Episode #209: CHASING WHAT CUSTOMERS ARE NOT TELLING US

Learning the mathematical power of customer defection rocked my world in 1988. For 35 years I have been chasing the reasons, and solutions.

Season 5 continues our hunt for ways to make customers happy, and to keep them coming back. The headwinds of the Experience Economy beckon the necessity to change our go forward coordinates. If we don’t change, the dreaded Silent Business Killers (SBKs) will overshadow our efforts. The business graveyard is full of companies that refused to, or did not know how to embrace the new metrics of customer satisfaction. We invite you to join us on this weekly chase where we ask important questions, pursue reasons, and look for simple solutions

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

We invite you to join us today as we talk about what customers are not telling us. Stick around. Alright , Mr . Simple Sky to show . Hello everybody, and thank you so much for tuning into the first episode of Season five with Simple Biz 360 podcast. We have been at this since mid-October 2019 at the Wonderful Home of Half Coast Studios. Matt Parker, behind the window at the boards. Uh, thank you Alex Dietrich. Uh, we've just been so pleased we've done , uh, 208 episodes with these gentlemen, and it's just been a wonderful experience. If you're in St. Louis and you need some recording assistance, whether it be a song or an audio book , or you want to do a podcast, this is the place to do it. Half Coast Studios, again , uh, I tip my hat to 'em and I really appreciate everything they've done. So, man, this is , uh, the beginning of season five and I , you know, every year I kind of want to kick off the new season and just try to tell you what's ahead and what we're about. And I just, I can't, you know, I, I've been trying to kind of bottle what I do up in, in , in a nutshell for many, many years. And every year I seem to come up with a different , uh, kind of explanation for it. But , but here, here's the scoop. In a nutshell, we chase the things that customers don't tell us. Why do we chase that? Because we are in what we call the experience economy. And the experience economy begs the argument that in many cases it's what the companies do that, that supersedes the goods or services they provide. In other words, we are now being measured on how we treat people, make them feel what the experience was like when they, when they dealt with this . Um, we have this, this, you know, we have this present the product or idea to the customer, to the pay, the invoice, and all these little journeys in between that mark that these little dots on a map. And , and it's what we're doing in those little journeys that matter. So , uh, again, I've been chasing this concept since 1988 when I read a 1985 study, A TARP study, and it argued the following, that 26 outta 27 people who have a bad experience with a company fail to tell the company about that negative experience. And why is that? Because they don't expect anything to change. And then 91% of those people leave and never come back. And, and when I read that, there's more to the story, but let's just park here for a second. When I read that, that hit me and it's hit me for 35

Speaker 2: 2:58

Years because it , it's telling me that there are these things that are going on that I'm not aware of as the business operator, business owner, business person, I am making my customers unhappy in one way , two ways, many ways, I don't know, but it's enough where they're not telling me about it and they just choose to, to flee. They choose to just fire me and fire my company and they go somewhere else for similar goods or services and, and why, why are we , uh, you know, not looking at that closer? And I looked at all these different thought leaders out there, and I just don't, I don't find anybody honing in on this. And so I started tracking it and looking at it in 1989, I I devoted 30 years to looking at this and, and writing a book eventually and doing this podcast. And I am chasing those answers. That's the quest I've been on. I am on and I will be on. It's, it's what is making those customers become lost customers. And today, folks, that's way, way too expensive of a proposition for any of us to embark in on, you know, on we don't want to have to go reinvent lost customers. I , I think, so I've read some articles and it seems to be the common argument is it's around five times the original cost of acquiring that customer to replace that customer if they decide to go elsewhere. This is an expensive proposition. So, you know, again, I love this, I love to just oversimplify things. I think the beauty of doing that is it allows us to clear the dust , um, clear the weeds away, look at the roots of the tree, which is the business, examine the dirt, examine the light source, the water, what is going on at the roots? What are the simple things that are not working for that tree? What are the simple things that are not working for that business? And how can we correct them ? So I'm chasing those answers. Now, the more to the story is after 91% of those people leave, a good portion of those unhappy customers go on to tell nine or 10 friends, colleagues, neighbors, church , you know, goers, whatever. Um, and then there's a 13% of those unhappy people that left. They go on to tell 20 or more people about this negative experience. And they're throwing darts at your company. They're shooting flaming arrows at your company. They're these loaded quivers all over the place that are pulling out flaming arrows that are knocking your business down a peg because of things you are doing or not doing. And guess what? You are not finding out about it. If I had a dime for every executive that told me or said to me , uh, that's not true, Jeff. We , we don't hear any customers complaining about that. Exactly. You're not going to, they're not going to say anything. And so here's what this podcast is all about. As we chase that, we chase the answers for why customers leave. We chase for the answers as to what's causing those customers to be unhappy. And our argument is this, let's get in front of it. We don't need the customers to articulate it out of their own mouths. Every time we're making some mistakes, we should be smart enough. We should have enough history behind us, we should have enough in our business files to figure out on our own what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, and what we need to change. And that is what this podcast is all about, is to try to enable you to ask questions as a listener in the audience. Um , we're gonna ask questions that you can rub your chin about. You can think about, we are going to want you to, to pontificate in your own mind as you drive 60, 120 miles where you're just thinking, or if you're at a lake or on a park bench or your favorite chair and you in your basement, or you're outside in the hammock and you're just trying to think about what am I, what can I do differently that would not irritate customers? And that's what our focus is. So if you see this graphic on behind this , this is kind of what it is, right? As business people, we understand the wants and the needs, but this podcast takes it one step further and we say, Hey, what do the customers deserve? What are they wanting that they're not articulating, that if we don't provide it drives them away from us and they go to a competitor? What can we do to give the customers what they deserve so that they come back and say, job well done. I love your company. Love the way you guys handle things. Wanna refer you to other people, want to , you know, want to give you repeat business. That's what we're all about. So if you want , take that journey with us , it's a short journey. Every week we've been in this three business tips and five minute series for a while . We'll continue that vein. Aside from this show and the , and the close to season four, we're gonna try to hop on that five minute train , um, consistently again, if we deviate, we deviate, you know, but I , I mean we'll be close to five minutes, I assure you. So we just invite you, hop along for the ride. Uh , we talk about things that you are not hearing in many other sectors of the social media

Speaker 3: 8:55

World. So , uh, again, we would just love to have you on board for every week. Uh, we love to share, we love to pay things forward. Many of these things, most of these things are not my observations or theories or it's things I've learned, it's things I've tested, but I am focused on trying to uncover, you know, using all that pay it forward advice that I've, that third party advice that I've acquired over my 35 year career and situational observation. And I'm trying to pay it forward in , in the form of questions and , and thought provoking statements and concepts and mindsets that maybe we just haven't given thought to. So any rate , uh, that's kind of what we're all about. We hope you can stick , uh, uh, stick around for the ride and, you know, we end every show we always do , uh, with a, what we call a lost in the shuffle track. And basically it's a , you know, it's kind of a rock and roll tune that has some significance in our lives. We loved it, or it's kind of been tucked away in, in, in the Lost archives and we haven't heard it for a while and we kind of bring it to light. I love the , um, British invasion years and, you know, I love some , um, some , some cool bands like the Alman Brothers in Traffic as well. So , um, any rate , uh, what we do every week is we post this song on the YouTube experience. We post it up in the upper right hand corner, it's a little, you'll see it says Lost in the Shuffle. It appears for a couple seconds, five seconds, whatever it is, and then it goes away and we have to put it up there , um, kind of like 30 seconds before the end of the show. So it , and the song link is always then in the show notes if you want to go to the YouTube show notes. And then it's always on our website, which is where we live. It's Simple biz three six zero.com , simple biz three sixty.com . So , um, you can find all the podcasts from season one up through. Now you can find even the song links to the , uh, rock and roll , uh, lost in the shuffle tracks too, which is pretty cool. So today we're gonna dip back into, I believe it was what , 19 71 5 Man Electrical Band. I believe they were outta Canada and they did a song called Signs . Yes, we too are looking for the signs customers are sending us, just not telling us. And we're looking for those signs where they're irritated and dissatisfied and we wanna fix that . So enjoy the tune Signs five Man Electrical Band, 1971. We will see you in 168.