think this is the most obvious place to use the power of why. It should be used in two crucial ways problem solving and decision making. However, to use it properly in these situations, you will need to ask more than why questions instead. I suggest adding the following:

Problem-solving (Why?):

• What will we need to change?
• How can we prevent it?
• Who do we need to coach, train, hire to make sure it does not happen?

Decision Making (Why?)

• How is this insert job/task/project important to meeting expectations/goal/bottom line?
• What will we need to change to implement?
• What area of our business will be affected by this change?

Clients 

The final area we will chat about today is understanding your client. It is imperative to understand your client’s motivation, desires, hooks, triggers, pain points the list can go on. The best place to start is, you guessed it, with the why. Here are a few of my favorite client-related why questions to get you to solve problems for your ideal client?

• Why does my client have the problem they have?
• Why do they want to get rid of this problem?
• Why am I the right person to help/solve/serve my clients?
• Why is my solution the best/optimal solution?

Now that you understand why “WHY is so important. Find your inner child and ask why then keep asking why until you don’t know the answer. This is the point that you have identified the real problem and begin to make the lasting change in your business & life.

Looking to get your business to work for you instead of working for your business, check out my E-learning marketplace, which is filled with great tools, tactics, and strategies that will have you doubling your sales, cutting your cost, and increasing your annual revenue by 10k or more!

Ask yourself: Why should I invest in myself and my business today? Want to find out more about the coaching? Schedule your discovery call today!