Episode 83: How Important is Customer Experience? (Hint: It’s SUPER Important)

Episode 83: How Important is Customer Experience? (Hint: It’s SUPER Important)

Brandon Condrey:
Guys, this was our jumping off standpoint was like, Hey, maybe we're going in the wrong direction. How do we do this? So like the concept that the business coach guys had put onto Brandon was you need to do something that's unexpected and makes the customer feel overjoyed. So that was our jumping off point, unexpected overjoyed. So we had a long sort of strategy session. We made a list of four buckets of people that we would talk to. So we have leads and prospects so that we're talking to them in the estimate, we have current customers, customers that are trying to cancel service and then former customers. And so for our particular business in our name, it says, claim your weekends. So we're always trying to find ways to make the customer point back to how do you claim your weekend? We're going to rattle off a couple for you to kind of make you get the gist and try and spark a little brainstorm on your site to see if you can incorporate something like this on your end to really just go over the top.

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. The only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to take it to the next level and win. I'm your host, Brandon Schoen. And I'm joined by my amazing co-host over here, Brandon Condrey that's me. I'm amazing. You are amazing.

And together we are the Profit Cleaners. We are doing the real talk, doing the real deal, just giving you guys a scoop on the cleaning business what's happening in our business. And hopefully we can all learn and grow together. That's the point. So if you guys are getting any value, Brandon, let's tell them the fee, the housekeeping for the show.

I subscribe. I mean, hopefully I already subscribed because you found this, but maybe you just wandered across us, but subscribe, if you want to get more content about what it's like to own and grow a cleaning business, you can tell us your friends about us. And most importantly, I think you could leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts.

There's a way to leave a review in there. So please consider doing that. Absolutely guys and yeah, help us out, guys. We're not running a bunch of ads. We are just purely serving up content to help give you guys a great experience. And speaking of experience, that segues nicely into our podcast today, we have an a really exciting episode.

Guys, we're talking all about customer experience and we're talking about what we're doing currently, what we've been learning to deliver more happiness to our customers and what just kind of hopefully sparks some ideas for you guys, what you can be doing to grow your business through delivering an exceptional customer experience, which is a huge way to be differentiating your brand from all the other people,

all the other businesses out there that are pretty much these days, it's pretty much transactional. And a lot of people are getting in the road of using so much technology and automation that they're actually losing the human element of it. So we're going to talk about that. Kind of like how we've shifted gears to creating more of that experience. And it's really exciting because this is like big stuff,

guys. This is all about what entrepreneurs and how they're going to change the world, how we're going to be doing this. Even through small ripples, small things that you do in your business to make people feel a certain way. That's what it's all about, how you make people feel. That's how you're gonna change the world through your business, through all these little things we're going to talk about.

So let's get into it. Brandon, let's tell people all the goods and stuff we're getting into here. Yeah. So we've told you in the past about software tools that we use and ways to automate certain business aspects. And so there's kind of like two ways that you can go with this as a business owner, you can fully automate as much as possible to reduce overhead employees,

people that aren't cleaners. And so there are companies that kind of lean this way, like launch 27 is heavily focused on independent contractors and automating a bunch of stuff through websites and software. So there's a niche for that. Like I know a lot of the launch, 27 people that run businesses through there are absentee owners. So like they live in Florida,

but a cleaning company in Chicago, like that seems to be pretty common based on their Facebook group. So you can do it that way. And we have told you about things that we've done that are kind of like that. Like we've got automated email responders and for awhile we had an automated text message responder as well. So like you can do that.

And kind of the goal was to do more with less, less people and try and train the customer to only email us or only text us. The other side of that is like a high luxury customer experience. We actually have that as one of our three uniques, as part of traction is a luxury customer experience. And so I think part of having a luxury customer experience is that you're able to talk to someone when you want to talk to someone.

And this is definitely a weak spot of ours right now, But yeah, absolutely. And that's why we're talking about we're sharing. This is real talk with you guys. These are things we're improving in our business and we want to share it with you guys because we know this is a huge opportunity. If you look around right now, what are most businesses trying to do?

They're trying to automate everything to a point of a fault. And I feel like what you said at Brandon, we kinda started going down this route, but we're shifting gears. And this is really a way to like weaponize your business in a way that is going to make your brand or your service. Something that people brag about. Cause that's what you want.

Ultimately, the best marketing is word of mouth. You want people singing your praises on the rooftops, telling everyone about your business because you did something. You made them feel a certain way. And it wasn't just some piece of technology kind of interfering. And I think a lot of times when this came up recently in our business, we were like, what is the reason people get really pissed off with businesses and it's usually artificial intelligence or something.

Some wall, some piece of technology standing in the way between just them talking to a human, right? You guys know what that is. Like you call your bank and it sounds like a human, but it's like, tell me why you're calling. Tell me in a few words while you're calling, I want to speak to a representative. It's like,

I think said open a debit card and it never gets it right. Or it hears some noise in the background that drives you crazy. That's the big corporate version of automating to a fault. And we're trying to prevent small businesses from falling into the same trap. Yeah. And just like, think for a sec, how does that make you feel? Cause I know in my head,

I can remember lots of times when I've had this and I, and I see you Brandon, when you have a phone call like that and you just get like super frustrated and It Makes, yeah, it makes you feel like disrespected. Like you've been like reduced to a transaction, almost like the company is so arrogant. They don't care anymore and you don't have any other choices.

But I think that's the opportunity is if you look back in the past and in history, like all the companies that have been really huge behemoth companies, like the blockbusters of the world, the cable companies, like the ones that were really, really amazing at one point. But they like almost to a fault, automated everything and didn't care about the customer.

And now they're no longer here. So it's like, you might be doing really well now, but it's like, you gotta be starting to think of these things like how you're making people feel, because people do have a choice. Customers have a choice. There's going to be another cleaning company that comes around. If you're not doing this already, that's going to outperform you through creating these experiences for people.

And that's what we're trying to work more into our business. Like for a while we got big enough that we weren't even answering the phones anymore when it was more automated. And we're trying to get back to doing that. Just things like that, guys, it's really simple when you're smaller, it's easier. You can answer the phone, you can do all that stuff.

But as you start to grow, you start to put in systems and things that kind of like start to lessen that human interaction. And so we're trying to get back into that and find ways we can innovate this back into our business, you know, still being tech forward, but also bringing that human element back into it. Right? Yeah. I mean,

so make no mistake. This is also a system it's just not systemizing it with a piece of software. This is going to be systemizing it with someone picking up the phone. Now, granted we may end up using a different kind of software. That's more heavily focused on customer service. Something like Zendesk is one that we're kind of poking around with. But the reason that we really got this ball rolling was that both Brandon and I have business coaches,

I belong to a CEO peer group. We meet once a month and Brandon's got one that meets online once a week, I think. And they said something in one of those calls that Brandon sent me the notes for that blew me away. And it was that cool tech is invented by college kids that have never had a business and don't have customers. And that felt like a slap across the face to me that like,

I've totally bought into all this cool tech like texting and this and that and all these things. And it sounds great. But if it was invented by a 20 year old computer whiz, or maybe even a younger computer whiz, who's never actually dealt with customers, then there is a time and place for that type of stuff. And maybe it is the big corporations,

like Google's AI speech recognition stuff. But I don't know that a small local business is necessarily going to benefit from blocking out the customer as much as we have right now. So we are in the point where we're thinking about switching this up. Yeah. I mean, that is such a funny thought because it it's really true. Like a lot of these amazing softwares and things that we use,

like the people that design them again, they've never had a business or they've never understood like the concept of this customer experience we're talking about. And so if we just, just stop for a second, like think about like what business even is just the purest form of business. It's that interaction, right? It's this human thing. Like people crave as humans.

Like we want this, this interaction and this like communication and this experience, it really is what it comes down to. And so I think a lot of businesses, including ourselves, we were going down this path. There's almost a clearancing ourselves out of business because we're like trying to like automate every little thing and streamline it and systematize it, which is great.

You need systems to scale. But think about the idea that you have a real person on the other side of this. And if you can start thinking about through the lens of like, what is the experience this person is having. And as a business owner in any time you're ever selling a product or service, you're creating this experience and what are you making people feel?

How are they feeling when they're working with you and what are they feeling right now? And if something goes wrong or something, you know, happens that this is actually what I learned on coaching calls recently, which blew my mind. And I knew this having business experience and stuff, but it's actually the post-purchase value add is what they called it. So I'm in the art taste into KIPP,

add my Le Andy, Frisella a lot of these guys to have huge businesses. They talk about amazing stuff like this, but it's, I had never heard it phrased this way before the post-purchase value add. So think of it like anytime you have a customer, you have a couple opportunities after the sale, usually right. Immediately after the sale to create this experience.

And also maybe like months down the road or a year down the road, you have another opportunity to create this experience. And it kind of cements this bond, which creates loyalty in your customers, which creates this experience that they want to not only brag about your business, but they can't help, but keep working with you, you know? And so you're going to have more loyalty and it's just such a cool way to think of it.

The other way that they phrased it, the way to think about it is it's the gratuity. You're think of it as like tipping the customer. So like they paid you now, how do you say thank you. You can say, thank you. Thanks, bye. Which is what everybody does. But the ROTC syndicate guys gave a couple of examples.

And I have a couple of local examples too, that I think are really interesting. So I'll give a local one and then Brandon, you can talk about the restaurant one, cause you were there and you got a better feel for it. But the local one was the real estate agent that I used to buy my house. I mean, you get to know them.

You're looking at houses, you're talking, driving between when we closed, he gave us this like gift basket, which sounds like it's got some oranges in it and whatever, but it was a, it was for us, it was a tailored gifts basket. So mine had a bunch of IPA from local breweries and there was a bunch of wine that my wife liked.

And there was a gift card to a restaurant that we had talked about as part of it. And that gift basket that he gives to his customers after they close on a house is totally different. Every single time. My mom also used him. This is where we get to the part where this is going to get you more business because they're going to talk about it.

My mom used him as well. And in her case she wanted to throw like a house warming party. So she threw a house-warming slash retirement party and he cut her a check for like 300 bucks, I think. And we got to put that towards catering. That's an example of a local one. And Brandon's got one from the business coach guys. Yeah.

And just like, as you're talking about that, like this experience that your posts creating after the purchase, it sparks some type of joy and some type of unexpected like feeling right. Like a surprise almost because that's the point of the gratuity is it's, it's like you're tipping up front and I've heard this before. But like, if you want really good service at a restaurant,

you should tip, like you should put the tip out before you order the meal and then you'll get even better service. Right. Because the server's like, oh man, like I'm going to come over even sooner and fill up your water now because you tipped me and you know, and you're on top of it. And it's just like the law of reciprocity,

like it comes full circle and how you make people feel and how you treat people. Right. So, but yeah. The example would you talking about the restaurant won, right? Brandon? Yeah. The restaurant one. Yeah. So the one that ed gave, it was a really cool example that there's a, an Italian restaurant. Apparently it's in a,

I want to say it's Washington, but I could be totally wrong here, but it's, or it's in California, one of the two, but it's called solo Italiano. And basically it's a really nice high-end Italian restaurant and see it's like 20, 30 people at a time. And essentially after he went to eat at this restaurant, he got, let's see,

he was on a boat back to his house an hour later, he got a video text message from the owner of the restaurant, like the chef in the back. And he wanted to, he just said, thank you so much for coming out tonight. We're always here for you. They had like talked to him during the dinner and learned to like his daughter,

like their last name and some information about their family. And he was Italian. So they actually like looked up their last name. They found out what part of their family was from like Palermo, Italy, when they were born all this stuff. Like they just like went out of their way to create this personal connection. Right. And so if you can just imagine for a sec,

like having a, like, you know, go out to a restaurant, it's a normal meal, but then having this like post-purchase experience where like the chef or someone at the restaurant reach-outs to send you a video, talks about something in your life, something personal, like, and that's, what's cool is like some of this stuff we're talking about, guys that doesn't even have to be something that costs a lot of money.

It could literally just be a handwritten note or a video like we're talking about here that doesn't cost anything, but it literally just shows people that you care that you listened you care and you're like reaching out and expanding on that experience. And you're creating this joy and sparking the surprise and unexpected joy out of people. And so basically that was it. Like I have a bunch of other notes And that was,

that was great. So yeah, for the record, it's solo, Italiano is in Portland, Maine Portland, Maine. I put It on my list of places that I want to go check out. Cause the inside of it looks awesome. So guys, this was our jumping off standpoint. It was like, Hey, maybe we're going in the wrong direction.

How do we do this? So like the concept that the business coach guys had put onto Brandon was, do you need to do something that's unexpected and makes the customer feel overjoyed? So that was our jumping off point, unexpected overjoyed. So we had a long sort of strategy session. We made a list of four buckets of people that we would talk to.

So we have leads and prospects so that we're talking to them in the estimate, we have current customers, customers that are trying to cancel service and then former customers. And so for our particular business in our name, it says, claim your weekends. So we're always trying to find ways to make the customer point back to how do you claim your weekend?

So we have our customer experience person, not customer service, but customer experience. We're going to start conducting this thing called the claim, your weekend check-in. And so Thursday or Friday, call up a couple of random people that got cleaned that week or that day and ask them, you know, how did it go? Like, and then part of the unexpected overjoyed part was that,

well, listen, I'm glad the cleaning went well. Like I really want to help you claim your weekend. So here's what I can do for you. And so we made a list, we put them into two columns. One of them was unpaid and one of them was paid. So things that we do that didn't cost the company, any money that made them overjoyed and it was unexpected and things that we could do that did cost money that we can fold in when we have the budget to do that.

And so there's a bunch of cool stuff on there. There's a bunch of cool things. And so we're going to rattle off a couple for you to kind of make you get the gist and try and spark a little brainstorm on your site to see if you can incorporate something like this on your end to really just go over the top with customers that not only are they happy customer,

but now they're going to go tell like 10, 15 of their friends. Like I can't believe what this cleaning company did. Let me tell you about it. I want to hear all the latest news from Profit Cleaners. First, want to make sure you don't miss out on our next courses and some amazing discounts. We'll be sure to follow at Profit Cleaners on Instagram and sign up for our emails on Profit Cleaners dot com.

So you want to give him a couple examples. You want me to start? Yeah. Yeah. Let's give them some examples. And like, just while you guys are thinking of this, just think of like there's opportunities to do this all the time. It doesn't have to be just when you start working with people or right when you clean their house,

but it could be somebody who's calling your business and you don't even do what they need, but you're going to go out of your way to make sure that they get what they need and you solve their problem for them, whether that's sending them to a competitor event, which sounds crazy. But at sometimes these small things that nobody else is going to do,

your competitors are not going to do this stuff. And it's going out of your way to go above and beyond, to serve people and to make like, make them know that you care. And if you do that, some of these things are big. Some of these are paid. Some of these are free things you can do, but guys, it's all about creating happiness and creating this like reciprocity.

Right? You give something and you get it back. So let me give you a couple examples. So one of the things that we started doing a while back was Matt, our sales guy, we had him just start collecting demographic data. And so that's not demographic is maybe the wrong word in this context, but anything that you can learn about the customer that's outside of the context of cleaning,

let's just make a note of it and store it in their customer profile. So, all right, they got a kid that goes to this college when they were in college, they were going to, or like they like this Italian restaurant, or they're a big fan of whatever sport, basketball, baseball, soccer, just make a note of it. Then when it comes to doing these check-ins,

we've got that info. We didn't know what to do with it, but we have it saved in there. So a couple of the unpaid things are the obvious one is a cleaning company is free cleans. So we're using free cleans is a tool right now that if you unhappy, we're going to come back and fix it. But what if we could use it as a tool for good?

And so one of those examples is like, let's say your daughter just had a baby. Well, we're going to go clean their house for free. Thanks for being an awesome customer. Make sure to let them know and they can contact us to schedule it. Or, Hey, I have a friend that is having a really hard time, like we've done this in the past where like they canceled the cleaning.

Cause they got to go help their friend because I don't know their spouse tied some tragedy, but struck that person. Okay. Well, we're really sorry to hear that. Listen, can we clean their house like two times in the next month to try and like take some of that stress off the family. You don't make any money from that, but your building is bank of Goodwill.

That is really, really hard to lose. Like that is a huge benefit. Yeah, absolutely. And just like along those lines of something that we just started doing recently that I don't know if you'd consider it paid it's we have to pay for some of the materials, but we just started having the teams write handwritten notes to customers. And just the first week of doing it,

we have people messaging us back. Oh my God, thank you so much. Like, it means so much how thoughtful, like, and it's these little ripples guys, these little ways you make people feel that not everyone's going to tell you that, but it does go a long way and it's again doing what no one else will do. And that's how you're going to win.

That's how you're going to out compete the competition. So that's just a recent example. I think we're starting to send those, like these notes. You're taking, talking about Brandon like that Matt's taking during the sales estimates, he'll put them into the software and then we're starting to send like, like a more customized card, personalized cards. If you can learn something to put in that card,

you know, like hope your daughter's doing well at like whatever university or something like that. That'd be great. The first batch of thank you cards were kind of more generic, but we still got really good feedback from it. Like the, the team signs it at the end, like, you know, this is from the Iris and Maria. And like you learn their names,

their team number five, just to bond, it's connect with them. You got free cleans. And then we were we're spit balling ideas. You know, it's like, we're talking about getting SGC, branded gift cards to like Starbucks or something like that, where our logos on it. And we can just, here's $10. Like go get a drink for yourself.

Like whatever we've talked about doing dishes and laundry, which I know that we don't do as part of our normal routine, but like as a one-off benefit, Hey, we're really sorry. We screwed that up last time. Like next time we're there can the teams like load your dishwasher and starter for you and you can just leave us a little bit of dirty dishes and maybe someone will take advantage of that.

I don't know. We'll figure that out. But the idea is you're never going to know until you dabble in it. And I think the competitors is a good one too. Like we've done that before. Like it's they heard good things about us. They're in a part of town that we don't service. They're in an outlying town. Hey, we don't go out there.

But listen, we have this contact with these two housekeepers that do service Bosky farms. Let me give you their info. You call and tell him that we sent you. We're not going to make any money off of that. But like some housekeepers are going to be happy that we keep feeding them business. And that customer is happy because like, Hey,

this trusted company recommended me to a person that they trust to still do. Yeah. And again, you're just generating Goodwill in the community. People are speaking well of your business because you're helping everybody. Right. And then going back to the check-in calls, I mean, that's such a simple one. It doesn't even cost anything, but it's like, it could literally be the teams are cleaning the customer's house.

You call that customer up and say, Hey, one of our best customers, we just wanted to drop in today or give you a call today. See how things are going. Can we do anything better? Can we show you that we care? Can we pick you up a coffee? Even if you don't give them a gift card, go pick them up a coffee.

I mean like, can we help you bring in the groceries? What can we do to make you have a better day? Like just going the extra mile, like anything like that, that would just blow people away. And they'd be like, what in the world? Like sparks some joy in their life, right? And those are the experiences that you have all the control of,

you know, you don't have control of everything, but you can control how you make people feel, you can control these experiences. And so yeah, hopefully these, these start generating some inspiration for you guys. Some ideas for what we can do. Yeah, totally. That's mostly on the unpaid side, but like later when we've got a budget to work for this,

the plan is going to be that, listen to anyone who deals with customers or prospects, customer perspective customers, everyone's going to have an impact budget. Like you're going to have a claim, your weekend budget. So like every person has whatever. It comes out to 500 bucks a month, a hundred dollars a month, 50 bucks a month to start,

you get to decide you, the employee gets to decide how you're going to spend it. So you could give out five, $10 Starbucks gift cards just to make people happy. You could spend all of it on one person. If you just, if it made you feel good and you knew it made them feel good. And so some examples of that would be like,

Hey, I had to reschedule cleaning this week because my dog got sick and got all this stuff all over the carpet will, Hey man, I'm really sorry to hear that. We have a really good carpet cleaner that we work with. Can we just cover that for you this time? Like as our gift to you for being a good customer so you can cover other services,

you can also like, this is like a side benefit. You could potentially work out a bulk discount with that carpet cleaner or a landscape guy or a window guy. You could say like, look, I'm going to feed you a ton of business. Can you just give us like a 20% blanket discount when we feed you stuff? So that's an option taking them out to lunch.

Like part of that demographic was I knew that you liked this Italian restaurant. So Hey man, I picked up a gift card from a two cheese this weekend. Do you want to go check it out with your spouse? So I'm going to, I'm going to send it to you by email. It'll be in your email box right now and do with it,

what you will. Yeah. And some of these things could come like they could come right away like that initial post-purchase value add experience like right after they purchased within the first few, few days, they could have, you know, maybe they did, you're doing the sales call and you here while they do need window cleaning or they do need something else that we don't offer.

And maybe you have a little extra room to work with that month to surprise this customer. Oh, that's a great opportunity to do that. You know, not everyone's going to need extra things in the beginning or you might, they might not tell you, but if you can go out of your way to show, you're listening, you're caring and you you're like,

Hey, we got a deal with this partner over here. We'd love to hook you up. And then additionally, you know, this is a great way to be building your partner network of referral businesses. It's not always, we try to do this in the past where we were going to keep track of all the leads who sent what I think, what we determined is the best way to do this guys is just generate that Goodwill,

just send leads to the people. Like if you don't do that service, send it to the best qualified business. You want to work with, pick those businesses and start generating that Goodwill. They're going to start spent sending you a bunch of business. And then you're not only making them happy, but now you're making your customers happy because they're getting something extra that maybe can surprise them with a discount and service,

or even a free service once in a while, because you can work it into your budget. But these are the kinds of things, guys that people are going to brag about. They're going to go. I cannot believe this company did this and they're going to be loyal. They're going to be so loyal to your business. They're not going to look anywhere else.

They're going to stick with you guys for years and years to come. You build up to also bails you out of situations in the future. Let's say you did that with a customer. You send them a gift card. They went and had a good time. They had date night on you. They're super excited about it. Well later when you knock over a picture and break it in their house,

and then you call the, tell him, Hey, I'm really sorry. We broke that picture. Can I buy another one? They're gonna be like, ah, don't worry about it. You guys are awesome. Like, you're kind of building that up front. That's the tip up front that we were talking about the restaurant. So you tip them up front like,

Hey, we're really happy to have you go get some coffee later when you screw something up, they're less likely to go off the fricking handle. Cause they had a bad day and leave you a one-star review. That's what you're kind of buying too. Like that's what you're getting with that Goodwill. And, and these are things that are like, some of this is like totally anti the business numbers that I'm such a fan of.

Like, this is hard to quantify. You are not going to be able to quantify. How much did we spend on carpet cleaning last month? And how did it help us? Like there's no direct ROI on not, it's just the thing that you're going to have to be like, well, is business going up? Like, I think this is part of it.

Like part of the business going up in general is that the whole business is going up. Not just the sales went up or the cancellations went down it's that this Goodwill contributed to everything. And then if overall the business is going down anyway, like you need to change gears and maybe this is the thing that will turn it around. And sometimes this could be a situation where you gotta spend money to make money and that phrase exists for a reason.

And so this could be the thing that also helps you turn it around by not pushing back on a customer when they complain being like, yep. Extreme ownership, totally screwed that up really. Sorry. Do you want to meet for a beer and talk it out later? I'll pick up a beer for you. You know what I mean? Like that type of stuff that you just wouldn't expect out of a random local service company is what's going to make you really stand out.

Yeah. And this goes back as to like the, one of the V I think it was the third episode that we ever recorded when we talked about there's a book called evolved enterprise and they talk about not just being transactional, but having these deeper, bigger purposes behind your business. So that, and that's why we do the cancer cleans. And there's so many ways you can serve your local community,

but even just how we're talking here, like you can use cleaning as a great gift for people as a great surprise that will overjoy people because they love having their house clean. I mean, people love it. This is creating happiness through not transactional happiness, but like through showing people you care. And it's like that gratuity that the whole, that word gratuity,

you know, I was like giving that tip up front. It's like undeserved grace, that you're extending people. And if, if you can create that culture of like tipping your customers first and making them feel overjoyed and like surprised and stuff like that is such an amazing experience that you can be again, I don't think any cleaning businesses in your area are probably doing this.

So you'll be a huge leg up just thinking of ideas. And it doesn't even have to be paid. Like we're talking about giving away services or things that cost money. But again, it could be as simple as a handwritten note, a phone call, like something that just extending your time or just going out of your way to solve a problem for someone and send them to the competition.

Even. I mean, it could be so many different things. So don't get locked in that, you know, thinking it has to be given out money or anything like that, but there's lots of ways to get creative with this guys and small acts of kindness. This is big business right here, because a lot of businesses aren't doing this and the ones that forgot how to do this,

they're not here anymore. You know? So if you want to build like a legacy business and look at the big picture, I think this is huge stuff to be thinking about. Right? Yeah. So, I mean, I think that covers it for you guys. So the idea is you can lean into either, or they're both, there are pros and cons to each side of this coin,

or you could do what we did, which is start with the automation side and then eventually get to the point where you're like, well, maybe we need to flip. And by that point we have the bandwidth and the resources to be able to hire more customer experience reps that can actually answer the phone and do these things. So you gotta be able to execute this stuff.

So take that for what it is, try and find something that will work for your business out of this. And maybe you don't want to do any of this, which is also fine. We're just trying to give you food for thought here. And this is a big shift for us, and it's not something that you can flip a switch on and make it happen overnight.

This is a lot of work leading up to this point and it's going to be a lot of work going forward to make sure that we're doing the right overjoyed, unexpected things and not buying people cars. Like you got to kind of put it in a nice little bucket for yourself to make it work, but I'm excited. I'm excited about how this is going to play out.

Yeah. And just like another example, like I was testing out some other house cleaning services recently in our area and had a bunch of things go wrong. Like this company screwed up multiple things. And like, after all the bad experiences I had had, I think I was telling you this Brandon, but they're like, well, we'll give you $10,

$10 off or something. It was like some ridiculously low amount of money for even my house on locked and missing a bunch of stuff and all these things they did wrong. So what I'm saying is this is the average experience. Like this is what people are used to getting. And they're used to talking to a robot and they're used to getting upset with big companies that are basically making them feel reduced to a transaction.

And so this right here, guys is how entrepreneurs are going to change. The world is creating experiences. And literally your handwritten note, you're reaching out to a customer to see how their day is going, how you can make it better. That could change their whole day. They might be fighting with their wife or their family or having a bad day and that could change their whole day right there.

And so when you think of it that way, that's truly what business is getting down to. Like you are in the business of happiness and selling happiness, and that's how you do it. And you create these experiences for people. They go, wow. I can't believe that they go brag about it to 10 of their friends. And now you got more loyalty.

You got more organic customers without even having to spend another dime on marketing. And you know, so I think it's a really exciting concept. I was really excited to learn about this when we learned about it recently and just how we can keep building this into our company and making it better and better and make the experience for people better and so much so that we hired Katelyn to do customer experience for our customers.

And she's getting it now. So it'll be exciting to see how that goes and we'll let you guys know how it goes more. You know, I have a funny story about this. I pushed back on this. I don't want to answer the phone. I think that we can cover more ground. If people aren't talking to customers, especially the ones that are like talking your ear off for 20 minutes,

talking about their cats and stuff. But that 20 minutes is demographic data. You can make it a note like this lady has a lot of cats. We could use that in the future. However, the story was we're in Santa Fe, me and Brandon and Matt were in the hot tub at this hotel. And earlier Brandon had put on our issues list.

We need to answer the phone. And I was trying to make us a reservation at dinner and nobody would answer the phone. And so I complained in the hot tub. I've just walked into this as walked into this face first, like, man, I'm trying to make this dinner reservation, but nobody answered the phone. And Brandon turned around like right away.

See if we just answered the phone. And so like, it is like, I get frustrated. Like I am the person that would, we rather text you, but this particular restaurant didn't offer any such service. So literally the only way to get ahold of him was answered the phone. And if that's the only way, why don't they answer the phone?

And so if you start thinking about this from that perspective, like the next time that you, dear listener call someplace or text someplace, you're texting, sometimes this is another one that bothers me is you go to a website, they have that little, you know, message bot in the corner. And it makes it seem like you're talking to someone, but really it's just a bot.

And it's like, Hey, what do I need help with? And I type out a long sentence, like, well, I had this order and it's delayed. And it says like it's stuck in Indiana. And then a bunch of these automated options pop up. Like, are you talking about an order? Do you want to talk to an order?

And you click that. And then it just takes it to like an FAQ and their knowledge base instead of actually helping me so that one's even worse. That one is like fake talking to you and then the end, they just point you to somewhere else. And I get from the efficiency standpoint, you're trying to, you know, sorted out. But anyway,

that was a funny story there at the end. But like, these are the things that you should think about. So try and keep that in mind. Next time you're trying to like do something around town with some of their business. What experience do you want that would make you feel overjoyed and unexpected? Yeah. And just, how can you continue to think in that mindset,

in that lens of experience, remember that business is relationships and it's building that customer experience that happiness, that ping that like tipping your customers upfront. So they're just so overjoyed that they can't help, but to talk about you, you know, and that's really, when you get down to it, then you think about the best businesses in the world. The ones that create these experiences,

that people are so loyal to, we could name off a bunch of them, but like the ones that are still around, you know, that's why, if you think about it is because they create these amazing experiences. And so you don't have to be a huge company to do that. In fact, if you're smaller, it's a lot easier to create these experiences when you're smaller and you don't have,

but it's kind of fun to see, like through our growth, we've tried to kind of automate to a point of a fault. And now we're kind of going back and being like, well, how can we work more of this experience into it and make people feel like we genuinely care. There's so many cool ideas. So we'll keep you guys updated on as we continue rolling out these programs and these experiences for our customers,

but be thinking how you can do it for your customer base. And just remember that how you make people feel the small little ripples, like how can you be the Robin hood or the wizard of Oz for your, for your business. That's kind of like the fun thing. If you think of it that way, and you can really save the world,

change the world. It's through little, it starts with ourselves. It starts with changing our, our own world and serving our own community is helping people and making them happy. And it'll all come back to us, you know? So I think that's the big picture there. So before we sign off, I want to give you guys some homework. If you're in one of our Facebook groups and you heard this episode chime in there and tell us what is the best customer experience service you have ever had,

whatever it is, just let us know. That's a good way to start to get some brainstorming going on. Tell us, man, I want to know what the experiences are that you've had that really blew you away. That'll help all of us to try and tweak this customer experience system for everybody. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah. Let us know and let us know if you've got ideas too or something that's working for your business,

that you are already doing this to create an experience for people. You know, we've shared some ideas with you, so share what you got working. If you've got anything like that, and we'll, we'll share it with everyone else and we can all win together guys. So if you want to share anything else, Brandon, or should we wrap it up,

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

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