Episode Description:

In this episode we implore you to investigate if your service department is undermining your marketing department or even your entire business! It’s incredibly common that the people in the service center of your business are not properly trained to engage with customers. This episode is an important resource for anyone with a service-based business that has separate sales teams and service teams.

Action you can take right now:

The goal of this podcast is to provide marketing and service insights, but also to provide actionable items that can occur right away without much thought.

1. Invite Your Service Manager to Your Next Marketing or Sales Meeting
2. Schedule a short training sessions with all service staff – remind them “how” to act professionally. Never talk down a product, service, previous repair, competitor, or staff.
3. Share this episode with your service staff!

After-Show Thoughts:

I was amazed how many people quickly referenced this episode and shared their horror stories of being treated poorly by someone undermining their companies reputation and customer relationship. It’s clear this problem is even more prevalent then I thought, but I’m also not surprised at all the stores that were shared.

Fortunately, this is the EASIEST thing to fix. This should never happen, it shouldn’t incur any expense to fix, and the faster you  make certain you stop this behavior, the faster you can get back to building relationships!

 

Transcript from Episode 3 of the Marketing and Service with Justin Varuzzo podcast.

Is your service department undermining you your business and your sales team that more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast.

This podcast by giving two recent real life examples of an instance where the service arm of a business I was working with greatly undermined the business and their sales team. The first example would be a pest control example.

I recently had a fairly large yellow jacket nest underneath the lip of my siding in the rear of my home. I had tried spraying it with conventional bees sprays, but the nest was inside the block and it made it very difficult to get any of the spray onto the actual nest. After doing some research online, I found some powders that could be puffed into the cavity with the promise it would encompass and killed the bees nest. I spent about a hundred dollars for the puffer tool along with the powder substance. And I waited until dusk and then I thoroughly puffed into the nest and to my surprise, the next morning, when I went in my basement, I was greeted by 40 to 50 bees buzzing around a fluorescent light fixture.

Fortunately, the bees were so drawn to the light that a brief spray of conventional bee spray almost immediately killed most of the bees that were flying around. So later that evening when it was dark again, I went back out and I puffed again into the cinder block from the outside of the home in the hope that the powder would kill the bees. And again, the next day there were a bunch of bees in the basement as each day passed. I continued to puff powder into the void and the number of bees in the basement were less and less. The activity of the nest was also less and less, but after about two weeks, we continued to have bees in the basement and be swarming around the nest outside.

At this point, I decided it was best to call a professional. So I did some research and I contacted three different pest control companies. Two were smaller, independent ones that I had found on Google. And one was a larger national brand to my dismay, neither of the two local independent pest control companies responded to my online inquiry at all. I never received an email back. I never received a phone call. These were two leads that went right down the toilet, which is a conversation I’ll save for another podcast.

The national company did immediately call me back after submitting the inquiry online. I scheduled an appointment which was convenient and quick, and I was quoted a godawful price of $450. But the truth is I probably would have paid more than that to not have bees flying around my basement anymore. It’s horrifying. So at the time of the appointment, a very professional person arrived at my house, dressed professionally in a vehicle with the company’s name on it, and was very friendly and polite. He eventually asked where the nest was and I walked him to the rear of the house and he proceeded to pump some powder, the void as he was pumping the powder. I had mentioned to him that I had tried a couple of different powders and a couple of different sprays with no luck. And this is where things started to go South.

He casually looked at me and said, Oh, I’m using the same stuff. So I don’t know if my results will be any different than yours. And sometimes it can take up to two weeks, but I’d be happy to come back in two weeks. If you still have an issue. Now, I had to think about this a lot because now I felt really bad because this person was at my house for all of about five minutes, pump the same powder into the same void that I did. But now I just paid $450 with the promise that if in two weeks I still had bees he’d come back.

I was so disappointed with the situation and I was angry at myself for not being patient enough with my own progress, which was coming along nicely, but not as quickly as I would’ve liked it to . I thought about the few options that might’ve made sense. He could have said, listen, I don’t have anything beyond that. I can charge you perhaps a $50 fee for making the trip out here, but won’t charge you for the application being that you’ve already done it. He could have said nothing and continued to do whatever it was that he needed to do. And I never would’ve known any better, or he could have offered a list of reasons why the way or the method in which he was doing, it would be far superior to the way that I did it. It really doesn’t matter.

At the end of the day, I felt ripped off and miserable and they collected $450, but you can rest assure I’ll never call them again. It was disappointing experience because the company did so many things, right. That so many other companies do wrong. And I was so impressed with the process from beginning till almost the very end now, to be clear, I’m not going to go and leave a bad review for the company. I don’t think they did anything wrong. They did what they said they were going to do. They treated the bee’s nest. Two weeks later, the bees stopped coming in my basement and ultimately in the long-term the problem was solved. However, it may have already been solved, but the point is the service end.

This technician who came to my home, planted a seed of discontent in my mind. And by simply keeping his mouth shut, I would have been a very happy customer and continue to do business with this organization.

Since we’re speaking about home projects, my second recent real life example was purchasing a washer and dryer combination. I knew at the time they weren’t the best quality, but they were a great price. And my thought was, if I had gotten a few years out of them, I’d be happy after all the last set I had for almost 10 years before they failed. And it was the same brand and they worked pretty well. I never had too many complaints. So after owning the dryer for about two months, it started making horrible rattling noises, which wasn’t too concerning because I knew it was covered under warranty.

I placed a service call and again, the process was professional enough and the technician showed up on time, on the appropriate day. And when he walked in my basement, he sighed , it was a sigh of disappointment. It was a that I decided to buy this brand and he couldn’t help, but share how miserable he was in his life because of how poorly these are made and fell. Just short of telling me that I made an awful horrible wasteful decision, something you never want to hear after spending over a thousand dollars on a product that should last at least a decade. Yet. Another example, we’re just a few words made what could have been a positive situation, very negative.

Now, for those of us in sales, we know how important it is to choose our words carefully. When guiding someone in a purchase decision. The last thing you want to do is offend them or offend their family or offended their beliefs. In fact, it should just be the complete opposite. We want to build relationships based on trust and respect. And this is the basis of today’s podcast is making sure that you don’t have a service department that undermines what you or your sales team is doing. And I am sure and can guarantee that you’ve had experiences in your life where you’ve made a decision that you were happy with. And then later someone came by from a service perspective and destroyed your optimism in the product or service in which you purchased. So now that we agree that this is a major problem, let’s talk for one moment about why it’s a problem today’s phrase.

The word of the day is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories. For example, if you think the world is flat, you will probably seek and find websites and information that would confirm in your head that what you believe is true. But I also think the confirmation bias can be applied to sales and marketing because deep down, we all want to believe that we made the right decision. And we want to be confident that we made the right decision. And I think this is the key area where a lot of companies start to slip in their service. And especially in their sales, most salespeople are looking to close a deal in once the deal is closed, they move on to the next, but the best salespeople will be the ones that continue to foster the relationship of trust and respect long after the initial deal is closed.

Adults do this with children all the time. Sally gets a new dress and comes running out to her mom and dad and says, look at my new dress. And mom says, Oh my God, it’s beautiful. You look like a princess. And without fail every time the child grows in ear to ear, grin, happy and excited that their bias of wanting to look like a princess was confirmed. They were hoping this was going to happen. And they wanted that extra bit of confidence that mommy just provided.

I do believe that the same thing applies to adults as well, but we just don’t see it as often. Let’s use, for example, purchasing a car because this is such a big decision that so many people make and there’s so much money involved when you pull in your driveway and your neighbor comes running out and says, Oh my God, that thing is amazing. That is an awesome car. Um , can’t believe you got that. That’s so cool. It’s great. I read so many amazing things about this. You will get that grin year to year and feel good and confident that Jack just reinforced the decision that you made to purchase that car. Likewise, if your neighbor came out to you, as you pulled into the driveway and said, Oh no, you didn’t hear about this. And you think here about what, Ooh, this car got some of the worst quality ratings. They’re nothing but problems. My cousin had one, it was a complete piece of crap. Ended up getting recalled four or five times. And then he turned it in under a lemon law. Now, even if you don’t experience any of these issues with your car, that just planted a seed in your head, that is really going to ruin your day.

So the point here is that we should always be reassuring our customers, that they’ve made the right decision before the sale, during the sale and after the sale, when you bring the car into the service department, a bad dealership for the first oil change, the service technician should say, wow, congratulations on your first oil change. This is such an awesome car. We love working on these. They’re so great. And it’s so rare. They give us any trouble. Again, it’s just a small queue that plants that little seed in your head that you made the right decision. It’s the confirmation bias that you so desperately seek. So the real question is how do we fix this? How do we make this better? And it’s really a lot simpler than you would think. What it requires is some basic sales training of your service staff. Now, I know we’re not going to spend hours and hours and weeks and weeks, and months and months turning our service staff into top notch sales staff, but we can teach them some very simple basics about how to communicate what to say, what not to say. And when to say it, we’re not looking to turn them into salespeople, but we are looking to ensure that they’re not undermining the philosophies, beliefs, and efforts of your sales team.

Now, don’t think this can’t go the other way around either. On the next episode of this podcast, I’m going to talk about how your sales team is probably undermining your service department, but for today’s podcast , let’s just focus on how we can improve our service technicians, attitudes, and behaviors towards customers. So here’s some action items you can take with your service staff immediately to help alleviate this problem.

First thing to emphasize is listen more and talk less. I was always told through all my sales training that you should be listening a lot more than you’re talking, because if you’re not listening, you’re not going to hear what the customer needs or what the customer wants. And how could you possibly service that customer if you’re not paying attention and listening to what their needs are. So listen more, talk less. A customer may be complaining to a service tech that this is the third time something has been fixed.

This is an opportunity for the service tech to reassure that they’re highly trained professionals and that they’ll double-check everything as they go through the process to ensure that the equipment is perfect prior to leaving Apple is notorious for training their staff to always be empathetic, but never be apologetic. And of course never be sympathetic rumors have always been that at Apple. You’re not allowed to say things like bug or broken or defective. And do you know why? Because people want to know that when they buy a $1,500 cell phone, that it’s not buggy broken or defective, take a moment to explain empathy versus sympathy. One of the best examples I’ve ever heard that characterize the difference in a business viewpoint is from the famous Zig Ziglar. I heard Zig give an example of selling fire extinguishers. And he came upon a home where he was selling the fire extinguisher. When he learned that the wife had been very sick and the husband recently lost his job, they were in no position to afford a fire extinguisher.

If you were sympathetic, you’d apologize profusely for their sad situation and offer to come back at another time, that would be more convenient. But Zig took this example to show the difference between empathy and sympathy. Someone who is empathetic would recognize the dire situation that this family is in. If their house burns down and they can barely afford a fire extinguisher, they certainly won’t be able to afford lodging food, gas, and all of the other things and expenses that would occur when your house burns down, being empathetic is being truly helpful and serving the customer, not having a fire extinguisher in your home is extremely dangerous. Simply put this family in particular of all other families absolutely cannot afford not to have a fire extinguisher in the home. In my dryer example, from earlier before the technician could have said, I understand how frustrating it is when your dryer makes loud clunky noises. That’s why I’m using OEM parts to ensure that you have a smooth, quiet operation from here on out, that statement would have been 100% factual and honest, and maybe I just had bad luck and it would have fixed the problem permanently.

Instead, that technician reminded me how stupid I was for buying a crappy brand and more or less said, expect me to be back here often. I can’t return it. I’m not going to sell my problem to someone else. I just have to live with this bad decision now and hope that he was wrong. One of the most important tips to train your service staff on is ensuring they never criticize someone else’s work. Now. I’m pretty sure we’ve all been in this situation before. At least once in our life, to where we have a service tech say, Whoa, who the hell made a mess of this thing? And you embarrassingly have to reply your company. Maybe not you personally, but your company, your business. I mean, come on. This has happened to me many times. Don’t tell me it’s never happened to you. This is a classic example where the service can genuinely undermined the trust and reputation of your business. If something like this is to happen.

Now, what gets even worse is I’ve had people come and say that. And then on a follow-up visit had yet another person say who the heck did this last time referring to the last tech who talked about how horrible the previous tech was. And sometimes it seems like this chain never ends the bottom line. It should be made clear to your service staff that regardless of how sloppy or bad something looks, they should just fix it and make it perfect. They don’t need to announce it or publicize it. One last bit of advice on this topic. It’s never a bad idea for you or a member of a sales team to make service call up calls, because the reality is you probably don’t know that this is happening in your business every single day. And we know it is because for all of us, we hear something like this almost every single day, it is happening.

Now it is happening everywhere. And it’s probably happening. As you’re listening to this at this moment, a service tech is making one of your customers feel terrible for having put their faith and trust in your business. So by personally, following up with service calls or having someone who’s not part of the service department follow up , it may not uncover every small nuance of making someone uncomfortable, but if there are any serious offenders, it’s sure to come to light through the follow-up in neither of my examples that I presented at the start of this podcast did either company ever follow up to see how the service went? I probably would have mentioned it to both companies that I was disappointed.

I probably would have mentioned it to both companies that I wasn’t thrilled, that I was made to feel foolish on both accounts. Now, again, this is much different than leaving a company, a bad review because a service person didn’t serve my confirmation bias and ego. Hopefully this is helpful to you. I hope you enjoyed this podcast and I hope that you can get through to your service team and make sure that they get some very basic sales training and that they serve as a source of confirmation bias for your customers and not a source of frustration, disappointment for your customers.

If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe. Also take a moment to check out marketing hand service.com. That’s the website marketing and service.com. I’m Justin Varuzzo . Thanks for listening. Have a great day. We’ll catch you at the next one.