Episode 53: Generating Customer Loyalty: The Lego Article

Episode 53: Generating Customer Loyalty: The Lego Article

Brandon Schoen:
You can make your customer smile. It's easily one of the best ways to remind them why they became a loyal customer in the first place. And so when you look for ways to delight your customers, even when something didn't go right, you can't go wrong, guys. This is what it's all about. In fact, when something does go wrong in your business, when some mistake happens, which inevitably it's going to happen because we're people and we're imperfect, we'll look at it as an opportunity, right? Anytime something bad happens, thing gets broken into home or a customer's clean gets messed up. What's the opportunity, right? What's the opportunity to change that experience around, to put some personality behind it, you know your audience, how can you make them smile? How can you change it around so that they're going to go tell all their friends what an amazing experience you turned it into.

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Brandon Schoen:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners podcast. I'm your host, Brandon Schoen, and you are in the place, the only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world. Guys today, we have a super exciting episode. We're going to be talking about how to delight your customers and how delight is maybe the most powerful thing you can do to generate loyalty among your customers. We're going to read a quick email, actually that our mentors sent us the email. So it's a really cool story. I want to share with you guys today and how we can integrate that into our cleaning businesses and be doing the same thing to delight our customers. So stay tuned for that guys. Before we dive in a hundred percent here, I want you guys to take note of the fee for the show. You guys already know the fee, but if you're getting any value, if you're getting any new insight, if the show made you laugh, if it made you learn something or a new perspective, whatever it might be, just change of maybe a brand new idea you never thought of before. Please help us out like subscribe and leave a review for the podcast. It really, really helps us out. We are not asking you guys for anything else other than just help us out with that little bit of housekeeping. And that helps us keep continuing to do the show. We're not running a bunch of annoying ads and commercials for you all the time. So that helps us to keep going. So if you guys are getting value, help us out.

All right, now that we've got the housekeeping out of the way, let's dive into our show today. Just another quick episode for you guys. And again, just talking about how we can generate loyalty among customers. We've talked in the past about how you respond to customers and your public reviews is super important. A lot of people actually don't do this and they totally missed the boat. I know when we started our cleaning business, this was a glaring hole that we saw in our market. That just the lack of customer service and response and empathy and compassion for customers in general was just totally lacking. So this is a huge area. You can stand in your cleaning business. And just in general, as a business, what I want to do is just dive into an email that was sent, and this is actually an article and you guys can find it it's on Inc magazine, Inc.com. And actually, as I mentioned, guys, our mentor Corby up in Denver, who's taught us the entire cleaning business he's been in the cleaning business for over 20 years now, he actually sent this down to us the other day on like a text message on our WhatsApp and was just like, man, this was an amazing response. I just wanted to share it with you guys. I thought it was really cool. And I thought there was a lot of value that could be taken out of it and we could apply. We could all apply to our cleaning businesses. So we've been talking a little bit lately about delighting your customers, how you can delight your customers. There was another podcast we did recently about the donut guy that chased me out of the store and how amazing that customer service was so much so that I was compelled to leave a five star review, right? So this is just another example, guys of this exact same thing, delighting your customers and finding every opportunity to delight your customers.

So the title of the article is a customer discovered their $350 Lego set was missing pieces. The company's response was brilliant. Okay. So we're going to dive into the article, go through it. So here we go guys. So I came across a fascinating story from someone will call John, we'll call him that because it's his name. And he told me I can use his real name. John is a fan of Lego and star wars. I can relate. We have four children and have an entire playroom at our home, mostly dedicated to Lego constructions. Our children have built over the past few years. Many of them are star wars themed though not quite like this. So when John found the Mose Isley Cantina set at target, he bought it. It's not an easy set to get. The set has over 3000 pieces. It will cost you $350. Even if you can find it in stock. The book of instructions is 400 pages long. If you're buying this set, it's clearly pretty much a big fan of Lego and star wars. If that's you, you might imagine the excitement of opening up the set, sorting the pieces and following instructions to build it. You might also imagine that if you spent hours working on it, only to discover that you were missing a bag of pieces, that would be pretty disappointing. So that's what happened to John. At that point, John could have returned it to target, except it's not easy to return a Lego build. That's two thirds complete. And even if he did the chances of finding another set, weren't likely. So instead John told me he reached out to Lego via its website.

I don't know about you, but I have mixed feelings about contacting companies on their website having to contact customer service because there was something wrong with a product you bought is something most of us can relate to. It's also something most of us would rather not have to endure. So in most cases, if you're lucky enough to get a response, it's something automated or sent by a person whose job is to respond to hundreds, if not thousands of requests every day. So if the response you get actually addresses your issue, it's likely to be generic. That's understandable, but it's not easy to read through people's problems all day and try to solve them. So on the other hand, the response that John received from lego is so good that it's worth sharing. It's also an incredible example for every business.

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Brandon Schoen:
Hey everyone, are you part of the TRIBE? If you're not, then you're going to want it because it is literally one of the most awesome masterminds in the cleaning industry. And there's tons of people on there talking about stuff to grow your cleaning business. It's free one of the best parts about it. It's free and you're going to want to be part of it. So let's tell them how to, how to do that.

Brandon Condrey:
So to join head over to Profitcleaners.com/FacebookTribe

Brandon Schoen:
See you guys on the inside.

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Brandon Schoen:
So I'm going to go ahead and read the email. You guys know the situation now. So John just had a horrible experience. He's really upset. He's really frustrated. Probably a lot of our customers are when they call us up ranting on the phone about something that happened or something didn't get cleaned, right? So I want you guys to notice how this customer service rep totally reframes the situation, changes it around completely. And it's not hard to do this guys, but I just want you to notice how easy this could possibly be and how you can integrate this into your cleaning business. So here's the response, dear John, thanks for getting in touch with us and providing that information. I am so sorry that you are missing bag 14 from your Mosley Cantina. This must be the work of Lord Vader. Love that part. Fear not for I have hired Han to get that bag right out for you all. Get that bag right out to you. Your order number is 3021936866. And we'll be arriving in the next seven to 10 days or less with 12 parsecs, have a brick tastic day and may the force be with you. We want to make sure that you're doing a good job. So you'll always find the link to a four question survey in our emails. Please tell us how we did today, Jason.

Okay. So that's the email guys. Totally reframe that scenario. I don't know if lego actually trains their employees to take this kind of care when responding. It seems they would not do that, but this email is sheer brilliance. I'm telling you guys it's really, really great. It's hard to know if you could actually train this exact type of mindset into your employees. I'm guessing you can. I'm guessing this is something that's totally possible. If you are aware of this, customers are coming at you. If you're asking those questions, how can you make this a great situation and experience, even though it started out kind of rocky, how can we change the situation around? So I don't know if it's the best email I've ever seen. It's definitely up there. It's one of the best customer emails I've ever seen personally. And not only did it apologize for the mistake as you guys noticed it started out, thanking them for bringing this to their attention. So they're thinking the customer they're taking responsibility, they're apologizing for the mistake. And then they clearly explain how lego is going to make it right. And they did it with a sense of personality was awesome, right? I mean, I was laughing. I'm sure the person was really upset at the time, laughed as well. And they probably totally changed their whole attitude on the subject. Right?

So that might be one of the most impressive parts of the entire email is just the way that they did it with that sense of personality and just kind of having fun, turning a bad situation into something really good. I'm not normally totally all for passing the blame. I totally agree with taking responsibility in almost every single scenario, you want to be a hundred percent, Hey, that's our fault. We're going to take responsibility for that. But even just the way that they did this with personality, they kind of like blamed Lord Vader for doing this. And it was actually delightful. And that's the point of this guys is the way you do things sometimes how you say it, not just what you say, but how you say it is so much more important.

So if you weren't a star wars fan or lego fan, maybe that email doesn't really make sense to you or doesn't appeal to you as much. But understand that the person who wrote that email clearly understood that anyone who buys this set, isn't just a loyal legal fan. They're a die hard star wars fan. So this was a serious customer and the customer service person, seeing this understood this, they totally played that card and really showed that they know their audience, right? They took the time to make this response fun. They could've just said, oh, we're so sorry. We can't help you. Or some generic response. You'll just have to order another one. Sorry. That would have been a horrible experience even further now that they went out of their way to express this problem.

So guys, this is just an awesome opportunity, an example that you can turn a really bad situation into something delightful, right? And since we're talking about delight, it's probably up there definitely with one of the more powerful things that you can do to generate loyalty among your customers. It seriously does not take much responding to review or doing something small to help your customers show that you're listening, going out of your way to reframe the situation. It goes a long way guys. So it doesn't take much even little things. Knowing your audience, responding accordingly, this all can go a really, really long way. Making your customers smile, giving them a compliment. I was telling our teams recently today, just we're going to start integrating this more into our culture, but just, just giving your customers compliments about their home and things around there. Just lights them up. It changes their whole experience and their whole demeanor. But if you can make your customers smile, it's easily one of the best ways to remind them why they became a loyal customer in the first place.

And so when you look for ways to delight your customers, even when something didn't go right, you can't go wrong guys. This is what it's all about. In fact, when something does go wrong in your business, when some mistake happens, which inevitably it's going to happen because we're people and we're imperfect, we'll look at it as an opportunity, right? Any time something bad happens, a thing gets broken in a home or a customer's clean gets messed up. What's the opportunity, right? What's the opportunity to change that experience around, to put some personality behind it, you know your audience, how can you make them smile? How can you change it around so that they're going to go tell all their friends what an amazing experience you turned it into. And that's what this is all about guys.

So again, that's pretty much it for today, guys, just a quick podcast. I wanted to just share that with you because my mentor, Brandon, nice mentor up in Denver Corby. He shared this with us. He's all about this mentality and mindset as well, going the extra mile to delight your customers. So guys, I want to leave you that with that today, how can you go the extra mile, delight your customers, go out of your way to extend yourself and serve your customers in ways that they would never expect so much so that they'll smile. They'll laugh and they'll continue to be such loyal customers for many, many months and many years in the future.

And that's what we're building here guys is a sustainable long-term income, a long-term business asset that we're building. And this is the kind of stuff that you want to be integrating all the time. This is the mindset that you want to be integrating into your team. So if you have a customer service staff share this email with them, you can go Google it or we'll have the link in the show notes, but you could probably just Google Inc magazine Lego set. And that's pretty much it guys. I wanted to share that with you today. The title of the article is a customer discovered their $350 Lego set was missing pieces. So if you want to look it up, share it with your customer service team. I think it's a great story. I think it's a great way to teach that mindset and hopefully you guys got some value out of it. So until next time guys keep it clean.

Announcer:
Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profitcleaners.com and remember keep it clean.