Complaints are Opportunities

0:01 This program is designed to provide general information with regards to the subject matters covered. This information is given with the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial, legal, counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek the services of. Competent professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas. Hello, and thank you for tuning in to a Sharp Outlook on pay for HD radio and Talk or TV. I am Angela Sharp, your host.

0:42 I'll arm to your discussions with industry experts will give you the steps, tools and information to be successful in business and to prepare you to be your best self. Hello, I'm Angela Sharp. Here at a Sharp Outlook, a place where you get informed and learn best practices for success. And today we are going to talk about a very important topic. Complaints. Customer complaints. They're not something that's bad, they are opportunities for you, and in today's fiercely competitive world, customer service is key to growth and profits. Knowing how to retain customers, build a presence and market share, and improve worker performance is crucial. Almost nothing strikes more fear in an employee's heart than a customer with a complaint.

1:39 Most employees would rather have a root canal than deal with customers who aren't pleased with a product or service they purchase from your company, And so we want to talk about how to turn that that what you consider some of one of the worst times ever into an opportunity. Your first thought might be, where can I hide? Face it? You can't hide, But what you can do and should do, is address the situation in the process retain those customers and the more and the money they spend with you. The first step is realizing that any complaint from a customer or a co worker for that matter, is an opportunity to learn and to grow. Many customers simply take their business elsewhere. I don't think that's what you're wanting them to do. Those who come to you with a complaint are giving you an opportunity to solve their problems and identify what changes in your company's products or services might need to be made. What are the barriers that prevent you from satisfying the customer? Most barriers involve policy, procedures and processes, and maybe outdated policy that prevent employees from offering practical solutions and doing so in a timely manner. Well, my guest today is John shol and he is an

3:12 expert in the business of customer service and training and teaching your organizations and the members of your organization how to have a winning customer service. I would like to invite John to the show right now so we can talk about complaints on how to handle them in a manner that you don't lose your customer. Hi. John, Hi, Good morning, Angela. Good morning to you. And so we're going to be talking about customer complaints, and I know you have great insight on what needs to happen when you have a customer that's a little unhappy.

3:57 Angela, you did a really good job with the introduction and could just stole all my thunder your right that complaints are an opportunity to fix problems that you have. All of us, no matter how good we want to be, we make mistakes, yes, and things go wrong, And when a customer becomes irate or difficult, or raises their voice or becomes you know, starts to complain, You're right that most employees run for cover and they lie. I'd say eighty percent of employees lie anything to get out of it, good goodbye. And they don't realize that this is a customer.

4:47 And what's more important is they don't realize the value of the customer. So ninety nine companies have no grasp of how much a customer really costs them if they leave. They think it's a twenty five dollars transaction. No, it's not twenty five dollars. If you look at the history, let's say the history of a customer's ten years, and they spend twenty five dollars one year, thirty, the next year, fifty, the next year, seventy, the next year, eighty, the next year. You need to take a look at that value over the ten years, and it's not now a twenty five dollars decision. It could be eight hundred and fifty dollars. So you're saying goodbye to eight hundred and fifty dollars. Now.

5:30 It costs a lot of money to market to get new customers, so nobody thinks about the importance of keeping a customer. And employees they don't care. They this guy's a jerk, he's a real ass. Just let's get rid of We don't need them in our business. Okay, he could. And the people that complain are usually some of your most valuable customers. They spend the most money with you, they're the most demanded, and they expect results. And when you screw up is all you got to do is take responsibility. But angel that means you've got to lose face.

6:16 So if you made a mistake, you know, the most important thing in terms of handling complaints is is to say I screwed up and it's all my fault. Now, you got it. You might have to take out more insurance at your company if you train employees to do that, because some customers may die of an immediate heart attack because they've never heard an employees say that in their life, so they can says die right on the spot. But I can count on one hand all the times I've ever had an employee in my life say I made a mistake and it's my fault.

7:00 Yeah. Yeah, that ownership is really important, and you're right. They don't we say I'm sorry, but really you don't mean i'm sorry. You just say i'm sorry that you're complaining. Just get out of my life. But I'm saying i'm sorry. It's nice and it's polite, but it's not. It's not going to really just handle the thing because most companies, you know, are poor. I sent an email yesterday morning about six o'clock to a new mortgage company that's handling one of my rental properties called Vallon Va l O N and said, I am surprised that you don't have technology.

7:41 I'm surprised that with a company of your size that you cannot afford a call center that could answer questions. So when you call them, they say I need the last four digits of your Social Security number. When you give it to them, it says that didn't work. We need your the ZIP coded five digits for the zoop code, and none of it gets through. They never called me, and I said it's urgent, you need to call me, but they haven't called me. Now I didn't choose them. They took over the mortgage on a couple of properties I own, but because there's a hell of a screw up where they're taking money out of the wrong account, and I thought it was probably my fault, but now I realized that so they're so incompetent that is probably their fault. So companies sometimes don't have execution right. And you know, there's six steps we teach in customer service, and this is in the Feelings program that I developed and wrote in nineteen seventy nine, Angela Before You Were Born, and it was released in January of nineteen eighty and those six inciples are as valid today as they were back then. Number one, you got to feel good about yourself.

9:07 Number two, you've got to have practice the habits, the courtesy, you've got two three seconds. Number three, you got to use positive communications. That means that you've got to smile, you got to be polite, you've got to have good verbal language. You got to call by their name. Most people today don't have good soft skills, you know, spend all their time on their apps playing games, and the young people today are really weak on soft skills. You got to perform. You've got to do what you said you're going to do right. And that's where we all fall down. So there's a lot of complaints either because the present was rude and different, or you didn't do what you said you're going to do. And then the fifth item is you got to really listen to the customer, tune in and pay attention to what they're saying, tell me again, Angela, how we screwed up on this thing? Angela, can you expand on what we did wrong? I want to have a better grasp of what we got to do.

10:09 You're forcing them out of their emotional mind into more of an analytical mind. And then the step is you've got to learn about your products and services. I think in any business you can tell in seconds if the employee knows what they're talking about. You can smoke up somebody's you know ear, you know by lying, you can tell if people really know what they're talking about. And so you learn about your products and services. So and by the way, if you do LS, you move up. A lot of people would like to make more money. The easiest way to make more money is be more effective than anybody you're working with, r dispensable and extraordinary. Now, part of that is you've got to teach people how to handle irate customers. In nineteen seventy nine we did the design for Feelings, the feedback and the pilots that we did is we need two things. They wanted. They wanted to know what's in it for me? You know, I'm improving my customer service. So what how is it?

11:15 How is it going to help me? So we built in getting people to feel good about themselves. It's probably the singular most powerful part of the Feelings program. The second thing they wanted add it is how do we handle complaints? How do we handle these irate customers because they're just ruins and employees? Yeah, yeah, And I find that you don't really need to ever become my rate. To send an employee into orbit is all you got to do is raise your voice and they scattered, very defensive. And if you really want to piss somebody off, if you really want to send them to the moon, take a picture of the Oh my god, that will I mean, they will go nuts. Okay, So but.

12:10 I was going to say, I think a lot of companies what the problem is they're not understanding and what a great opportunity that they have. They're learning about something in their organization, a process, a procedure of the way the product was made, the way that it was package, or whatever it is that the customers complaining about. They're getting more feedback than they arrogant from some marketing study that they're trying to do. And those things are extremely expensive, and the people they pick they generally are there and going to tell you what you want to hear instead of the truth. So being able to get the truth from a customer that's saying, I've been here shopping for the past ten us and this is what's going on with your product or your service has fallen down from the way it used to be ten years ago, and whatever they're saying. You need to be writing those notes down because those are process changes that you need to make in your organization instead of, like you said, just saying, oh, we don't care. Just let this person go about their business.

13:22 We don't care what they're saying or what you know is going on. We'll get another customer that's their mindsight. And it's very expensive to get new customers, very very expensive. In New York City, it costs for a restaurant to get a new customer could cost him twelve hundred dollars a person. So now I lose that customer. I mean, just think of that, that just to get them as twelve hundred dollars, very very expensive. So complaints are opportunities to solve problems, keep a customer more loyal, and to improve your system. So if an employee, here's a complaint.

14:09 They need to let management know here's what the problem is and here's what we should do different The manager if they hear about complaints, they need to go and figure out how they can change their systems to eliminate that. The biggest problem Angela is that most people have never been trained on customer service, right, Most people have never been trained on how to handle a difficult or irate customer. And it increases employee turnover. So the typical employee turnover in most organizations is probably twenty five percent, fifty percent, so it's one hundred percent, you know. So you if you have really well trained employees that really understand customer service, you're going to have more execution, you're going to have less problems, you're going to have less complaints. And then part of the process is you want to teach people how to handle difficult customers, how to handle complaints. How it's an opportunity.

15:19 But you know, one of the other things I think is the problem is they don't empower those employees to be able to answer the customer's problem. They don't give them they don't give them the ability to make a decision on the spot that will resolve the issue that will make the customer happy. And instead they you know, like you said, they might go out and just lie to them just to quiet them down, when they could actually talk about resolutions to the problem if they were taught how to do that. And now you're building trust, you're making the customer think your care. But you've got to empower these people so that they can, you know, talk to the person that's in there upset.

16:11 And empowerment means that the employee has to be able to make a decision on the spot in favor of the customer. Yes. So empowerment is not you're empowered to say no. I mean that's the first word that most employees are taught no, no, no, no no. We need to learn how to teach people to say yes. And empowerment is the most complicated thing to get an employee to use. Yes. Employees know, they just know in their head, in their mind that if they made an empowered decision to satisfy the customer, they would lose their job. That is the number one reason employees will not make an empowered decision.

17:00 You have to overcome that by applauding people that make empowered decisions. If it's had a staff meeting. You say, Greg, yesterday I saw you make an empowered decision, and you explain what the employee did, and the other employees see the guy getting recognition. He didn't get fired. It gives him more reassurance. You got to look for opportunities. If you have a company newsletter when you hear about empowerment, make a big deal out of it in your newsletters, in any of you any of your communications. Because the greatest fear employees have ANGELA is they are going to get fired. They just know they're going to get fired.

17:41 It's not even a fear, they just know it's going to happen. Now, nobody really gets fired from making an empowered decision, but it's this tremendous fear, and nobody wants to go home at night and tell their spouse or girlfriend, I lost my job today. I don't know how we're going to pay the rent next month because I don't have a job. Yeah, it's just huge fear. Okay, and that fear has come from I'm going to have to say it, John, that's some very poor leadership in that organization when you have your staff feeling so intimidated that if they actually make a decision about the job you have placed them in that they are going to lose that job, then there needs to be some leadership training so that the whole environment can change. You know what I'm saying.

18:37 There's only a handful of companies that have really trained their staff unempowerment and about two three days ago, I ordered four products using my phone from Amazon. They were sent to an address in Texas. Was about fifty one dollars the cost of the four items. It was my mistake. I called up Amazon. I explained the problem. I said, I have no way to reach this person. I know their daughter, but she doesn't communicate. I don't have their phone number. I cannot reach them. I said, what do I do? She said, we're going to waive the charges.

19:27 Don't worry about it. You're one of our most important customers. So she waived the four items, and while she was on the phone, I was on my computer and I reordered the four items. Probably ninety nine percent of companies would not do that, right, But let me tell you the two advantages for Amazon and the two reasons most people don't copy. Amazon. Number one, their profit last year with seventy seven billion dollars too much profit for most companies.

20:09 The second reason that they don't want to copy Amazon is sales increased about seventy eight billion dollars last year. It's too much of an increase, it's too much money, So most companies don't want to copy what Amazon does. I called and I talked to a live person at Amazon. Now, the person is in India, I asked them, but they didn't want to tell me where they're from. And the reason I asked that because I suspected they were from India, and I would say customer service in India with most companies is about a zero on a ten point scale.

20:52 This person was extraordinarily effective. I asked them, I said, you know, why are you being Why are you able to make this kind of a decision. He said, because the company knows that you're one of our most valuable customers. Now, to be honest with you, you want to tell every customer that you're one of our most valuable customers. You know, goes back to recognition. These are the soft skills. So why can Amazon with a million, six hundred and fifty thousand employees, be twenty times better at customer service than the typical company, and I'm selling strategy when I talk about this stuff. The reason for figuring out how to solve customer complaints is you want to have rapid growth at your companies. You want to grow faster than anybody else.

21:50 And if you can build a brand, Angela about around your business being the service leader. I mean not be a but I mean you could really build a brand. You can increase the value of your business one hundred percent, five hundred percent on thou So we're not talking about twenty dollars or two hundred dollars or two thousand dollars. We're talking millions of dollars for most businesses if they could improve their if they could build a brand around the customer experience. And that does not mean adding more employee, you already have way too many importance. What it means is putting people on eight cellders, teaching them the soft skills, teaching them the customer service skills. Angela. I suspect the vast majority of employees don't know they're in customer service.

22:46 They think they're in healthcare, retail, IT software. They don't understand they're in customer service. Right and as they go through the educational process, grade school, high school, college, vocational schools. None of them teach customer service. Right, So if you wanted to be a plumber, you wanted to be an engineer, nobody teaches your customer service goals. We're supposed to know it from birth. Well, you know that you need to teach people. It's not complicated. And the mistake that companies make Angela is they take their staff. Let's say it's twenty twenty six, and let's say they have fifty employments and they have a twenty five percent employee turnover, right, so they lose, you know, twelve employees every year, and they believe that if they take a three hour course on customer service, and let's say the average age is twenty seven years old, that they're going to take this twenty seven year old and change his and her entire life and make them perfect because they went through three hours.

24:06 And then with the employee turnover, every year, they're adding another twelve people, right, and after about four or five years they have a complete turnover, and nobody's ever been trained in customer service and they and so it's like wanting to learn Russian. You know, I took a nine week course learning Russian, and I didn't do very well, to be honest with you, I mean it's very difficult. And then they have another course. They just you know, they have a lot of courses. We think that we could learn customer service and two hours you can learn Russian.

24:48 In two hours we can learn Chinese and two hours you're not going to do it. You want to dramatically improve sales, whether you have ten employees or twenty or fifty, or two hundred or two thousand, I think it's important that you train all of them on the skills in the art of customer service. And there are three things that we do that are really important. Number one, you got to change behaviors and attitudes. If you don't do that, you're not into the game. I don't care intellectually what you know, it's what do you do? You got two seconds?

25:29 Three seconds, and so it's an attitude and behavior change. And then the second thing is you've got to start teaching the skills a skill. It's not complicated. Why not use the customer's name? What is so complicated about saying John right, or good morning, mister shoul or hi angela, missus sharp? How are you Okay, we don't use the person's name. These are skills, right, and what you wanted if you want to own the market. If you don't give a dang it, you know, this podcast has no value.

26:12 But if you want to really make a change, you know you want to be able to do that, and you've got to teach your host aff Now, if you're just an individual listening to this podcast and you say, hey, I just work here, I'm not the owner, I'm not the manager. We have twelve online learning courses on our website. ASH don't forget the service dot com that people could go through on their own. They could. So if they're in Austin, Texas, or they're in Billings, Montana, you know they could, they could on their own. You know, learn these skills because your mind is your greatest asset. Anything you can do to build your mind. And I've always I grew up very poor. I didn't have any money.

27:06 My dad died when I was seven. My mother raised me. We never knew we were poor, but we were poor. Let me tell you what, Okay, but she really managed her money, which she lived off the life insurance. My dad sold the prudential life insurance I didn't like being poor, so I've always been more financially driven, trying to make money, and so money has been a high priority for me. And so to do that, you got to develop yourself and you got to build your mind. Your mind is the greatest asset that you have. I was talking to a partner in South Africa last night and I asked her if she had ever read Elon Mus's book called Elon Musk and she's in South Africa. They said, he's the richest person in the world. He's from South Africa.

28:08 I said, I can't believe you have not read the book. Now, this book is about six hundred and sixty pages. Okay, it's really thankful. But you know, I've rated it at ten when I read it, and I read it on October twenty nine is when I completed. At twenty twenty three. I rated it at a plus. And if you were to go through the book, I have marks on at highlights. Now this book would take me about twenty minutes to rego through again if I just look at all the highlights. But what I'm talking about is we have to build ourselves. Okay, and not just in customer service, but whether we want to be a manager. If I wanted to be a manager, I should be reading every book on leadership and management I can find. Right, if I want to be the best at customer service, I want to be like an Amazon, I should be reading books on customer service. Don't read one stupid book. No, eight books on customer service too on success? But so what, okay? So what okay? You read eight books, you're going to become perfect, you know.

29:19 So you've got to build people. And by the way, here's the interesting thing of small companies versus large companies. If you are working for three M and they said we have a course that we're implementing on customer service, and you said, I'm really too busy. I don't have time. I'm already perfect, I don't need it, your future at three M would be very limited. Right, In small companies, most employees that really need this stuff say I'm too busy, I don't have time. So management needs to say, at our company, all of us are going to go through this training. And if you don't have time, you know, then you're going to have to find another company to work for. But I expect all of us to go through this training and to implement these skills. And so the problem that small companies have is that fifty percent of the employees are saying, I'm too busy, I don't have time, I don't need this stuff. I'm already perfect.

30:30 I talked to God yesterday. He annoighted me. I talked to Pope Leo. He said, I'm good. The people that need this the least, that are the best, are the first to assign in and participate, and they get the most out of it. If you got forty employees, you have tremendous amount of contact with those with your customers, right. Yeah, and every day, if if let's say twenty percent of the transactions are weak, the employee doesn't do a very good job, you're at risk. It's huge. This could be millions of dollars of revenue for your firm, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. So your weakest link can destroy it.

31:19 Yeah. So it's so handling complaints is first of all, if you have if you have flawless execution, you're gonna have a whole lot less complaints. Right. I believe we did this for the military when they used our program. You can reduce customer complaints easily by fifty percent. You've got to trade people to deliver excellence in customer service. Part of that training is they need to learn how to handle complaints, difficult customers. Yes, yes, absolutely, you know the whole concept of customer service.

31:59 They don't underunderstand that the customer is spending money and that's how you make money so that you can get salaries paid and you can continue to be in business. Your customer is the most important thing, not even the product or the service, the customer because if they're not happy and they're not paying, you're not in business. So they somewhere they've got to get the concept. The whole thing is the customer. That is what you're trying to reach. That is what you need to keep happy. That is what you need to keep functioning so that they're they're doing word or mouth sharing of you being a great company because you care about your customers. And they don't get the concept.

32:49 Here's another obstacle that we face, particularly in the United States. Say I'm SULO, I thinks believe they deliver awesome customer service. I would say that out of three hundred and thirty million people in the United States, that almost all of them believe that customer service sucks. So why is it that the virtually ninety nine percent of the population would say there is no customer service, it's awful. Ninety nine percent of all CEOs would say, we're already PERFERCT.

33:36 There's a major disconnect. That's the obstacle that we face. It's a little bit like being overweight. If you're fifty pounds overweight and you say I'm fine and I don't have a weight problem, You're probably never going to lose the weight. You know, ian ten pounds overweight and ten pounds and man trying to lose ten pounds of his life really difficult. Problem is I like food? You know I need to stop eating? I guess. But we need to teach people how to handle complaints. Again, the customer does not have to become irate, and I would say that of employees are going to go crazy if you just raise your voice. You don't have to become irate. And in we have a program called Handling I Write Customers that teaches people how to handle difficult and I right customers. It's a two session program implemented in two hours or three hours once a week.

34:42 For two weeks, okay, And the venettes that we have in there are really aggressive, I mean really aggressive. But I find that in real life it is all you got to do is raise your voice and the employee will cry, they'll send you into jail, meaning they're going to do something to really screw you up. And they have no value idea of the value that you bring to the business. You're just you're spending the year at McDonald's and you're going to spend four dollars on this meal. And you know who gives a dan. Well, maybe you go to McDonald's once a week. Maybe you spend on an average ten dollars every time you go in there.

35:27 And that's ten dollars, that's that's five hundred and twenty dollars. And let's say you've been doing it for ten years, has five dollars two hundred dollars. So it's not a four dollars meal, it's it's it's maybe fifty two hundred dollars that you're looking at. So what do you if it was fifty two hundred dollars, you knew it was fifty two hundred dollars, and you got somebody spending four dollars what could you do? Uh? And and the other thing that we do. We have a program called Loyal for Life on service recovery that teaches you four steps when you screw up. Number one is to act quickly. All this has to happen at sixty seconds. Number two, you gotta take responsibility. You can't say, well, it's my manager's fault, it's accounting, it's shipping, it's you know, we like to blame everybody else say hey, obviously we screwed up and it's our fault. Boom. I mean, you're going to shock the customer. The third thing is you got to be empowered. I mean you got to be able to make a decision on the spot. And the fourth thing, which is important, this is a service recovery. Now instead of just saying I'm sorry, you got to give something in a way that has high value, low cost. All of us have products and services that have high value, low cost. So let's say I'm at McDonald's and I went through the drive in and something was wrong with

36:59 my meal, and I paid six dollars, And it doesn't matter what your business is. I'm just using McDonald's right now, And you come back through again and you're you're upset and you're you know, you didn't put the ketchup on, you didn't do this whatever it is, Okay, what's the employee going to do. They're going to probably just say I'm sorry, But instead what the employee could do to say, I am so sorry. Obviously it's our fault. Let me give you a cupeon here for twenty dollars off your next time you come to McDonald's and let me exchange the food that you had so that so that it's fresh.

37:44 Now they're real cost out of the twenty dollars and changing the meal. You know, it might be four or five dollars. They keep the customer because now what do you do with that twenty dollars gift card you get to back? You know most of us are cheap. I'm cheap, Okay, I'm frugal. I'm not going to cost a twenty dollars gift card a work. When I come back through that and I spend the twenty dollars and you screw up again, it that's you got to help a problem then, but you got teach service recovery to the frontline employee. Four things take responsibility act quickly. I means you don't have time to move it up the chain of command. You've got to be empowered. And fourth, you got to compensate.

38:29 All of us have services that we can give away that have very little real cost of goods, but high value in the customer's mind. Now, if you are at a business and they say I'm going to give you a free T shirt, it might be a slap in the face. If you said, I'm sorry, we screwed up. I'm going to give you a free cup of coffee. Come on, that's your cheap has no impact, right, So the goal is to make such an impression that you flip a guy in sixty seconds who may be wearing it, telling you I'm never ever going to come back to your business for the rest of my entire life. In sixty seconds, you can change his or her attitude where they say you're the greatest company in the world. Yeah, that's what this recovery is. But we don't teach that to employees. We're afraid that employees might give away the store.

39:27 By god, think of what would happen if you had overhappy customers. I mean, you could have so much money you could buy your own bank, and so problems are going to happen every day. You talked earlier that its empowerment is very important. That means the employee has to be able to make decisions. A single task of every employee every day and should be to make a customer over happy. If they're over happy, you own the market. Yeah, they see the concept. When I started in nineteen seventy nine, I'm getting older. Now, that's a long time ago. Probably ninety five percent of your listeners weren't even born by the time I started to write the Failance program. But it was based on a simple concept. I saw companies spending a lot of money trying to bring people to their place of business, and as the customer walked through the door, they would issue baseball bats. They hit the customer on the head as hard as I could. And I thought figuratively, and I thought, that's really stupid. I mean, this is really crazy. I said, why is customer service so bad? And I decided because nobody had ever been trained in customer service. And the concept was that I had that if you treat a customer like a ken Air queen, you treat them specially, you make them feel important, you deliver an incredible customer experience. Two things happen. Number one, they come back and they spend more money with you, but more importantly, they bring their friends. Yes, so Amazon

41:02 spends no money on advertising for their products, right, nothing. They all their ads are to try to get employers. So they all use word amouth. That's how they grew the business word about. You have the largest companies in the world, you know, they just use word about right, and they have flawless execution, and when they screw up, they really understand service recovery. So think of the incident where there were four items totally about fifty one dollars not their fault, my fault. I told you it's my fault. I sent it to the wrong address, and they said, well take care of it. I'll bet you that not even one percent of the companies and in the world would do that. Yeah, but most people don't want to have seventy seven billion dollars in profit. Most companies don't want to have an increase in sales of seventy eight billion dollars too much money. So that's really much all THO, what we're talking about is how do we take our business whatever it is and start to own the market because we deliver a better customer experience than anybody around us.

42:20 And that means whether you got five employees or forty employees, or four hundred or ten thousand, every single person has to be trained on the skills in the art of customer service. And it can't be just one little magic program. You need a process where you keep developing the best employees. Money only brings a person in the door. If you doubled everybody's salary tomorrow, performance in your company would not go up one percent. That's right. In about thirty days, you'd be out of business. So money has handcuffs. If you want to get more out of people, you need to train them. You need to build their self worth, build their self concept. You need to teach them how to be more successful. You need to believe in employees. You believe in customers. And you believe in employees, and you're willing to keep customers, you're willing to build and develop your people. You will become another Amazon.

43:26 Yeah. Absolutely, And you know I was even thinking as you were talking, this is even happening in organizations. One department to another department. You might have a department that generates reports and different things like that, but they don't understand the departments that they're sending those reports too, are their customers. I used to say this like long time ago in the seventies, eighties, nineties, when I went into management and I had my finance staff, do you understand that the sales and marketing department receiving this information there are your customers. So you want to be able to provide the best service to them, the best information to them, and you want to make sure it's not only on time, but you've even added some additional information that they never ask for but will totally appreciate. This is another way of having customer servers working internally in their companies. And I've seen where you have two departments don't even speak to one another because one can't rely on the other, or they just have this friction. It's just it's something that can be used in so many different areas.

44:51 That are when we train must say it's forty people, the most important thing is to mix up the forty people. Let's say you had four groups of ten people age. You don't want the front desk people that you don't want shipping separate. You want to take a group of ten people from ten different departments because in most companies the other department is the enemy. Yes, and we need teamwork because everybody has. Everybody's involved in customer service. There's no more the person that's packing the product, the person that's shipping the product, the person on the call sid, the person that's face to face. Everybody is involved in customer service. The problem is that most employees don't know they're in customer service, right, and that's a global problem mm hmm.

45:43 Yeah, And it's just a matter of you know, like I was reading something from one of your books, stepping into your customer's shoes, how would I want to be treated? That's what you definitely want to be doing to make sure that the customer is happy and make sure that you're meeting their needs and making sure that you've done all that you can to give them the product, the services, the delivery. Everything is all part of making sure that customer is not just comfortable, but excited and you know, happy about what they have received. And like you said, you mentioned Amazon, Costco is another one that's really great in providing great customer service. And it's really important because when people are out spending money, especially when money is tight, they can't afford for you to make mistakes and then not know.

46:50 And so I'll give you an example with Costco. I brought some breed cheese, I thought, but when I got home there was no bree cheese. So the next time I was in, I went to the return counter and I said, I bought a deal of bree cheese, but I never got it. Can you look at the last invoice? You know. I gave him my card and they said, go get you know, some bree cheese. Go to the return counter and they'll give you the cheese for free. They didn't say, well, can you prove you didn't get it?

47:30 They just trust the customer. Right. See, if we're going to be a service leader, we have to trust the customer number one. Number two, we have to trust our employees to take care of the customer to the customer's satisfaction. So I probably spent an average of three to four hundred hours a month at Costco, maybe more. It's a disaster. Every time you go in. You see all this stuff. It's really good and it's high quality, and you walk out with a half a cart and it's two hundred dollars. So you know, they understand the power of customer service. So when you buy a product at at Costco, they have really a lifetime warranting.

48:20 You know. Computers are a little different. But let's say that you bought a pair of tennis shoes and you brought them back three years later and say, you know they got holes in it. I want my money back. They will, They'll look it up on the computer and they'll give you a credit immediately. They have a They don't have too many complaints because they just take care of everybody. They make everybody happy. They really do have a defective product. You know, they really have a lifetime warranting. Yeah. Yeah, but again, it. Looked at the sales of Amazon Costco. You know, I don't remember the exact numbers right off the top of my head right now, but I invested one thousand dollars in two thousand and three in nine companies. One of them was Amazon. In the stock in Amazon today is worth Let me just let me just look at last month.

49:27 Hang on the second here, I'll just tell you this is what happens when you're a service leader. To see if I can find here we Go. This is at the end of April. The stock at Amazon was the thousand dollars worth one hundred and sixty nine thou six hundred and thirty eight dollars. The stock of Costco, the thousand dollars is worth forty two eight and seventy eight dollars. Those are people that understand that it's all about customer service, is all all about providing and keeping the customers happy. Well, I've enjoyed this conversation John as always, and you can tell them how to get in touch with you and to be able to your wonderful customer service training.

50:17 So there are several ways. One they can go to Service Quality Institute dot com that will lead me to their website. They can call me on my cell phone on WhatsApp or my cell phone which is one the country code six one two three eight two five six three six. They could email me at John at service quality dot com. Yes, so you can go to my website Service Quality Institute dot com. You can call me on my cell phone and you can email. Me all right, well, we appreciate you being here on a sharp outlook and if you if you miss that, you can always email me at asharpoutlook dot com or Asharpconsulting dot com because I'm going to become one of the distributors and trainers of customer service, so one of us want to get you get your organization set. So thank you for tuning in to a Sharp Outlook. We're here every Monday at eleven a m. Eastern time eight a m. Pacific time. We're here to give you great information so that you can have success on your business and to inform you so that you can make the right decisions whatever you do. Join us again and stay informed.

51:50 I want to thank you for joining us on a Sharp Outlook. We have been informed and energized to take the next steps. We have posted links to website and videos to learn more on today's topic. Please join us again next week or another thought provoking conversation right here on k for HD radio and talk for TV. Listen to the podcast on all The podcast apps, and until next week, stay informed.