Episode Description:
I’m back! Welcome to season 2 of MarketingAndService.com podcast!
What’s been going on the past 6 months? Why is the world falling apart? How can we save it through marketing? What every business should be thinking about as we begin to wrap up 2022!
Episode 50 Transcript
00:00:00
Wow, what the?
00:00:02
Hell is going on in the world.
00:00:04
I go away for a few months after they finished up my last season and now we have record inflation.
00:00:10
We have a labor shortage.
00:00:12
Service has gone to hell in a handbasket.
00:00:14
It feels like the whole world is falling apart, so I have to come back and I have to kick off season.
00:00:29
Hey, Justin Varuzzo here from the marketing and service.com podcast the podcast to help you build your business by creating incredible customer relationships. If you find value in this episode then please take a moment to follow or subscribe.
00:00:49
If you want.
00:00:49
To do me a huge personal favor, please leave me a 5 star review.
00:00:52
It means so much to me and it helps keep me going and motivated.
00:00:56
I’d love to hear from you, so please hit me up on the marketing and service.com Facebook page and let me know what marketing challenges you’re having with your business and what would you love to learn more about. Just let me know. You can always shoot me an e-mail justin@marketingandservice.com
00:01:12
April 26, 2022. That was the last published pod.
00:01:19
Test and I took a little bit of a break in it.
00:01:21
Went a little bit longer than I thought it would go, but here we are.
00:01:24
Now in October of 2022, just going into Q4 and WOW has there never been a more insane, unstable wild time that I can think of in business in quite a long time.
00:01:39
So let’s talk a little bit about what’s.
00:01:41
Happening for one service seems to have plummeted since COVID.
00:01:47
I mean just plummeted.
00:01:49
People are furious.
00:01:50
No one is happy about what’s going on.
00:01:53
Any place you call, you’re waiting forever and a lot of this is because we have this major labor shortage, right?
00:01:59
We’ve all heard about this, everyone.
00:02:01
Is hiring literally every company seems to be hiring or trying to hire like crazy to fill all these positions, but it’s not.
00:02:09
It’s just not happening.
00:02:10
It’s not happening, so I want to start by just talking about some of the stats that are out.
00:02:15
Right now I’m grabbing this from a Forbes article, but I’m just going to lay down some of these stats here because I I think it it’s very indicative of the world and if you are functioning and living in this world then you already know exactly.
00:02:29
What I’m talking about, it’s really hard to get through anywhere, and overall you just don’t seem to have businesses that care, and I’ll dig into that a little bit and why I think that’s the case right now, but let’s start with this. 93% of customer service teams.
00:02:45
These are the people that work in customer service in businesses.
00:02:49
They say that the customers have higher expectations than ever before.
00:02:53
So basically 93%, we’ll just say almost all of them. Almost everyone in customer service thinks that customers today have much higher expectations than they have ever had.
00:03:05
Before and I think that 58% of consumers say their customer expectations are higher than they were a year.
00:03:14
Now keep in mind, a year ago we were still kind of outside the peak of COVID, so this is kind of an interesting dichotomy between the 93% saying that there’s definitely higher expectations.
00:03:25
58% saying higher just in the past year. So I want to dig into this just a little tiny bit because I think it I think it’s worth taking a moment.
00:03:34
To think about what is happening here.
00:03:36
We have record inflation.
00:03:38
Right now we have record inflation.
00:03:41
That means that prices on staple goods are going up higher and higher and we know we also have serious supply chain issues that are still plaguing us.
00:03:50
If you’ve tried buying a car, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
00:03:53
If you’ve tried to put gas in that car.
00:03:56
You know exactly what I’m talking about, and I think what happens is someone disposable income decrease.
00:04:02
Places they become a little bit more serious about the money they have left, right? If you had hundreds of millions of dollars and gas went from $3 a gallon to $4 a gallon, you wouldn’t really think about it.
00:04:15
It would have zero effect on your life, but let’s face it, none of us are in that position.
00:04:20
So for most of us, when we go to fill up our car.
00:04:22
And now it’s doubled what it was just a few years ago.
00:04:26
That hurts.
00:04:27
That means that when we do make an important purchase decision and we buy something that involves a little bit more of a thought.
00:04:34
Process for example, let’s say you’re spending $100 or $200.00 or $500.00 on something, and even as a business, if you’re buying business services, suddenly 2% versus 2 1/2% versus 3%.
00:04:46
For example, for credit card processing, it starts to make a big impact and you really start to analyze all of these little expenses.
00:04:54
To see where you can cut and where you can make up for the increased costs.
00:04:59
Moving on 75% of consumers say the pandemic will drive long term changes in their behavior. Now this one seems relatively obvious too and I don’t think it’s just consumers.
00:05:11
It’s the workforce as well, COVID and the pandemic had dramatic impacts on how people shop.
00:05:17
I can say one thing that blows my mind.
00:05:20
Right now, and if you live in a major city, this may not be a big deal, but for someone like me who’s in a little bit more of a rural area in new.
00:05:28
When I go to Dunkin’ Donuts to grab my coffee in the morning and I see multiple shelves filled from top to bottom with Grubhub and to go Uber orders, it blows my mind that we’re in a world now where someone would pay what they need to pay to get a cup of coffee to them. Because the inconvenience?
00:05:48
Stopping for a moment is worth this expense and.
00:05:52
I think the reason we never had this before is because any other time in the world. If you said hey for $10, I’ll deliver your $3 cup of coffee to you.
00:06:01
Everyone would say that’s nuts.
00:06:03
You can.
00:06:03
You can’t do that and that will never succeed.
00:06:06
But suddenly, somehow people are so freaked out and they just need these comforts that now they’re paying these huge.
00:06:12
Premiums, but that is a major change in consumer behavior. To go back to what we started with. 75% of consumers say customer service worsened during the pandemic.
00:06:23
Like again, if you live in this world, this is not news. You already know this. It’s staggering to me that 25% think it remained unchanged or maybe even improved.
00:06:32
Again, I would think this is 100% of people would agree customer service is not today what it was even one year ago. It’s not today what it was back in April when I posted my last.
00:06:44
Podcast episode it has gotten dramatically worse.
00:06:48
And to that .78% of consumers have contacted company multiple times to address a single concern. I personally just went through an issue with Apple that I’ve never had before using my iPhone upgrade program. I purchased a new iPhone and I’m in the iPhone.
00:07:08
Upgrade program, which means after a year I send my phone back and they send me a new one.
00:07:13
However what happened is they actually billed me twice for the same phone.
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They do their little payment plan that’s 24 equal payments, but they also charged my credit card the full price of the new phone and I have contacted them no less than about 13 or 14 times so far with my last resolution being just opening a dispute with my credit card company because no one can give me an answer.
00:07:37
And nobody seems to understand.
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And everyone in the financing side is saying no, you paid for it.
00:07:42
Your financing was in place.
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It was perfect.
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They just didn’t opt to use it yet.
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They can’t explain why they’re taking my money every month for the financing option.
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Yet the other side of the business is saying no, you finance this.
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We didn’t take any money.
00:07:55
We don’t know what you’re talking about.
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All I know is that Apple charged me for a phone.
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And I’m also paying monthly payments on that same phone, so stay tuned.
00:08:04
We’ll get to the outcome of that, because I don’t know what that’s going to be just yet.
00:08:07
Before the pandemic messaging was ranked 5th in customer service channel usage.
00:08:14
Now it’s second, that’s a significant change, and this is something we’ve talked about earlier in earlier episodes in season one of this podcast, we’ve talked about the shift of channels where people want to get service.
00:08:28
The phone is not good enough anymore.
00:08:30
People prefer texting.
00:08:32
Now they want to use Facebook Messenger.
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They want to use live chats.
00:08:37
They want their problem resolved in a way that they can multitask.
00:08:40
It, and I think that’s why these things are becoming more important now because the need to multitask is becoming more impor.
00:08:47
Now everyone who is working feels like they’re being overworked, and they’re strung out, and their experience burnout, right?
00:08:54
And then all the people not working.
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Maybe they don’t even exist, but there’s all these open jobs that aren’t filled, so everyone who’s there is trying to toe the line and it’s really difficult.
00:09:04
So now you just don’t have time to spend an hour and a half.
00:09:08
On the phone trying to call Apple to figure out what’s going on with your iPhone.
00:09:12
So instead I’m going to do it in messages.
00:09:14
I’m going to do it through chats. I’m going to do it through e-mail anyway. I can do it, so while I’m waiting I can work on something else which is hard to do if you’re actually on the phone talking to someone and again to talk about overworking 87% of contact center agents.
00:09:28
Report high or very high stress levels at their call centers.
00:09:33
That’s not good.
00:09:34
You know you have these people who are there to help.
00:09:36
And again, it’s a limited number of them.
00:09:39
But part of the reason that the service is declining so much is that the people who are working these jobs are burned out.
00:09:45
They’re done.
00:09:46
They don’t want to do it anymore.
00:09:47
They don’t want to hear the nonsense.
00:09:48
They don’t want to hear the fighting.
00:09:49
They don’t want to hear the anger, and likewise, I’m not saying the consumers.
00:09:53
They’re not justified because they’re not getting what they think they were supposed to get.
00:09:57
But my point is, there is an explosive confluence of things happening right now, right?
00:10:03
You’ve we already talked about inflation.
00:10:05
What does that mean?
00:10:06
It means that you have less money.
00:10:08
You have less buying power.
00:10:10
That means more stress.
00:10:12
It also means the things you’re buying.
00:10:14
If they haven’t gone up in price, have probably been reduced in size, right?
00:10:18
Maybe by some tic Tacs and there used to be 50. And now there’s only 47 in there, but we see this. We see this package reduction.
00:10:25
Reducing the quantities that things.
00:10:28
Reducing the weight, increasing the price or combinations of.
00:10:32
Both, we have the labor shortage.
00:10:34
Those that are still working are being punished, right?
00:10:37
If you’re working right now, you are being punished because you’re absorbing all these pitfalls and shortages that are beyond your control and the outcome is poor attitudes.
00:10:47
Feeling on edge very high stress levels.
00:10:52
Right, these are all things that are kind of normal when you’re just pushed all day, every.
00:10:56
Today and then you have this increase in expectations since the pandemic started in COVID, right? Because now not only do you have to do your job, you have to do someone else’s job and maybe the scope of your job has now increased and you’re doing more things than you used to do, which again are making this problem even worse.
00:11:14
Even things as simple as where you’re going to work right. 70% of customer service employees want to continue working from home.
00:11:21
Home and of course here comes the work from home versus hybrid versus in office battle that has also been brewing for the last 12 months.
00:11:31
These companies that were so quick to embrace work from home.
00:11:34
The big tech companies, right?
00:11:36
They’re now the ones pulling back, saying hey, you know what?
00:11:39
Get back to the office no.
00:11:41
No more, no more fooling around.
00:11:43
We need to get back to business.
00:11:44
We got to start making some real.
00:11:45
Money here and I get this, but we also have all experienced this.
00:11:50
You call you wait on hold for an hour and a half for a company and then you get someone on the phone.
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Their dog is barking in the background.
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Their kid is screaming.
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It is completely unprofessional.
00:12:00
I’m not against work from home, but I do think there’s a balance between those who are set up to really work from home.
00:12:05
The Genuine Home Office in an environment that’s suitable for that type of position and someone who is trying to multi.
00:12:12
Ask daycare doggy care, housework, and all of these things while trying to do their customer service jobs and that is where these companies I think are struggling and trying to figure out.
00:12:22
How do we control this and how do we make an equitable work environment that’s fair for everybody?
00:12:28
So in season 2 of this podcast, there’s a couple of things.
00:12:32
That I want to dive into one of the things is I want to explore the different jobs in marketing.
00:12:38
The different types of market.
00:12:39
Thing right, as as someone if you work in a small business, you’re a digital marketer or you’re a Jack of all trades, or you’re a full stack marketer.
00:12:47
There’s kind of a lot of names for, but you do a little bit of everything, right?
00:12:50
You you might be doing some sales calls.
00:12:53
You might be doing copy for an ad you might be running Facebook campaigns plus doing the social media.
00:12:59
Hosting you might be on LinkedIn with sales navigator trying to fill a pipeline.
00:13:04
You might be creating, landing pages, updating websites, managing a catalog, right?
00:13:09
But as a business grows, a lot of these marketing roles start to split up.
00:13:14
Part and they they tend to become more focused in certain parts of marketing as a company scales up, right?
00:13:22
So what are those different types that you might have?
00:13:25
Database marketing, product marketing, growth marketing, revenue marketing outbound versus inbound marketing, content marketing, brand management.
00:13:34
Event marketing PR.
00:13:36
It goes on and on there’s so many different roles and one of the things I’d like to do this season is get some experts in those fields to discuss.
00:13:44
Us those details of each one of those roles because I think just as you learn so much from other people, you can also learn from scalability when you look at how a business of large scale.
00:13:59
Performs a marketing function and then kind of water that down to see how.
00:14:03
Maybe in a small business environment those same ideas and concepts can be bundled in to a full stack marketing role.
00:14:13
And again, understanding those roles really will also help you scale your business in the long run if you understand what each of those functions and roles are now.
00:14:23
As your business grows and you need to start adding these things, you’ll know exactly the value you can expect those roles to bring it to your business, so I think that’s important to cover.
00:14:32
Season and of course I’m going to do some case study examples.
00:14:36
One that comes to mind right away that’s probably going to be earlier in this season because it’s so relevant right now is a company like Peloton.
00:14:42
This is a company that had a meteoric rise and equally meteoric fall just inside of five years, right?
00:14:50
That company is falling apart right now.
00:14:52
So I want to look at that.
00:14:53
Because I think there’s a lot to learn both on the way up and on the way down from Peloton, because they’re an example of a company that created a great.
00:15:02
Really high quality.
00:15:04
Product and really put a lot of time and investment into the design and the quality and the structure of the product and then the the timing of COVID when people wanted to bring their gyms home and they wanted to bring physical fitness into the home.
00:15:20
It was really a perfect opportunity for them to just take off.
00:15:24
But they weren’t really thinking about what was going to happen as people started going back to gyms and wanted to get out of the house and wanted to get into a fitness routine that was not in their base.
00:15:34
And I think that’s where they really struggled. They wanted to scale enough to keep pace with their demand at that time, but they really didn’t do a lot of forward-looking to say, well, what happens when everything goes back to normal.
00:15:45
How will we handle this on the way down?
00:15:47
They may have been a lot better off if they curbed their distribution of their product and and let that go a little bit slower.
00:15:54
And maybe had to turn a lot of people away, but as things started to slow down, they would kind of balance out and things would be good.
00:16:00
And that’s where car companies, for example, do a really good job.
00:16:03
Uh, you know there was huge drops in demand temporarily in cars and then all of a sudden it came raging back to a point.
00:16:10
And you know.
00:16:11
Obviously you have to wait.
00:16:13
Some people are waiting six months.
00:16:14
Some people a year plus to buy a new car.
00:16:17
Even used cars, if you were going to get one, if you’re lucky, you replied paying 30% more than you would have paid just before.
00:16:24
The pandemic, something else I want to talk about is maybe fighting against some myths.
00:16:28
I always hear things like, you know, Apple has the best packaging.
00:16:32
If I could just get my packaging to look like that, or I have this incredible product, I’m just not sure how to market it or how to get it in.
00:16:40
Wanted people or I have incredible service.
00:16:43
You know, the the products may not be the best the packaging made, but the service is awesome.
00:16:47
But I think one thing I really want to discuss is how all of those things really need to be aligned and synchronized at a similar level.
00:16:56
Not saying they have to be at the apple level or the best level, just.
00:17:00
A similar level because if you have one of those categories that’s really high, and one that’s really low, it just doesn’t work.
00:17:08
These things only work when you have everything together at the same time In Sync, so I want to spend a little time this season talking about.
00:17:16
About that
00:17:17
And of course, it’s time to start thinking about marketing. In 2023, we’re in the fourth quarter now.
00:17:23
What does 2023 bring to marketing right? We’re we’re really going into the unknown because I feel like we haven’t paid the Pied Piper yet. For the pandemic, we’ve really had a market that I think surprised a lot of people coming.
00:17:37
Out of a pay.
00:17:37
Pandemic, but we still have these very real issues with the labor shortage and with the inflation now we’re looking at oil prices that are record high for home heating oil as we enter the the brutal NE cold weather and I think all of these things are going to have a huge impact in 2023. I think we’re going to see supply chains.
00:17:57
Start really catching up.
00:17:58
I also think we might see some oversupply companies that have been behind for a year or two or just cranking out as much as they can to try to keep pace.
00:18:07
And I think what you’re going to see happening.
00:18:08
You’re already seeing happening a little bit with.
00:18:10
Companies like target.
00:18:11
And Walmart starting to cancel some orders.
00:18:13
Certain say hey, you know those things we’ve been waiting on.
00:18:15
Don’t worry about it, we.
00:18:16
We don’t think the demand is going to be quite there so it’s going to be really interesting to see what the holiday season brings for fourth quarter and then it’s really going to be interesting to see what the economy brings.
00:18:27
Four businesses in 2020.
00:18:29
Three so I want to talk about what our outlook should be for the next year.
00:18:34
Two years, three years, four years, and how will you handle a recession if it actually really becomes impactful?
00:18:42
If things really start to go bad as we’ve seen them go in other recessions, after long booms like we’ve had, how are you going to handle it?
00:18:50
Where will you double down during the recession, right?
00:18:53
We’ve certainly learned the first thing that companies loved to pull back on his marketing.
00:18:57
They love to pull back on development. They love to pull back on R&D. These are the easy ones, right?
00:19:02
These are the things that don’t have a tangible return day-to-day, so those are the first things that tend to get cut.
00:19:08
But we also have seen in the last few recessions.
00:19:11
Of the companies that doubled down and kept focusing on their marketing and kept focusing on their service and kept focusing on their innovation and their commitments.
00:19:19
They were the ones that really came out of the recessions.
00:19:22
Incredibly strong and incredibly.
00:19:24
Powerful, so these are things that I want you to start to think about that I’m certainly thinking about.
00:19:30
How do you handle a recession?
00:19:32
Where is the money going to be worth spending during a recession?
00:19:36
Now if I’m wrong and there’s no recession and everything is just peachy for the next three to four or five years, then what do we do?
00:19:44
We wasted a little time with contingency planning and I have no problem with that.
00:19:48
It’s something everyone should do.
00:19:50
You know what?
00:19:50
What ifs?
00:19:51
There’s nothing wrong with running a couple, what a couple of what if scenarios and trying to figure out what you’re.
00:19:56
Going to do.
00:19:57
If something bad happens and it doesn’t necessarily need to be a recession, it could be something.
00:20:02
What if?
00:20:02
What if a hurricane, right?
00:20:03
We just see.
00:20:03
What happened in Florida? If your business gets wiped out by a hurricane, you might be out for two 3-4 weeks trying to rebuild.
00:20:10
Get your Internet back.
00:20:11
Get your power back on.
00:20:12
What are you going to do if you live in an area like that, you should know you should have a plan in place.
00:20:17
You should have a contingency.
00:20:19
So I want to talk about contingency planning, especially as it pertains to marketing and service with now with no Internet.
00:20:25
How do you provide service if you have no phones?
00:20:27
How do you plan to provide service?
00:20:28
Can you outsource it temporarily?
00:20:30
Can you re route it somewhere else?
00:20:32
Can you have a little remote office?
00:20:34
Can you hire remote?
00:20:35
Person somewhere else in the country to help her.
00:20:37
Maybe not even in this country.
00:20:39
These are just things that I want to discuss in season 2 because the stuff that has been super relevant, especially the last last six months.
00:20:48
And with that I’m going to wrap it up for this episode.
00:20:52
Thank you so much for listening.
00:20:53
I really look forward to spending some.
00:20:55
Time with you.
00:20:55
This year and moving into 2023 and I’m really looking forward to another great season on this podcast and growing it and having more awesome guests and more awesome interactions with you.
00:21:07
And if you have any questions whatsoever, the website is marketing and service. Com the Facebook group is marketing and service.com pretty much anywhere you type marketing and service.com, you’re going to find me your host Justin Varuzzo. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great week.