Episode 896 – 9 Ways To Lose A Customer
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 896 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're gonna talk about 9 Ways to Lose a customer. There's many ways. 50 ways to lose your lover, but nine ways to lose a customer. How about that? Hope you didn't miss episode 895. That was Apple Intelligence coming out this fall. Just a massive drop of AI on your cell phones, your your desktops, your laptops, your tablets, everything. So check that out. See what's coming. Uh, let's see, make sure you grab a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree, and check out my longest running ever and most successful and most unique mentor program on Internet and Digital marketing at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com.

[00:01:17] All right, here's number one. And these aren't in any particular order. These are just, uh, things that I know are bad and I see in other companies and I try not to do in my company. All right, here's one. You take too long to answer questions. Or even worse, you don't answer them at all. And this is why people hate contact forms on websites, because nobody ever answers them. And people they hear you leave a stupid voicemail that says, well, we'll leave your message, we're busy with other clients and we'll get back to you within 48 hours. 48 hours? Are you crazy? I could be dead in 48 hours.

[00:01:59] But, you know, chances are I'm not going to be dead. I'm going to your competitor. That's it. You got to get off your fat asses and take care of customers. Uh, I'm sorry about the, uh, the language there, but it's. I see it all the time. People complain. Oh, I'm not making enough money. Well, you're out there, you know, on vacation half the time, and you're doing everything but taking care of customers. That's stupid. All right, next, you make an answer to a question. This is related to questions again that shows that you paid no attention to the actual problem. I just had this situation with a company called yes welders, and I bought this thing from them, and it has a dial on it of degrees. It's a magnet that helps you hold pipes together to weld them at a certain degree. And there's there's the scale of degrees, but there's no pointer to tell you where the degree was. And I clearly put this out in an email to them. No, I called and the lady was clueless. She said, well, you have to send an email because that's pretty technical, dumbass. And so I sent an email and the email comes back, well, what exact welder are you talking about? I'm not talking about a welder. I'm talking about a magnet that you sell. What are you talking about? Oh, well, which magnet is it? I told you in the first email the name of the magnet.

[00:03:29] So I send the magnet back. Oh, well, we don't sell that off the site. We sell that only on Amazon. Can you give me the link to Amazon. This is back and forth from a bunch of idiot fuck nuts for a simple problem, and I'm going to return the thing. They're just a bunch of fucking idiots. All right. So, uh, again, sorry for the language, but I've been in business 47 years, and I don't do stupid shit like that. I take care of people, and I pay attention if they have a problem. So, uh, they're just idiots. And don't you do that. All right, next one. Make it the customer's fault if there's something wrong with your product. All right. Everybody wants to make excuses for their, uh, product when they have a. Now, if your product is perfect. All right, I can get that. But the thing is, is if even if it isn't perfect, people aren't as close to your product as you are, they don't know how the things, the instructions you give on how to use it may be faulty because you know too much. You need to put those instructions in front of people that have no clue about your product and see if they can understand it. Of course, we get all these Chinese things for, you know, some, uh, person that can't speak English, right? Something that's just totally, uh, you know, unintelligible.

[00:04:56] But, uh, that's a different story. If you're listening to this and you speak fluent English, get people that don't know your product to help write the instructions and tell how to use it. All right. And then you'll have a lot less customer problems, and you won't lose customers over that kind of stuff. The spin off of making it their fault is to make excuses for any of your failures. If you clearly have not done something to make your product proper, well, don't make excuses about it. Just say I'm sorry, I'll give you a refund. We'll do better next time, you know? Just don't make excuses. Uh, next thing is to hassle people over legitimate refund requests. Now, I've had some good experiences with this recently. I bought a welder helmet from Northern Tool. It didn't work at all. It could hurt your eyes, you know. Luckily, the test button showed that it didn't work. Took it back. No trouble whatsoever. Here's another one. And it was bad. I took it back yesterday. No trouble whatsoever. Well, the guy at the register didn't know what to do, so he called the manager on duty and a manager had to was the one that checked in the previous one. I think it's their brand.

[00:06:14] And I said, look, this thing is dangerous. It changes the darkness in the middle of a weld. I mean, this is crazy. This can hurt your eyes. And he says, no problem. I said, you know, I was going to. Uh, get a better one anyway, but I he would have taken the refund. No problem. You want a refund or do you want to get another one? So I said I don't want this one again. I'm going to go buy. And I bought another one. So but it was no hassle whatsoever. They were perfectly accommodating say so that's what. And that's why I stick with Northern Tool, even though I bought this big engine from them recently and uh, it came in incorrect. But the person helping me was wonderful about it. Did everything they could to fix it up. It wasn't their fault. Uh, it was the person or the company that shipped the engine. Shipped the wrong one. But again, no hassle whatsoever. And we're talking about a 20, you know, 2200, $2,300 purchase. Next thing is, never ask for their feedback. If you want to lose a customer, never ask them how they're doing with your product. Never ask them what could be better. Uh, don't ever don't ask them. Hide from them. Okay? That'll lose a customer for sure. And then the next one that's a spin off of that.

[00:07:36] These are kind of related. I kind of put them next to each other is ignore good feedback. So somebody says, hey, if you do this on your product, it would be so much better. And instead of being arrogant, thinking I'm perfect and I don't need to do that crap. Think about it. At least give it a chance to say, you know they might be right. This would be so much better if I had done this. So. But if you just ignore the good feedback, you're never going to get better. You're always going to have products that aren't as good as they could be. All right. Let's see. Number eight is don't continue to meet their needs. So you might have a customer that loves you. But if you aren't continually come up with products and services that meets their needs, then they're going to leave. Now, sometimes you can't help this if they if they need some one time thing from you and that's all they need. Oh okay. They're going to leave. I got tens of thousands of those okay. Because let's say somebody bought my eulogy book. Well, I'm hoping they don't have to come back over and over and over again, or they're in a pretty sad life, right, to buy more eulogy books. Same with my wedding speech and wedding toast books. I love the cash flow from those products, but those people, you know, it was a one shot deal on those things.

[00:09:00] So but for my internet and public speaking people, I've had some people around for 15, 20 years or more. All right. Some of them died off, all right, because they've been around so long. So you've got to continue to meet their needs. If you want long term customers, you don't want to lose them. All right. And number nine is threaten to kill them if they leave a bad review. All right. Well, that truly probably. I suspect that would lose a customer and maybe gain a friend when the police showed up. So. So, uh, I'm only kidding there, but, but. You do need, you know you're going to get bad reviews. And there was a study that came out that showed that all five star reviews are the not the strongest review because nobody believes it, that you got all five star reviews. And so actually, I think the study said that 4.7 is the most trusted number of stars. And so, um, don't get mad. You know, when somebody, you know, makes a comment that's, you know, you kind of hurts your feelings because it's your baby, but it's actually helping you in the long run. Um, and then always answer a bad review. Of course you should. Good reviews. Unless you're getting thousands of them a day, you know, on some mass market product.

[00:10:28] Always thank the people for the leaving the review, because reviews are so critical nowadays and always, always, uh, respond to a bad review and tell your side of the story. And, you know, unless it's something they're just bashing you and it's all bullshit. Respond reasonably. I saw this one guy, he's got a store on a glass replacement store down on Cleveland Street here in Virginia Beach, and some of these people were just lying and competitors. And he always responded beautifully, uh, with, um, you know, that's not really nice that you say that to me. After all, I helped you and and you're not really a customer here, so I'm not sure why you're reviewing me, but anyway, God bless. And so he just took everything beautifully. And guess where I'm going when I need some glass stuff right to his shop? Say so. So do that. So, uh, there you go. There's nine ways to lose a customer, for sure. And the one of them, it could get the police after you if you threaten to kill somebody. All right, so anyway, that's, uh, 47 years of experience right there for you folks that you just got in about ten minutes. I think so. So, uh, check out my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com, and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.