by MJ DeMarco
✓I expect to press a never-ending menu of buttons: press 1 for this, press 2 for that, press 3 for something else.
✓I expect to be shuttled from one person to the next.
✓I expect to speak with someone not fluent in English named “Steve” but sounding more like a Pradeep or Sanjay.
These are my expectations. No doubt, it isn’t favorable. My bank, and hundreds of other banks like it, get away with crappy service because it is expected.
However, let’s flip the scenario on its rear.
What if I call the bank and instead of the voicemail rat-maze, my call is immediately answered by an English-speaking person. No voice mail, no press 1, press 2, no automated attendant. I get a REAL PERSON answering the phone, like you answer your phone. After speaking five minutes to the customer service rep, my problem is resolved—and heck, I wasn’t even transferred to another agent. I’d be like, “Holy Mother of God! Wow!”
This is a SUCS event: a Superior Unexpected Customer Service event.
It is a transformation from customer service that naturally sucks, to SUCS.
You see, when you violate your client’s customer service expectation profile positively, you turn your customers into loyal, repeat buyers, and ultimately, disciples of your business.
Leverage Free Human Resource Systems
One passive income system is human resource systems—good old-fashioned people. Except that employees aren’t cheap, so human resource systems typically need management. Wouldn’t it be great if you could benefit from a free human resource system?
You can when you create disciples for your business.
Customer service that SUCS, service that violates your customer’s low-expectation profile positively, turns customers into lifelong clients.
They become disciples of your business providing a never-ending stream of free advertising. Word of mouth, or social proof, is the best advertising there is. In effect, the mathematical equation behind social proof and discipleship is: 1 + 1 =3.
Because two customers creates one new one through word-of-mouth, the return on investment (ROI) on happy customers is infinite.
Your customer service strategy influences your company’s growth more than advertising itself. Satisfaction isn’t enough because it implies expectations are being met. To create raving customers, you must exceed satisfaction.
When I negotiated with potential buyers for my company, I was asked frequently: “How much do you spend to recruit advertisers?”
My unexpected answer?
Zero.
Incredulity and skepticism followed. Sure, I did it the old-fashioned way when I started: prospecting, marketing, advertising, and cold calling. But after awhile, my advertiser acquisition cost disappeared because my advertisers did it for me . . . for FREE!
When your clients love your business, they become disciples and advertise for you. They become unpaid human resource systems, evangelists who drop your name wherever necessary.
How do you create disciples for your business?
Provide customer service that SUCS—Superior Unexpected Customer Service. When you send an email to a corporation, how long does it take to get a real, human response? A day? Week? At my company, I answered my customer emails within minutes, not hours or weeks. People would email us just to test our response rate. I was in business to violate my customer’s expectation profile, and it paid dividends.
I followed this up with live customer service. A call to my company got a real person that worked for the real company. No press 1, press 2. Support wasn’t outsourced because I didn’t want service outsourced.
Customer discipleship grows businesses exponentially because human resource systems talk. For example, my web-hosting provider is Liquid Web. The first time I contacted Liquid Web for technical support, I submitted a ticket and my expectation profile formed … I speculated it’d be a day or two before I heard back.
I was wrong. Within ten minutes, Liquid Web Support responded and fixed my issue within 20 minutes. They provided customer service that S-U-C-S and violated expectations.
The result?
I’m a disciple of Liquid Web. When someone asks me, “What hosting do you recommend?” I confidently respond with “Liquid Web.” I am an evangelical customer. I pay Liquid Web in two forms of currency: 1) My money and 2) My frequent recommendation of their service. The effective value of this latter currency is priceless because I am now their FREE human resource system selling their product. Imagine the potency when you have not just one raving customer, but 10,000. Will your business grow 2% in one year? Or 200%?
To provide great customer service and explode your business, determine your customers’ expectation profile. What are their expectations when they deal with your business? How do they relate to competitors and similar businesses in your industry? Make a subjective call on how your customers expect service. Then VIOLATE IT.
Any time you positively violate your customer’s expectations, they buy from you again. Then they become unpaid human resource systems, liaisons, disciples, and free advertisers. All build speed. And speed builds wealth.
Great customer service costs more to provide, but the benefits should outweigh the costs. If more money were spent on pleasing existing clients rather than trying to find new ones, the average business would survive longer than five years.
Unfortunately, business owners who seek money first and needs last often spend their advertising budget on new customer acquisition, customers who aren’t familiar with their uninspired and crappy customer service. It becomes a constant battle, like emptying a leaky boat with a bucket: Replace the old disgruntled customers with newer, oblivious ones.
Violate customer’s expectations.
Create evangelists.
Create human resource systems that will work for you, for free.
Attract money.
Where Are Your Loyalties?
The greatest myth of business ownership is “be your own boss.” Owners who live by that mantra eventually find themselves bosses of nothing—dead, bankrupted businesses. Success in business comes from making your customer the boss and the No. 1 stakeholder to your business.
A stakeholder is defined as “Person, group, or organization that has direct or indirect stake in an organization because it can affect or be affected by the organization’s actions, objectives, and policies.” Long-term business suicide occurs when you are your own selfish stakeholder and forsake your customer.
Want to really know why customer service sucks?
It’s because business owners place their customers at the bottom of the stakeholder chain. Public companies are the worst offenders, as shareholders come first, Wall Street second, and executives third. Guess who sits at the bottom?
You and I.
My repeated, and often preached, motto to my employees was, “The customer pays your paycheck, not me—keep them happy.”
You see, my stakeholder wasn’t my selfish desires for fast cars and big houses. It was my customer, because I knew they had the power. My loyalty was with my customer. Yes, I had a boss, and the boss had the keys to everything I selfishly wanted.
Look Big, Act Small
In my high school gym class, my teacher had a knack for butchering the simplest of names: Henderson became Hankerson and Seagrams became Cegraves. No matter what your name was, he would shred it. I don’t know if he was senile or just being funny.
So fast-forward more than a decade, and who is listed on my website as my chief technology officer? Mark Cegraves. Oh, and look who’s my web developer—Gretchen Hankerson! Wow, so did I hire my friends from high school? No, I didn’t, especially since their names were illusions of real people. None of these people worked for me. Yet if you visited my website’s “Contact” or “About Us” page, they were listed as employees in high profile positions: CTO, business development, or Web Producer. These people weren’t employees, but it looked like my staff was big, and growing.
This started as
a harmless “inside joke” with my employees, but I eventually realized it had a benefit: it branded my operation to look big. Dominating. Well-funded. Growing. Of course depending on the person, an employee manifest featuring butchered names from a 1987 gym class tested ethical limits, but my purpose was clear: I wanted to look big but act small.
Setting Up SUCS
Big companies notoriously provide poor service. Meanwhile, small companies are better apt to provide service with a personal touch. My objective was to look like I had the power of a big company, yet give personal service as if I were a one-person operation. When you receive detailed, exemplary service from a big company, you create a SUCS event and create loyal, evangelical customers.
Anywhere customer service is expected to suck, you have a business opportunity. Looking big and acting small is a setup for SUCS events. The customer expects mediocre service from the start. This tactic works well for any company that operates without a physical presence. Obviously, you can’t look big if you own a small retail store, but for those of us with Internet companies, you can.
The trap that snares many business owners is the extreme opposite: They look small and act big.
“Joe Blow Enterprises.” Does this give you confidence that you are dealing with a strong, reputable company? It screams “This is a one-man show!” and conveys amateur. Sorry, “Joe Blow Enterprises” is a monumental fail. I’m sure the logo is nonexistent, and, if there were one, it’d be bland, boring, or look like it was designed using some freeware paint program. This company’s website is static, stale, and childlike. No, Comic Sans doesn’t cut it for a professional image. This company sells to the world but doesn’t have a toll-free number. Small. Small. Small.
The problem compounds when their smallish business operates with biggish company actions. Call their business and you get a long maze of buttons to press only to land at the bottom of a voice mail dump. Send an email? Forget it. Most emails are ignored, and the ones read are answered weeks later. “I’ll get back to you” never happens. Customer service issues aren’t resolved in hours, but in weeks.
If you insist on working 4 hours a week, your business won’t grow because your selfishness is more important than growing a business meteorically. Look small and act big and you dig your own potholes.
Beat Competitors Before They Start
My other purpose for “looking big” was to beat my competition before they even started. When someone (or some company) wants to set up shop and compete with you, they investigate you first. They look at your website, see what you’re doing and the prices you’re charging. Then they decide if they want to invest time money and enter the space. To the untrained entrepreneur, a big company will scare would-be entrepreneurs almost like it scared me . . . “Oh jeez, how can I compete when they have 12 employees against little me?”
If an entrepreneur thinks they can’t compete because you’re too big and too well-funded, you’ve won before they’ve even started. They either commit halfheartedly or defer to another industry with duller competition. Look big, but act small.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
➡Complaints are valuable insights into your customers’ minds.
➡Complaints of change are difficult to decipher and often require additional data to validate or invalidate.
➡Complaints of expectation expose operational problems in either your business, or in your marketing strategy.
➡Complaints of void expose unmet needs, raise the value of your product or service, and expose new revenue opportunities.
➡Great customer service is as simple as violating your customer’s low expectation in the positive.
➡Poor service gaps are Fastlane opportunities.
➡Satisfied customers can be human resource systems who promote your business for free.
➡Satisfied customers have a dual residual effect: Repeat business and new business via discipleship.
➡Your customer’s satisfaction holds the key to everything you selfishly want.
➡Looking big but acting small sets up customer service expectation violations in the positive.
➡Looking big can scare away potential competitors.
[41] - Throw Hijackers to the Curb!
People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.
~ Mary Kay Ash
Your Castle Is Mismanaged
Your castle is your business. If you put crooks in the castle, expect trouble. Returning to our chess analogy, the rook—or the castle—represents the people you put in your business. This includes employees, partners and investors, and advisers.
The Business Marriage: Partners
A business partner is like being married. It either works fabulously or it ends in fiery divorce.
Three years ago, Jim and Mike were drinking at a bar and a legendary idea was born that compelled them to start a business together. Their only consideration for the union was their excitement. They agreed to do a 50/50 profit split and promptly began. Mike finds their first client, while Jim finds the second. Within a few months, their client base expands to 28, enough for both to draw a profit and quit their daytime jobs.
After two years, Jim’s time on the job and quality of work starts to suffer. Not that Mike knows what Jim is doing every minute of the day, but he notices something concerning. For every four clients Mike brings to the company, Jim brings one, and sometimes, none. He later learns that Jim read a book that advocates working four hours a week. And to make matters worse, Jim’s clients are not supported well and Mike has to take up the slack; yet every Friday, like clockwork, Jim is there to get his 50/50 cut.
When Mike brings this to Jim’s attention, Jim gets defensive, and tensions mount. This confrontation only decreases Jim’s productivity to where he sometimes doesn’t have new clients for months. Mike tries to dissolve the partnership, and Jim resists. Why should he? He’s collecting 50% profits off Mike’s efforts. Mike ultimately has to hire a lawyer and seek a legal remedy. A few years later, the partnership dissolves and, along with it, the friendship.
Partnerships are marriages. After the love affair and the lust wears off, they must survive on character, synergy, and complementary attributes. My early entrepreneurial ventures were all partnerships, and all miserable failures. Not that my partners were bad people, but our work ethics, values, and visions were not compatible. I remember one partner had a normal 9-5 job and was active in intramural sports; the business was number four or five on his priority list. The other partner was out working four other businesses, including ours. That left my business and me, which was priority numero uno. See the issue here?
Search the Fastlane Forum for “partnership” and you’ll find a garden of complaints about partnerships gone bad. One partner wants to expand, the other wants to brand. One partner wants to advertise, the other wants to develop. One partner wants expensive cars and money yet arrives late and leaves early. Partnerships are like marriage—half the time they will fail because the partners just aren’t compatible.
“They” say you should partner with people who have complementary skills to you. If I’m a marketing guy, I should partner with a technical guy. If you’re a sales-and-people guy, you should partner with an analytical guy. While this is a great starting point, it’s like marrying the first person you date simply because they like the same music as you. Many other personality characteristics will make or break a partnership.
✓Do you have the same work ethic? Will your partner skate while you burn the midnight oil?
✓Do you have the same vision? Or will they compete with each other?
✓Do you want to grow slowly while your partner wants to own the world and do it fast?
✓Do you want to sell franchises while your partner just wants one unit that pays the bills?
✓Do you trust this person with your life?
✓Do you h
ave the same personality type?
✓Do you have the same risk tolerance?
The fact is people get into partnerships for the wrong reasons. Like people start businesses under false premises (not need-oriented), they partner under a false premise: Diversification. The partners don’t seek synergy; they seek diversification of risk, expense, and workload. Often, each partner looks to the other for the burden to bear, and when one bears more, resentment builds.
Partnerships can work, just like a lot of marriages work. Just make sure you know whom you’re engaged to. A two-week honeymoon with your college roommate might not be enough courtship to determine compatibility. Would you marry someone after two weeks of dating?
Get A+ A’s
I’ve had many verbal negotiations with investors, and when the 90-page legalese document arrived on my desk, what was said and what was written were two different things. We discussed an amortized note at 10% over 5 years, so why does it say 5% over 10? Who exposed the incongruity buried in an avalanche of legal jargon? Not me. It was my attorney.
Then there was the time when a simple omission of a business expense can cost you thousands of dollars in taxes. Who knows that $38,000 interactive voice response system is depreciable when you think its just some overpriced telephone system? An accountant.
If I didn’t have good team of A’s—accountants and attorneys—I’d be poorer. And yes, these people aren’t easy to find because they’re like partners under contract, another group of individuals who have the keys to your castle.
Don’t be an idiot like me. Still green, I remember my first accountant, found right out of the Yellow Pages—not from referral, but blind hope. It didn’t take long to see that she wasn’t concerned with tax planning. No questions about my business or my concerns, just impatience to finish the forms and get it done. Additionally, most of her clients were Slowlaners who dabbled with W-2s and 401(k)s rather than corporations. Great pick, MJ. I needed someone with a Fastlane mindset, and I committed to finding one. After interviewing and investigating a half-dozen accountants, I found one whose clients were primarily business owners.