The Customer Experience, Great, Good, Bad, Indifferent How Your Customer Sees You. Dave Negri 269

Contractors Secret Weapon Podcast

The Customer Experience, is it Great, is it Good, is it Bad, Indifferent, How Does Your Customer See You? This one of my pet peeves, how do you treat your customer better yet how does your customer perceive your interaction, Do they believe they are being treated well? That is really the defining factor.

They won’t tell you they just won’t do business with you again

The customer experience has been so on my mind for the past few days, week, or so that I really want to take a look into the customer experience. It’s just been one of those things over the past couple of weeks, sort of like a creeping thing at the back of your neck and I will tell you why. So, here’s part of what’s going on.

I’m looking to remodel bathrooms, or my wife is looking to remodel our bathrooms. So, I go to the granite store that’s suggested to me by my contractor. Yes, I hire a contractor; I don’t work on my own house because I love my wife and want to stay happily married. Because the only things she’ll get out of me is a start date.

So, we get to the granite store, we pick up the granite, and I forget to take a picture of the granite. So, my wife calls the store, but nobody answers. We just left there maybe fifteen minutes ago, and nobody answers, it goes to voice mail. We leave a message explaining our dilemma and ask if they could please send a text or picture of the granite that we just picked out so that we go pick out the tile for the rest of the bathroom because my wife is on a mission. She wants to get everything picked out and she wants you to get it done today.

So, now it’s been a week, a whole seven days waiting for someone to call back from the granite store. You know how you get busy to make the phone call, well, they never got called. I never got the chance to call them back. So, it’s seven days later, I’m driving my dad to the airport so that he can fly back to Connecticut and my wife calls me. She goes, “I really want to pick up the rest of that stuff. Can you run by the granite place since they’ve never called us and take a picture? I’m pressed for time but I say, “Okay,” because happy wife, happy life.

So, I run out of my way to the granite store thinking less and less of why I really want to do business with them. Because I have to go all the way back to the granite store since no one bothered to call me back or text me a picture or anything like that of the granite that we picked out. But just a little bit, the granite that we picked up was sold; they told us they could order another one when we are ready to order. So, that’s fine.

So, I get there and the granite’s gone. So, the girl says, “It went to production I can send you a copy of the picture we have to you by email.”

I say, “Okay, do it right now here’s my email address because I know I’ll probably never get it if I leave.”

And she says, “I will call the production guy and see if there is a piece hanging around that I can get to you so that you can go pick out your tile.”

I said, “That would be awesome.” It is five days later and no one has called me. So, neither here nor there I guess they don’t want to do business with me. So, I went back to the yard to take pictures of the first piece of granite that we liked, and then I saw another one that I liked even better than the one that we picked.

So, I took pictures of that, I took pictures of the UPC code of the name of the granite. I sent the picture to my contractor with the UPC code and I said, “Find another granite company.” I bet you can tell by now that I’m so fed up with them because their customer service is really bad.

So, the person who takes care of all that stuff lost a granite customer, and I wonder how many this year. Anyone who knows how much granite costs, it’s a nice little chunk of change. So, that one customer experience really sucks to anyone.

So, this is Saturday and I get to my mastermind I’m running a little late because I had to go out of my way to keep my wife happy and take pictures of the granite. When I get to my mastermind they say, “Hey, we are talking about the customer experience.” And I’m going, “The good one, or the bad one,” because you can tell right where my head was going.

‘I belong to a mastermind

So, I arrive at the mastermind a little late, they are talking about customer experience and I’m saying, of course, “Good or bad?” because you know what’s going on in my mind right now from what we’ve talked about.

So, I’m in a mastermind with Pete Mitchel, he’s been on the podcast before and he says, “No, no, we are talking about “Good customer experiences,” he says, “I have a new client and when I call her office I’m impressed by the way that I’m treated as a person calling in. It’s just a very neat and refreshing experience,” and the person, his new customer is a real estate agent who has up to this year sold over 200 properties, but she also has another business that trains real estate assistants, so she has it down pat.

She knows, “How do you answer the phone? How do you talk to the people? How do you make them feel,” so you’re going from bad customer experience to a great customer experience and how to really make that happen?

So, here’s the real question, that defining moment, “What is your company known for?” Good customer experience, great customer experience, or bad customer experience? If it’s the latter, it’s bad customer experience. I’m going to tell you what you’re not getting. You’re not getting a whole lot of business, you’re not getting any referrals, and you’re not getting good reviews on Google or anything like that. You’re not getting lifetime value out of good people that spend good money. But if your company has great customer experience, you know you’ve had to work on it and worked on it to make it better all the time. Something you might want to make on a script for your people to follow, when and how the phone is answered, the person answering the phone to know how to answer it, answer with a smile, with questions to ask, it makes all the difference in the world.

My wife, one of her pet peeves is customer service and overall customer experience. My wife is one of the most sweet, congenial people that I know; however, one of her pet peeves is customer service and overall customer experience. If it’s not happening, if she’s out doing business and she’s not treated right sometimes I just have to turn around and walk away because I feel so bad for the person or waiter that is waiting on us.

My wife owns a service business with my daughter and their whole business is customer experience and customer service. And their tag line is, “World class service can be yours,” so they live up to that. That’s why their business is growing at a rate of 61% over last year. Won’t it be great to have growth like that? She demands that the people who she’s going to spend money with treat her like they really want to do business with her. Sure, you know and like to be treated as customer, you go back to the business that treats you like they want to do business with you, you continue to do business with them all the time.

What about the ones that really don’t care? Don’t be like the ones that really don’t care. If it’s not that way in your organization, there are only two reasons to that, poor customer experience. One is the trickle-down effect, it’s your fault, or both ways it’s your fault. And two, no one has been trained and held to a standard that needs to experience your services and only can do that if they are trained.

So, I don’t know if I can beat that one up anymore today. But it’s all about the customer experience, and the customer experience starts off with the way the phone is answered all the way to how the proposal is presented and written, all the way to the end, how the job is done, how then people are treated and during that process the way their questions are answered. Yes, you have to answer their questions and all the way to the end when you say thank you, when you collect the money. Then you send them a thank you card and you learn how to wow them by building relationships.

So, until next week think on these things and go make a profit.

There are so many ways to do almost free marketing you just have to think about it or you could just go to the web site and pick up the free download

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