In this pep talk, I share my experience with the not so shiny side of customer service — what happens when it goes wrong and how you can both improve your business and protect your inner peace.

Transcript

Entrepreneurial Pep Talk: Customers

Customers are the heart of our business. They are the cause for our best — and sometimes our worst — days as a business owner.

I can remember years ago when I was a baby business owner with a printing business on the Square in Clinton, Missouri. I recall the feeling the extreme pressure of keeping my customers happy and my occasional failure at that adding to my level of depression which was already high in those days. I remember feeling very resentful of the adage, “The customer is always right,” because, frankly, sometimes they are not. Sometimes their demands are outside of our scope of service or the mistake made was their own and we are targeted as a scapegoat.

Later in my business adventures, as a photographer, I remember one customer being disappointed in my work. She was incredibly mean in the things she said, and even though I apologized and refunded her money, she threatened me with “ruining my business” and telling all her friends to “never hire me.” I was devastated and I felt absolutely helpless.

As we have moved into the digital age, customers have whole new ways to damage businesses with very little and sometimes no provocation. Our social proof reputations are always at the mercy of customers who may have unreasonable expectations or are just plain on the hunt to cause a business owner grief.

We are also all human and make mistakes. I know there have been times in my business where I have flat f’d up. In most cases, owning up to that and doing everything I can to make it right has been enough to at least move on in a positive direction albeit at times without that customer having a positive opinion of me or my business.

So how do you pick up and move past a customer service debacle? How do you keep serving customers when the time you’ve spent carefully cultivating a positive brand experience feels like it could be all undone by one disgruntled customer? I have some ideas and some wisdom that has worked for me over the years.

First and foremost, own your mistakes. We all make errors and our employees make errors. If you or someone on your team makes a mistake, omission, drops the ball, misses a deadline, or doesn’t do an adequate job, own that with the customer. Have the hard conversation and partner with your customer on finding a solution. It is a humbling experience and at times event painful financially and emotionally, but I have found it frequently turns out better than if I try to hide from the mistake (which rarely works anyway).

Of course, what I just said means you have to have customers who are willing to work with you and offer you a second chance or, if that’s not an option, the forgiveness to move on. This brings me to my second drop of wisdom: do the work on your branding, messaging, and marketing to bring the RIGHT customers to your door.

When I look back over the customer service issues I have experienced as a business owner they all fall into one of two categories: the ones where I was the problem and ones where the customer was the problem. As I said, I need to be the one who owns my mistakes and fixes them to the best of my ability. I also need to be the one where I am attracting the RIGHT customers into my business and minimizing the risks of creating bad experiences because my business was not the right fit for that customer. We’ve talked a lot this month on the podcast about customer service and each of the women interviewed shared their experience around fine tuning their customer experience to bring the exact, right people to their door. On Thursday, my Three Thoughts episode will talk about qualifying customers. There is sage wisdom in all of these episodes that will help guide you if you are struggling with getting the right customers to come to your business.

One more thing here: please do not get caught up in the bind of trying to make your business fit the customer who is currently complaining. Only change your business when there is a pattern. If you run a customer service focus group, invite your BEST customers, the ones you love to see at your door, so you know that whatever you’re working on will appeal to the people who fit how you do business. The client who doesn’t fit your business is the one that is most likely to leave you a bad review. It is better to bless and release them so they can find the better solution away from your business.

I can tell you this realization literally changed my life.

Now, let’s talk more about you.

The number one factor in facilitating a happy customer service program is YOU. Your mental health matters. It matters in how you show up for your business. It matters in how you handle customers both when they’re having a good experience and when they’re having a bad experience.

Take care of your mental health. Back in the beginning of my business, my depression often interrupted my ability to be fully present for my customers and that did affect my ability to provide good customer service. There were days when all I could muster was getting out of bed and doing the most basic of self-care. Mornings were especially bad.

As I grew smarter about managing my depression, I learned how to better shape my business so it served me and my customers. I switched from a project-based model to a retainer model. This gave me a longer runway on which to get projects completed, which in turn allowed me more latitude for those days when I needed a few extra hours in the morning for self-care. It was in these lessons the concept of building a business that supports the life you want to live was born. In my case, that life needed to have flexibility to care for myself when I was in a depressed state. It also needed to reduce the amount of potential dissatisfaction for my customers which exacerbated my depression.

I also recognized mornings were especially vulnerable times. For me, being around people helps with my depression. So I began to schedule meetings that I looked forward to and group calls in the morning. This meant I had something to look forward to, to show up for, in the mornings. These changes today mean I experience very few depression days and a lot of productive days. My change in how I did business offered me a positive change in my life.

The next mental health wisdom I want to share when it comes to customer service is to remember not everything is about you. So many times the grumpy customer has had their own bad day and you were an outlet for something that really should have been discharged at its source (which, hint hint, was NOT you!). Humans routinely do this to each other and so many times its with absolute unawareness. This drop of wisdom is one I wished I would have had so much earlier in my life — and a question I always reach for when a customer relationship goes sideways is: “Was that me or them?” If it’s me, I need to own that. If it’s them, I need to step into as much grace as I can. It’s not my place to change them, it is my place to choose my response.

Another way to stay happier yourself as well as build happier customers is to draw clear boundaries. Here is where working on your business becomes so important and it’s the little things we often see as non-urgent or “extra” become so important. Do you have a written sales and service flow? Do you have a procedure for handling customer complaints in person, on social media, or through heresay? Do you have a policy and procedure for refunds? What guarantees are you going to offer explicitly and publicly? How far will you go to keep a customer? Where your personal the line in the sand with customer satisfaction? Do you have an attorney on board? Are customers clear about how to exit out of your business if they need to? Do you have checks and balances to keep the customer experience positive?

I’ll share a story on that last one that hopefully will help you understand how important it is to have customer satisfaction checks in place. I host retreats and in my retreats I have always done at least one check in per day for the group. Often times, there are two checkins. In the beginning of my retreat hosting endeavor, these checkins were always done in a group setting and at the end of each checkin, I asked, “Does anybody need anything specific right now?” along with an invitation to approach me privately if they didn’t want to share with the group. I assumed this was enough and, if anyone needed anything, they would speak up. It wasn’t. At one retreat, I had an attendee who was unhappy — and her complaint was with me specifically. Because the question was asked in a group setting, she didn’t feel comfortable sharing her complaint there. She also didn’t want to seek me out privately. In the end, she ended up unloading on my assistant and leaving without ever speaking to me again. I felt awful — and like a failure. I went over every interaction and step along the way and felt as though her complaint as stated to my assistant was unfounded. I checked in with others on my team. It became clear she may have had an ulterior motive to her reaction and the timing of it certainly spoke to that being the case. There was a strong possibility the situation had almost nothing to do with me personally or even her experience at the retreat and everything to do with the pressure this participant was under outside of the retreat. The experience left with me with a valuable lesson, however — I needed to do more to open the door way if and when a participant had an issue that wasn’t obvious or being addressed. This is when I started doing daily checkins with participants — nothing formal, just a private moment where I asked if there was anything they needed that they weren’t getting or if there was anything they felt they’d like to share with me privately that they didn’t want to share with the group. It was a small change, with a big difference.

Systems are a supportive bridge in any crisis. They give us the structure to cross troubled waters and having them in place before a storm is crucial. That said, running a business is a learning experience and so you always need to be prepared to modify, update, and add to the systems and structures that support you and your customers.

At the end of the day, we may have started our businesses to fulfill our WHY, yet it is our customers that actually create the possibility for us to live that WHY. Serving them is an honor, but not at the cost of our personal peace. There are plenty of customers to go around — finding your perfect customer fit is one of the key factors in creating peace in your business and life.