“Ghosting” is a societal trend that is taking up more office space then ten, twenty or thirty years ago.
Today we find various businesses choosing to ignore difficult customer questions, concerns, issues, and tedious follow through. Buyer frustration continues to mount, as vendors are absent, and unwilling to respond. Companies are utilizing these operational mechanisms with alarming frequency. Bad news is often on the horizon for these operators, as the Experience Economy usually has the last laugh. Companies that consistently “Ghost” customers battle low repeat transaction percentages, and slim referral rates. Don’t get caught modeling this trend…it might send your business to the boneyard!
Alright , Mr . Simple Biz Sky . Let's guide to show.
Speaker 2:
Welcome everyone, and thank you for tuning into the Simple Biz 360 podcast. My name is Jeff Mason, I'm your host on this fast five minute episode, and we are in episode 2 34. We've been at this since mid-October 2019. You can find all of our past episodes on Simple Biz three sixty.com . Just go to the podcast tab. We're on 28 audio directories and , uh, YouTube IG Rumble tv. Today we're gonna be talking about the uptick in business ghosting. So yes, we know that this ghosting term is something that's really , uh, crept into the , uh, worldwide vernacular over the last 10 years. But this started a long time ago , uh, and , and I really noticed it in the nineties when we really started seeing a lot of , uh, buyers, a lot of decision makers just avoid answering you, you know, the answer was no, but they didn't want to tell you the answer was no. So they just never answered and this became the new no . But as society grew into this ghosting mode with the advent of social media, the, with the onslaught of texting versus talking, and all of a sudden talking, you know, started to really fall in terms of popularity and, you know, use, and all of a sudden we're finding ourselves talking less, texting more, and now ghosting is just become huge, right? Well, you know what? Factories are doing it. Customer service reps are doing it, buyers are doing it. Salespeople, executives, they're all doing it. They're ghosting , uh, employees, they're ghosting customers. They're ghosting vendors. Vendor relationships are becoming fractured because there's just no partnershipping going on. The companies are hiding behind this electronic facade as , as we don't talk anymore. They can hide behind the fact that they don't, you know, email you or text you back. Years ago, it used to be, Hey, I never got your voice message. Then it became, I never got that email. Oh, something must be wrong with our email server or something. Those emails never came through. And , and , and trust me, half the time, I , I , I worked in sales. I've heard other salespeople tell the stories. I've heard executives and managers ask us to, to lie in respect to this. The bottom line is these people were getting your emails, they were getting your voicemails. They were just BSing you and telling you they weren't. So this is really kind of grown into an epidemic, you know, situation. I think at this point, and, you know, I'm in the middle of , uh, I , I , I was just , um, I just got out of a ghosting mode with somebody that , uh, had been doing it for a , for a number of months, and I'm involved in two ghosts right now. I , I'm , in fact, my wife and I spent five months being ghosted over a home purchase trying to get warranty repair, and we just got nowhere. We tried everything, we got nowhere. And finally like a , you know, just like a outta nowhere, these people popped up and performed warranty repair for us five months later and just put us through the ringer. So, you know, where are we today? We're in a sad state. Um, you know, we , we definitely are in this copy and paste mode. So basically , um, we just wanna invite you to not be part of it. And in fact, we wanna invite you to take it one step further. We invite you to start selling not ghosting as a feature and benefit of your company. If you are company that prides itself on responding, following up and following through, then you know what? Go out and put it in your sales presentations that you are a company that will never ghost the customer. You'll never avoid answering a tough question. You'll never not answer a customer. You'll always respond to 'em. So basically start selling it managers, start training your employees on it, on how to be not ghosters, how to be good responders. Follow ups and follow throughs , right? I'm , I'm , I'm, I'm , I'm not using proper English there, but, you know , uh, so, and then executives and owners don't always assume your employees , uh, aren't doing their job and they can't get the answers. They're probably being ghosted in many cases. They just can't get anyone to respond to 'em. So with that being said, man, you know what? I, I feel like, you know, back in 1978, south Side Johnny and Asbury Jukes came out with a tune written by Bruce Springsteen. Talk to me. Just talk to me. Right? That's what the customers want. So enjoy this tune. We will see you in 168 hours and don't ghost those customers.