Alex Kraft and I follow up on his Blog on Customer Service. It seems that Customer Loyalty and Customer Service are inextricably linked.

You know, you touched a nerve with me with your blog, and I suspect you touched a nerve with just about anybody who buys something today. The supply chain is challenged. Having the right number of employees in place to serve customers, the marketplace, is being challenged. All of those things going on, I'm not sure that business knows how to respond to that. And the example that you gave kind of was intriguing. So I thought we should expand on a little bit and get more opinions. Everybody's got one. It's like a nose. Yours is better looking than mine. But why don't you tell us what you have been experiencing recently in customer service terms?

It's kind of like water torture, Alex. It's been coming a long time. You and I have talked about in the past how customer loyalty is something that everybody kind of laments. Where did it go? And in response, we've also said, well, what have we done to encourage customer loyalty in the last 40 years? The first iteration that I remember. was here comes voicemail. And so I don't want to have somebody answer your phone. I'm going to direct you to voicemail right away. I had some dealers that actually played the 30 second commercial on every call because, wow, this is a great idea to get a message across to a customer. Customer could care less about that. They're calling for a reason. Satisfy the reason. What do they want? Let's get it done. We've lost that. Yeah.

The very first column I wrote for the AD back in the 90s, the headline of it or the title of it was, who are your heroes? To me, the people that are the heroes are the ones you call customer facing. I'm just going to say anybody who touches the customer, whether that's in receivables, anywhere, that person is the one that really cements the relationship that your dealership or your company has with the clients. And I was talking with my granddaughter the other day about Walmart. They have greeters. And she was bemoaning the fact that they weren't paid very well. She said, well, sweetie, they're retired. They're conducting Social Security. This is mad money for them. They only work a couple of hours a day. And what purpose do you think that they perform? She said, well, I don't know. I do all my stuff online. So now we've got this shift, right? We're kind of a hybrid where there's a lot of places you have to go. But the Internet world. is providing an alternative. And that is without any interaction between the customer and whoever the supplier is. And that's dangerous.

Yeah. And, you know, and again, this transition circumstance. So, yeah,

calls in. I used to tease with them. I'm a bit of a jerk on the phone and person anyways. But the guy called up and said, I got a problem. I said, no, you don't. But, you know, I've got a problem, Ron. I said, no, you don't. It's mine. Tell me what it is. Let me look after it. And, you know, like that ballet guy, here's how we can make. Here's a little hint. Alex, this will make it easier for you next time. And you never forget those things.

That's that's the whole that's the not right in the middle of the problem, isn't it? We're not paying enough attention to the employees that are the ones that matter to the customer. And it's the way that I carry their tools in a toolbox. They're not assets to the company. And that's the biggest failure. And that's part of this reshuffle resignation, whatever the terminology is that people are using. We can't find enough people that are talented enough. Number one. Number two, we're not doing anything to help those people get better along the way. So number three, the expectations that the employee has is, well, I'm going to do the job. to my ability, the way that I think it should be done. And I'll get my paycheck and I'll go home at five o 'clock and don't stand in front of the door at five because you'll get run over. Right? That's right. It's distressing, actually. You know, we ask people to have an assessment, a skills assessment. So the people that are touching the customer, those that are answering the telephone or greeting them when they walk in or at an in-store merchandising kiosk. Who helps them? Who communicates with them on how best to communicate with the customer? I don't see anybody doing that anymore.

Yeah. We used to have a section in customer service training that, we'd ask rhetorically everybody, okay, give me an example of terrific customer service you've received in your personal life. And, you know, people are forced to think about it. They haven't really thought about that much. And every now and again, somebody would come back, my dentist, my hygienist, or my life insurance guy, or, you know, and then, and it was struggles. And we'd have 20 or 30 people in the room and we might get three or four good examples. Then I flipped it and said, okay, give me some bad experiences that you've had recently. The room lit up. Everybody was talking about it. And it's so darn common, yet we're not doing anything about it.

You know, one of the things that I struggled with is finding a definition of what's customer service. And the one that I came to was... It's the difference between the expectations that the customer has before the event and the perceptions about what the customer received after the event. Both of those things, Alex, are owned by the customer, yet we very rarely call them up or get an email out saying, how do we do? There's a lot more companies doing that, but not nearly enough. If you don't know what the customer expects, how the heck can you satisfy it? That's

Yeah, they really do. Lou Holtz, years and years ago, coach of the Notre Dame football team, he had a film clip we used called Do Right. He said, Do your best, do what's right, honor the golden rule. And the trick about doing your best, I don't know how often we actually strive for that. We might be getting a little bit complacent. You know, my granddaughters are Gen X. They've got a different view of the world than I do. And, you know, the other day, she's just starting her master's program and we're driving her someplace. And she said, you know. The world's not going to change until the boomers are all gone, Bobby. He says, you guys have got to get out of here so that we can start making the changes that are required.

Well, to some point, that's true, isn't it?

You know, go back to George Herbert Walker Bush when he was president. He's famous for little notes he would write every day. He'd be writing notes to people, thanking them, asking questions, whatever. We don't, I used to send thank you notes to people after they'd had a class, a Greek god, you know, kind of like Socrates. And, you know, people would make the comment, you know, geez. Thanks. I got a card from you the other day. I haven't had one of those for a long time. Birthday cards. You know, maybe it's a man-woman thing. Men maybe aren't that, maybe that's not something that moves us. But it sure as heck should.

Yeah, what I call. showing that you care. You know, one of the things that I'm after a lot, obviously, I'm in the product support world, but I want to find every part every day. And if I haven't found it after 48 hours, I want my boss to call you and say, hey, Alex, we're having a hard time getting that part. I just wanted you to know that we're working on it. And when we do that, the customer's kind of shocked. Or Dale Hanna at Foresight, who sends text messages for every activity, in a work order process so that the communication back and forth between the service department and the customer is facilitated. It's made easier. There are tools, there are things, there are people that are trying and are really good at these things, but the sore spots really stick out.

do. Why is Amazon so successful? It replaced non-functioning customer service activities. A bookstore, I don't mean to be demeaning the bookstores. But they never had the books and inventory that I needed. So I always had to wait. So I could go to Amazon. There was no differentiation. It was a customer service for me as a convenience to buy on the Internet.

What's interesting about that comment, just to take it to a different direction, here comes Amazon and had to pay freight, but they had a lower price. So the net effect of all of that is you were competitive to the bookstore and it was a convenience issue. You could order at night, at home, wherever, whenever you wanted. But then here came Amazon Prime. And Amazon Prime just announced they're going to 139 bucks. And Disney just announced they were increasing their streaming rates. And here we go. But what they've done is they've provided enhanced services for that annual deal. It's almost like they've created a club

you've got exclusive rights to certain things like what you do with your salespeople getting text messages from people looking for equipment. That's a service nobody had before.

It's not universally accepted yet, is it?

I love the tone in your voice. Not yet. It's common, Ron. Relax. It's common. It's slow changing people's work habits, isn't it?

It's a valid point though. You know, Sarah Hanks, who's one of our contributors this past week, we were talking about process mapping. And I said, well, how do you know? How do you penetrate? How do you get to a client to give you business? And she said, well, one of the things that I do is I ask people, what keeps you up at night? And, you know, so we went further on that. So we're looking for pain points. What are things that give you trouble? And we had a process I'd go through called five things. Give me five things that you could do in your job that would make your life better as a person. Give me five things in your job that are a pain in the butt to do. Give me five things in your job that if you were able to change would make the process for your company much better. And remarkably, there'd be two or three things on all lists, every one of those three lists. And of course, the next question I would ask people is, okay, well, if it's a pain to do and it would make life easier for you and it's beneficial to the company, how come we're still talking about it? How come we haven't done it? Right. And then I'd get the guppy look, you know?

that pain point. And then take it to a different place. Winsby and Steve Clay do data analytics. And they do similar things to you. What's the market potential? Who are the people you need to pay attention to? What are the retention rates? How can you modify those retention rates? We have the tools available, but people seem to be very hesitant to walk through that door. It's a change.

Well, the last, last 30 months since let's call it January 1,2020 with, you know, the early, early days of COVID. A lot of people have rethought their lives. A lot of people have rethought how they do things. And a lot of people are changing what their expectations are. And the customer service issue, I think, is going to take a more prominent role. Like that greeter at Walmart. When did they start that? 30 years ago. It's brilliant. The fact that you get text messages flying back and forth between people who want a machine and a salesman who can sell it, that's brilliant. Being able to identify the triggers, the purchase points, or to find in a discussion what keeps you up at night. There's not many people that we can talk to like that. That's another part of life that's interesting. Who wants to share what their difficulties are?

We had a guy in Montreal, you know, the special accounts guy, national account, whatever the heck you want to call him. His name was Bill Hallacy. He's been around forever. He's terrific. He's since passed, so I can mention his name. He was a terrific guy. And we had a very large construction customer that was exclusively cat. And the first Komatsu was delivered. It was on a low bed when Bill happened to be there. And he was Irish. And he went ballistic. He goes into the purchasing agent's office. And what's that? He said, you get that off this property or you're never going to see me again. And you know what? They turned the truck around and off it went. Today, what the national account guy and the old sales guy haven't recognized is the customers have changed. You know, the Stephanie Smith at Newman made the comment that, you know, our salesman used to be walking brochures. Customer doesn't need that anymore. They know the specs every bit as well as the salesman. What they need now is, okay. When I'm ready to order or when I'm ready to talk about it, I'll call you. Go away. And you answer that question. You get in the middle of that question. You facilitate that, what I call trigger points.

She's a sharp lady.

It really is. I've got two examples that are really current. One where I walked in and one where I went over the internet. And with the supply chain issues, neither of the products that I ordered is available. What was originally anticipated has been missed. And there's new dates. On the crew that I walked into, I have to initiate the questions. On the internet side, they send me updates. And, you know, it wouldn't take a whole heck of a lot for the walk-in business guy to give me a call and say, you know, hey, Ron, just got notification. It's going to be late by another two weeks. Wouldn't take anything to do that. Right. The internet guy does it automatically. It's really quite remarkable. We've got a changing customer. It's not lunchtime or dinnertime or drinks in the bar afterwards. That's been coming to an end for a long time. I had a product support salesman in Portland years ago who was a lady. And I had the customer's wife call me and say, you've got to get that salesperson off my account because she's with my husband in the bar after work. You know, well, if it was a guy, it's okay, right? So the customer has changed. And on the large account, something else that seems to be happening, which is interesting, and maybe you can comment on this. The transaction price on machines, the larger machines, is almost more now than the dealer capability by itself. So the dealer and the manufacturer are being used by the large customers more as a combined. tool financing the customer's business.

Keywoods, the big guys, they're doing that a lot more.

A guy's going to buy 50 machines. They learn from the rental companies where the rental companies will go to the manufacturer, the OEM, and say, I want to buy 50 machines. What's your best price? And then they talk about taking away warranty, blah, blah, blah, different things. Now the large customers are doing that to the dealers. I want to buy 20 machines in the next 24 months. I need financing on it. I want to lease it. I want different things. And all of a sudden, I don't have enough capability. I have to go to the OEM. Will you help me? So now we're starting to share the gross profit on the equipment between the OEM and the dealer. The dealer's making less, obviously. Customers. Absolutely. So, you know, the small guy, one piece, the large guy, another piece, the business channel walk in versus internet. Maybe it's just too much for people to come to grips with, but people like Newman have identified it and they're dealing with it and they're growing fast as blazes. It's wonderful.

It's remarkable. The other thing that's kind of intriguing to me is that we've got a group of customers that are ours. They're the Volvo dealers or the Cat dealers or the Comanche dealers, and that's us. And we've got salesmen, we've got this market coverage and everything else. But we never, we don't have a salesman that goes outside, goes to talk to the customers that don't have anything that we sell. Why is that?

Isn't that true? It's a human nature thing, isn't it?

Back in university, I sold encyclopedias for a while, the door-to-door deal. I did a lot of things in my life. But the getting no all the time, getting doors slammed in your face, it's a psyche thing. A lot of sales managers, they have to be psychologists because the guy gets, I get no doubt this week. I didn't get anything positive all week. Get up and go do it tomorrow. It's tough to do.

Yeah. It hurts you for a while. No doubt. The other thing in starting a new company is you're very lonely. You don't have the same social interactions. You've got to build new networks. 100%. And all of that is interesting. But the other, it's almost like we have. And I believe this is true. We've got two different types of personalities, one that will handle the cold calls, creating new accounts, the pure prospect, and the other guys that manage the accounts and retain the accounts and build the relationship. The prospecting guys, I don't see many dealerships having. And, you know, I always, when I'm talking to clients, new ones or old ones, guys that I've had for a long time. Why don't you do that? Why don't you have somebody? It's only going to be $100,000, $150,000 as a test. Try it for a year. Oh, well. And then on the managing the territory, exactly what you say. What's the relative value of that customer? And how do you manage your time to give you the most effective return on that investment, your time, with the people? It's not a guy that buys two machines a year. But I want to look after them.

Right, right. I call that dialing for dollars.

Yeah, that's something else I did in university. I used to sell newspaper subscriptions and I was given a couple of pages of the phone book. And, you know, here's a script. call them and you get these robo calls and everything all over the place. And it, you know, that methodology has gone the way of the Dodo bird. If you don't, you know, I'm, I'm off those, I've got blockers out all over the place. I, you know, the technology is such that if I ask for a person's name, if he's not in my directory and, you know, I can hear it before I answer the phone. I mean, we've got all kinds of filters now. And. customers and salespeople, well, let's change that. Selling organizations and buying organizations have got to come to a new compact. It's a new world. And it's not homogenous. It's not one size fits all by a long shot.

We seem to be comfortable with the level of business and the level of profit, the level of income that we have.

Yeah, it's kind of remarkable, isn't it?

I haven't changed my price since the early 1990s. Of course, I'm not in the consulting world as much as I used to be, but everybody used to laugh at me. You know, what did I charge you the last time? And, well, I don't know. I said, well, have a look because that's what I'll charge you now. Oh, that's cool. Thinking that I'm giving them a deal because it was five years ago or 10 years ago. It was the same price. Once you get to a point or a profit. expectation level that satisfies your needs, you don't need to go any further. The trick is to have all those things done. Market coverage, and I think you're showing the way in breaking a sector into a different toolbox. We need to have more people thinking. And that might be what my granddaughter, the Gen X people are saying. You boomers have to get out of the way because we've got to get fresh thinking in here. Because we are stuck in our ways, Alex.

It's the illustration I use to people is getting up in the morning. You do the same routine every single day. Only thing that changes is what you put on your body. But, you know, I had a friend of mine who was a vice president of sales at a large John Deere dealership. He used to shave his face in a different room every day. I said, why are you doing that? He says, well, I've got to condition myself for change. I said, there's different ways you can do it, you know. You don't need to do that kind of silliness. And he laughed at me. He said, it's the only way I remind myself every day. It's a habit now. But geez. And this is a guy with a master's degree, for goodness sake.

You're looking at me when you make that comment, right?

I'm not going to shave it. I agree with that. There's all kinds of game exercises that people are promoting now for older folks. I do a series, my wife and I both, we do a series of games every day. And some of them we do the same game. And it's kind of fun. It's like, who gets it done quickest? Or, geez, I didn't get that. Oh, really? Do you want me to show you? No, go away. But it's the same thing with a salesman and selling machines. How often does a salesman ask another salesman? Hey, Bobby, have you got time? I'd like to have you come with me on my call to Alex next week.

That's a darn powerful tool, isn't it?

That's the fundamental truth, isn't it? What's, what's the purpose of every call? You better have a purpose for every call and traveling. I used to evaluate salesmen years ago and traveling with salesmen, you know, what are we going to do here? I just want to drop in. You know, that's, that's nuts. Now, if I'm selling encyclopedias, I go to a street, I go door to door, to door, to door, to door, to door. And I would be knocking on a lot of doors. There's a single person. There's a childless couple, you know, so it's a lot of wasted time, you know, and they haven't done it any different except guess what? There's no longer encyclopedias that are books in people's homes. It's Wikipedia on the Internet.

It really did. And yet my daughter who teaches English in her classroom, she's got an Encyclopedia Britannica complete set. And she works in. impoverished areas that children have never seen these things. And some of them actually on breaks, read them. Imagine, but it's, again, it's a changing world, changing customer, changing delivery system, changing expectations. It's it's, and yet we're not adapting and adjusting. At least I don't see it.

Yeah, the question cycle really should start with, what would you like me to do for you to make your job easier? Just have that as a bold question. And then. let the customer talk at you. And that starts an engagement. Many customers, you go to their job sites now or to their offices and you're going to see vendors only on Tuesday. Vendors have to have an appointment. It's because we failed or I call people and leave a message. They don't call me back quickly. That's a reflection on what they think the value is that I'm providing them. You know, shift gears a second and talk about a complaint. Something doesn't work the way it's supposed to. Something went wrong. How do we handle those things? How do we resolve those things? The illustration of a walking business and the internet business responding to me on a disruption in the supply chain shouldn't be a difference. I'm a customer. It's a transaction. Should not be a difference. Yet it is.

personal. It's personal. It's a reflection on who you are as a person, not an employee, just who you are as a person. A lot of organizations, larger ones, mind you, have an office of complaints that's tied to the president's office. It's kind of interesting because the president's, the leadership, let me call it in a business, doesn't hear. what's going on. Too many of them are insulated, aren't they, from the truth of the business. That's another aspect of this customer servicing that's falling apart.

Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, we've identified that we got to get a better relationship. We've identified that there's problems in how we communicate with the customers, customer facing employees, maybe not knowing what's expected of them or what to do or how to do it. So maybe it's a skills gap. Maybe it's a function description problem. But there's things that need, they're pain points. They're things that keep me up at night, points. It's continuous improvement stuff, the Sarah Hanks from GE method. It's valid. How do we make this process better for the customer? And I'd like to see a lot more businesses call the customers and let's start over. Today is 2020. It's the month of August. How can I help you? What would you like me to do that I'm not doing? What would you like me to improve that I don't do well at?

Yeah.

true. One of the things I used to do, what do you like about what I do? I used to do this with the people that I worked with years and years ago. What do I do that you like that I do and you want me to continue? What do I do that you don't like that I do and you want me to stop? What do I do that doesn't make any difference to you? So if we make it a relationship and the customer stops buying, one of the things I like to do in every instance like that, Alex, is call them up and say, Hey, you know, Alex, I noticed you haven't been buying much from us recently. Is something happened? And he said, well, we had a bad experience. And they said, well, do you mind sharing with me where you get that product today? And they typically will tell you. And then my next question is, what do you like about doing business with them? And whatever the heck they tell me, it's something I'm not doing.

Yeah, I agree with you 100 percent. I used to say and I preach this price is only important. when every other element of the transaction is the same. And there's never an instance where every element of a transaction is the same. So take price, go away. I'm so conditioned to accept that. I got beat by a better price. Don't accept that.

We've seen a lot of, evolving in market coverage and selling and marketing and the whole thing. And this discussion about customer service to me is more appropriate today than at almost any other time. Coming out of the pandemic, we've got incredibly different challenges today. And those that are able to stand up to it, those that are able to provide the customer service expectation and satisfy it, they're going to win. It's that simple.

Well, you know, we're about to enter. I don't know if it's going to be as significant. With interest rates going up, we're going to see a lot of businesses go out of business again. We're going to see a lot more consolidation.

You know, so it's a perfect time. Alex, this is a great subject. I'm glad you brought it up. But you got any little ribbon you want to put as a closing comment on the discussion?

Yeah, you're the first of our contributors, actually, that focused on the customer experience. And I think that's what all of us need to do. So, Alex, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. And to everybody that's been listening to this kind of conversation, mahalo. We'll see you the next time. Bye now. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.