don't make this mistake with your customers

Summary

tried to transfer my internet service to a new house. existing customer. got ignored for days. eventually I gave up, signed up as a brand new customer at the new address, and the same company served me instantly. you cannot make this up.

1. the new customer side of every business gets all the attention. funnels, ads, onboarding, sales reps. lots of money spent.

2. the existing customer side gets crickets. nobody calls. nobody renews you proactively. nobody asks if anything could be better. you’re already paying, so you’re invisible.

3. the fix is a recurring innovation process. quarterly, you sit down and ask: where are existing customers experiencing friction? what would I want if I were them? where am I taking them for granted? then you change one or two things. every quarter. forever.

acquisition cost is high. retention cost is almost zero. but only if you do the work. most don’t. the ones who do, win. try harder.

Transcript

introduction to the importance of client success

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. What are you doing to keep your current customers happy and how can we make sure that we’re always innovating to keep them happy, keep them coming back and hopefully being a customer or client forever?

This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon and funny story, something that’s happened to me recently. So I’m moving, moving from one house to another right now and it’s in the same, same city. It’s not a very big move. It’s one house to the next. And I’m going through all the typical stuff you have to go through when you move, go changing your utilities, changing the trash service, changing the internet, like switching it over to a new address, all those kinds of things.

personal moving story and challenges with transferring internet service

And I encountered two pretty crazy things that happened in this process that I think are a good example of what I’m trying to talk about. So the first one is internet. So I have internet here at my current house because that’s why I’m still here right now. So I have internet service and I call them and I let them know like, hey, I’m moving.

I would like to transfer service to this new address because it’s the same internet service provider that provides it here, that provides it at the new house. And really it’s my only option. And so I tell them that and they keep, they transfer me around a bunch, right, which is already a poor experience, but this is pretty common with really large companies.

I’m going from this person to this person who transfers me to this person. And the second they’re super helpful, but the second they find out I’m a current customer, I start getting pawned off to all these other people. And then their actual solution was, okay, give us all your information and we’ll call you back.

the revelation of poor service for existing customers and excellent service for new ones

That was it. And I didn’t have like a ticket number or any way for me to follow up. They didn’t email me. They didn’t do anything. They were like, hey, we’ll call you back and we’ll figure out this new internet service. I couldn’t believe that this was the actual solution. And so this spans back several weeks ago.

And so I do this several weeks ago and then a couple of days go by, a week goes by, eight days, nine days go by, they never call me back. So I call them back and I’m like, go through this whole process again. And the same thing, there was no record of anyone, like I said, no ticket number. They had no idea who I was, the fact that I was trying to request service again.

They had no record of it, but they did the same thing. After I waited over a week, they were like, okay, well, the process is here. We got it. We wrote it down. We will call you back. I wait like two more days, no call back. And so what did I do? I just went to their website and I signed up as a new customer with new credentials under same name, but different email address, because I knew it would register as a new customer.

discussion on the focus on new customer acquisition versus nurturing existing ones

And I immediately had an appointment for setting up my internet within two days. It’s all getting taken care of. I got the new package, all this stuff, and it’s just rolling, boom, immediately, I’m good to go. And so what’s the point of me telling that story? Because this has happened a few times in this moving process.

Well, think about how they’re treating their current customer. So the current customer, which is me, who’s already been paying them for years, the second they find out that I’m a new customer, like, ah, okay, sales team doesn’t need to deal with him. He just needs to go to this other department and this other department sucks.

It really sucks for taking care of current customers. They don’t do it at all. But their sales process for new customers is like, they’re rolling out the red carpet. It is so easy. I did everything like super streamlined. I clicked through like I had it all done in five minutes. There was no waiting on hold.

strategies for implementing a client success mindset in your business

It was just, it was literally the red carpet for setting up internet services. I went in, used new credentials, had it signed up, had an appointment, boom, I’m going to have internet super fast. Awesome, right? That is awesome for new customers and that’s super streamlined, but it really sucks how they’re treating current customers.

Now I don’t care that much. It’s internet service. It’s a pain you have to go through. And then once, once you set up, you’re good to go. So I’m not here to gripe about my poor customer experience, but what I do want to point out is this does happen in business quite a bit. I wouldn’t expect it to happen on such a large scale of this internet service provider.

But sometimes in business, in entrepreneurship, we get too focused on new customer acquisition, how the marketing strategies, how are we going to get new leads? How are we going to get new customers? What do I need to do to my website? What’s the SEO strategy? All of those kinds of things. We get too caught up into how do I get new customers?

How do I get new customers? How do I get new customers that we forget about our current customers and their experience and what they’re going through? And this happens quite frequently, especially to solo entrepreneurs or small teams, because you, you literally only have so much bandwidth. So I’m not here to beat you up if you’re like, Oh, maybe I am focusing too much on new customer acquisition, but maybe you need to, maybe you actually just need new customers.

So what do we do if it’s like, well, I need to focus on new customers. But the second I start focusing on new customers, I start to forget about my current customers. Like what do I do? Like what do I do? Here’s what you do. You need to set up a process of innovation. Okay, so that sounds like a fancy term, but it can be a simple checklist.

It could be something that you do once a quarter. But what it is, is you just review your current customer experience. And then you think about, do I need to solve any problems? Do I need to create something? Do I need to reduce a friction point? And you have this as a checklist that you run, you can put on your calendar to happen once every three months.

And this is just so it’s, it’s checklist, it’s documented. So at least once per quarter, you’re reviewing your customer journey. You’re reviewing what the customer’s going through. You’re review, you’re, you’re realizing if you need to create any new resources or reduce friction points. And when I say friction point, like maybe it’s really cumbersome for somebody to book a call with you or book an appointment and you need to reduce that friction point, make things easier for the customer to do business with you.

And that’s all you need to do. Make it. And this could be monthly if you’re like in a very innovative stage and you are doing a lot of things. Maybe you need to have this meeting or checklist review once a month or at least once a quarter. But I highly recommend throwing that in there. That way you don’t get too focused on new customer acquisition, marketing strategies, where you completely forget about your customer and hopefully you never treat them like absolute crap like this internet company was to where I, if I had another option, which I don’t like that.

This is how monopolies work. This is why like monopolies are illegal. If I had another internet service provider option in the new neighborhood that I’m going to 100% would not be who I am with right now. Chances are you don’t have a monopoly. Okay. So you can’t, you can’t afford to treat people how I was treated in setting up new customer, a new account, or really just trying to transition account.

You can’t do that. So if you start treating people like that, you don’t have the monopoly where every neighborhood has to use you. You have that. You have competition, so they will just go somewhere else. So make sure that you are focused on your current customers, how you take care of them, reviewing the process.

How are you communicating with them? Are you communicating with them? All these kinds of things. And I know it’s a lot. We have to, we have to focus on our marketing efforts. We have to focus on SEO. We have to focus on new client acquisition all the time, but we also have to make sure that we are really delivering the best product or service.

And it’s not easy, but you need to try harder.