Effective Problem Solving with Your Customers and Suppliers – Small Business Show 108

The Small Business show, episode number 108 for Wednesday, March 1, 2017. Greetings, folks and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co the show by, for and about small business owners. Here a small business owner myself in Durham, New Hampshire, Dave Hamilton and another.

Small business owner, Shannon Jean in Concord, California. How are you, man? I'm good.

Yeah. It's always crazy, but it's, you know, good crazy. Like I, I've decided, I've come to realize that I like crazy.

Yeah, I agree. I would much rather have a bunch of problems in front of me to solve versus having nothing going on. And you know, you know, I agree with you. I'm along for the crazy train.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting you bring up solving problems. I mean, I know we have a little topic that we're going to talk about along those lines, but that to me is the easiest part about being a small business owner. When you know what the problem is and you know that the problem exists, solving it is. I mean, it's not always easy to solve every problem, but just being aware of the problem is huge. Like so much stuff. To me, the stressors are not. I need to solve those things. It's, oh, crap, I just found out we have this huge problem.

Yeah. And I would also one of the things I use around the office all the time is people kind of get alarmed when things happen and oftentimes they will want to set or change policies and procedures based on something that. That has happened.

Yeah.

And so I always ask, you know, things like how many times has this happened?

Yes.

And I want to be sure because if you set policy and procedures based on individual problems, you will, I think, drive yourself insane. Oh, yeah. But it happens all the time. It's like, oh, wait, they're asking this question. We have to go, or this happened. We have to add this to the terms and conditions or the website or this or that. And my comment is always, number one, nobody reads the terms and conditions. So you can't lean on that to solve this problem. Legally you probably can, but not when you have a customer on the phone or on the street.

Well, if it gets to the point where you want to involve, I mean, I was going to say want to involve a lawyer. But even if it just gets to the point where you have to lean on, well, you agreed to. You are no longer sitting shoulder to shoulder with your client. You are now across the table from them and you've already lost.

Yes, I agree with you. That is the key thing. You've already lost. Because not only is it. Even if you think you won, you know, you're losing time, you're losing the customer, you know, and that is just a critical piece of information. And so you learn quickly. And I think in a small business, after you've had a few things come up, is that you need to get with your customer and really, you know, stand next to them. I like that. You know, metaphor. And figure out how to work through things together. Yeah. You know, and it has to be.

You and the customer versus the problem.

Yep.

As opposed to the problem being something between you and your customer. And, you know, it's. There's a lot of different ways to do that, of course. But just to me, that mindset, I had to learn it when we had the computer repair business, when we had computer nerds, because you'd get there and instantly, like, this is a person that's frustrated with this problem. That's really, truly not your fault. I mean, it's your computer.

Right.

But if you don't manage that situation carefully, from the moment you walk in, suddenly you are at fault. You are to blame for this problem. And that's a really difficult scenario. So just learning, like I said, just think about it like, okay, it's you and me. We're gonna solve this together. And that pays off in every way.

Yeah. And. And speaking of the payoff, it's, I think, and especially in any kind of support role or advisory role where you're billing for your time or your expertise.

Right.

Because you. You would rather bill for your expertise, I think, than your time.

Yes. But even when you're billing for your time, you're billing your expertise just in. That's right. Different, you know, you just. In a different way.

In a different way, you need to have the customer. You have to manage the expectation that what will be billed and what will not be billed. Because in the like scenario you're talking about now, you know, you're stepping in to solve a problem. And if there's some other problem that comes up, which often happens, especially in technical support. I mean, most of the time happens. Yes. So one of the things I see over and over is there's an this kind of expectation that, well, you touched it once and billed me. Now you need to fix it always. Right. It's not printing anymore. I can't. This, you know, I can't do this in Photoshop. I can't. And especially any kind of tech support role, you have to have that expectation. And we do it just like, you know, my Attorney does they send out a letter. It's in the beginning, kind of one pager. Hey, we're going to do this for you. Here's what we do. And one of the critical parts of that letter is we bill for all our time, whether it's on the phone, answering emails, or coming to your location. You know, and it's really important for the customers to agree with that, I think.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's like, you know, like you said, you're billing for your expertise even if the problem is unsolvable.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

Right.

Yeah. Even if you have to do the research. I get technicians all the time say, well, you know, it took me a half an hour to research this before I could solve the problem. I said, well, that's a half hour billable time, totally. Because, you know, they're asking you to use your. Your expertise in researching this problem and then applying that to fix the problem.

Right.

You know, yeah.

I had people especially, like in the early days of, of, you know, search engines in general that would say, you know, all you did to solve this problem was you went to Google and you found the solution. It's like, yeah, I did. And I would always say, but I knew to do that, you know, and if it would. And again, you have to make sure you're saying this to the right customer. And so it was not always said in the way that I'm about to say it here. But it's like, you know, you didn't do that. I did that. That's correct. And with some customers, you can say it exactly like that, and with others, you cannot.

And that's why I love the one pager versus a big, long contract or terms, conditions, the one pager allow you to go even, you know, go over it with your customer, which is what we have our techs do. Anytime we do any of that kind of contract work, say, here's what we do, here's our expertise. This is what we bill for. And we have that in there. It's like, oh, you know, research and, you know, testing is billable. And, you know, we're ha. If you do not wish us to do those things, we'll be glad to give you tips while we're billing you and let you go do it. But oftentimes, you know, and it comes down to, you know, I made this comment before, where we often ask customers about their business and what they bill and that usually because it helps you.

Frame it a little better.

It does, it does. Because in the IT space, unfortunately, it's Kind of the. I guess the metaphor is, hey, come play it, you know, or we need a website. Why don't you build it for free and we'll tell everybody you did it to help you out. Or come your band, come play for free and you can get some exposure. Well, you know, I can't pay my.

My mortgage with exposure. Bucks, man.

That's exactly right. And it's similar in the IT space where, you know, oh, I want you to solve this problem, but immediately your value is, you know, I mean, if you have somebody bring in, you know, multi terabyte, you know, drive, and they need all this work done and repair done, and then they want you to go through all their data and their photos and those kinds of things. So we say, oh, you know, that could be six and six to eight hours of us doing this work. And it's 125 an hour, and you watch as their jaw drops on the ground. And we say, well, we'd be glad to provide you with tips during our initial assessment, but you will have to spend those six to eight hours. And so it's valuable time. It's critically valuable.

But like I said, those lessons of trying to buddy up with the person that. Yeah, I love that, to me, that's like one of the best things I learned from all of those years going to people's homes and stuff is I'm pretty good.

Yeah, you're on their side.

Yeah. You have to be on the same side.

Yeah, That's a great piece of advice.

Sincerely, too, not. Not just saying, hey, I'm on your side here, you know, like, that doesn't play well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to work together, but while I'm with you, I'm billing.

Right. But also, the clock's ticking. Yeah, well, and I mean, that's certainly true for a consulting or a support role, but when you just have a problem in your business with it, you know, with your customer, that you may not be billing.

No, that's true. Yeah. We're going to solve this problem together.

We're going to solve it together. Can we work together to solve this? Yes. Okay. And it does. It requires some compromise. And I mean all. All the stuff that goes into two humans working and relating together.

Yes, I agree. And if your business is such. I think that you're billing maybe for certain things are maybe not that expensive in a particular event, or you need to look at the event, and if it's something relatively minor, the first thing we always lead is like, hey, let me. Let Me just give you your money back. Because if you're not happy with what we did, let me take my parts back. Let me, you know, whatever it is, if it's, you know, a few hundred bucks or something like that, we always try to lead with that. And surprisingly, you know, nine times out of 10, they say, no, no, no, that's not what I want, but this is why I'm not happy. And then you can. So again, you're starting from there. They feel that you're sincere about, you know, solving the issue because you're not just, you know, trying to king out of the money. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So. But on the other end of it, you know, I. I wanted to talk about getting support, solving a problem. When you're the client, you're the customer. And I had an issue pop up last week with a major partner of ours that I use for multiple businesses to handle some cash management and things. I don't want to go in detail about who it is or what it is, but I used a different method than I had. I kind of stumbled into it, but it worked so great. I thought that we should talk about it today on the show.

Okay. All right. To frame this. Just want to make sure I understand you're the customer in this.

I'm the customer.

And this is someone you've worked with for a while, and they somehow wronged you, or is that right?

Egregious.

Okay, so I didn't mean to downplay it.

No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, this is a large organization that we are deeply involved in that. I, you know, I. They asked me to come and speak at conferences. I've done all kinds of things with these folks over for over 10 years.

You do business with them, too?

And I do. I do it a significant amount of business.

Daily or month? Certainly monthly. Daily with them.

Okay, all right, daily. And it's not insignificant amounts of money. And so a situation came up where it turns out, on the back end of it, I kind of see. And I was explained to. We kind of got caught in an algorithm and some software, kind of did some stuff and flagged some accounts that we have and treated us in a certain manner. That was really poor.

Sure. Okay, so you were put on a blacklist or something?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We kind of got qualified a certain way.

You got re qualified by a computer in a way that a human that could see everything holistically probably would not have done.

You got it. And I know this now, but I did not know this.

No, of course. Hindsight being what it is.

And this happened last week. And so of course I get some emails, nobody calls me and I make a call and I kind of get it to a low level support person who clearly has no access to the history that we have with this company and all this kind of stuff. And they're kind of just giving me the party line, nope, can't help you, can't help you, can't help you. And so I get really frustrated and I was not solving the problem correctly. So I hung up and I reached out to some other folks in a different division of this company and I said, hey, look, I just had a very bad experience. You may want to hear about this. Or if you can connect me to somebody in this other group, I'd love to share this experience with them because I just sent them email. I said, I love you guys. You have really helped me for the last 12, 14 years. And I want you to know what happened here. And so I got connected to a guy who happened to be out of the country. So I couldn't really. He was like, I can't have a phone conversation, but can you give me some detail? And what I did was I said, yeah, I'll give you some detail. And I took some time and I went up and I created a Google Doc. I wrote about three pages about what happened and the way they handled it and how it impacted me on a business level. But not just on a business level, business level. But it happened, of course, on a Thursday or a Friday and it all kind of trickled downstream where it could have impacted me. Very negative, in a very negative manner, in a financial manner coming into the weekend.

Sure.

And so I started writing this document and the first thing I said was, hey, I understand how this happened and even why, and I get it. I'm not asking for any favors or any special treatment, but I want to let you know what happened here. And I wrote this document, just kind of, hey, this is what it is. Sent the contact a link and I proceeded to have, I had the Google Doc open. And you know how you can. I don't know if you're familiar.

You probably see when people come in.

Yeah. And it was fascinating. And I called my wife Renee into from her office and said, hey, check this out. And literally over the next couple hours, I could see like 20 people log into this document. And I told, I said to Renee, I said, this is a powerful method because I did not have this conversation on the phone from one guy who would then kind of talk to it. And softened it up to the next person and the next person. Right. Like the telephone game. But I actually laid this thing out in detail. And then I could see everybody logging into this thing. Of course they were anonymous, but I could.

Yeah, but you know that there's people, right? Yeah.

He's sending that. This rep or this contact that I had is sending this link out to all these different people.

Oh, man.

And I'm watching it. And I sat there yesterday, I kept it up on one of my monitor on the side of my desk and I watched it. And literally there was like over the course of the afternoon or in the morning, and then throughout the rest of the day, there was like 20 or so people logging in and out of this document. Wow. And I thought, this is a really good method if you have the opportunity, rather than even sending an email or having a phone conversation, is putting the details in a document like this online, where you can see people logging into it, tracking, you know, you can't. You can't tell who you are. But anyway, it's still.

It's tall. No, I like, oh, this is brilliant.

Yeah. And you know, then at the end of the day, I got a phone call and it had been escalated, you know, somewhere on the. Along the ranks of those 20 people that logged into this document. And the first thing out of this contact person that called me is, I am so sorry. He's like, you are just the person we do not want to alienate and not have recommend our service. I was like, great. I go, that's cool. I said, you know, like, I said, I don't want you to do me any special favors. I understand how this happened based on the actions that came together. But the way it was handled was. So even if I was not someone that was connected in your organization, if I was just a regular customer, this is how you chase people away. Totally.

Yeah. Right.

So it was great. And this person had had the chance to read this, and I was really. I tried to be really objective and calm while I wrote this because I was so angry, you know, that it all came down this way.

Yeah. No, you can't. Right, right, right, right. Okay. So, like, this is like, mind blowing for me because it's like there's so many things to learn here. Obviously this using Google Docs is brilliant in this manner because like you said, you get to see. Even if you say, hey, look, you know, I know how email can, like, you know, mangle the formatting of. So just use that as your excuse. I had a lot to write So I did it in Google Docs because email always screws it up.

That's right.

And then it seems disarming, even though you're totally using it to track them. And that's totally fine. So that's the lead issue. But there's a couple of things that have been buried here. Number one is when you're lodging a complaint, I wrote it here in our little show notes. When complaining, lead with love.

Oh, yeah, that's exactly right. And I told them, I said, the only reason I'm giving you this detailed feedback is I said that in my first email. I love you guys.

I love you guys.

You really have impacted me in my life, my business, even in my personal life in a tremendously positive way over the last 15 years.

Yeah.

So the way that this, you know, you need to read this even if you don't take any. I wasn't asking them to take any action.

No. And that. And that was like, number three to me was that you specifically said, here's what I want. And it was, I don't want anything. Right. But I think, you know, just to abstract. I mean, that's very powerful to say. I'm not looking for a favor. I'm not looking for a favor.

But you often are.

Right, but sometimes you are. And so just be upfront about that, you know, and even if you are, I can totally see a tactic. And this may be exactly what you employed here, where you say, look, I'm willing to gamble that if this gets into the right person's hands, they will do something for me and it'll be even better because I'm not asking.

That's exactly right.

And that's fine. And as long as you're willing to roll those dice, that's okay. And there's a tactic there. But if there's something where you can't afford to roll the dice, and you'd have to ask. Yeah, ask right up front. Here's what I'm asking for. And you put it, like, just clearly not. Like you said, take all the negative emotion out of it. Apply as much positive emotion as you can without being sickly sweet and insincere. But then, like, just lay out the whole thing. And what a. And, you know, here's the thing. People are much more comfortable reading big, long diatribes as, like Word or Google Documents than an email. That's right.

Yeah. I think if you write more than a couple of small paragraphs in an email, people just shut down.

Yeah. But moving it to a Google Doc, there's so much power in that we're just like scratching the surface.

Yeah, I agree.

Of this tactic.

Yeah. And then, you know, what I tried to do was, and I always mention this to larger companies, I say, you know, if I treated my customer this way, you, excuse me, you would not have me as a customer because I would not be in business.

Oh, what a brilliant. Oh, dude, this is just getting better and better.

Yeah. And so I just try to tell them that I said, you know, you expect me to operate in a certain way to make people happy, but if I treated, you know, my customers this way, it wouldn't work. And in the Google Doc that I created, I'm a story guy.

Right. Yeah, of course.

We always try to tease stories out of our interview folks. And I like telling stories. It's powerful. And I kind of framed it as, hey, here's what I would have expected to have happened in this scenario and basically was simply I would have expected to get a phone call well in advance of what happened on a Friday afternoon before a three day holiday weekend. And here's the dialogue I would have expected to have happened. And I just wrote it as I would have told one of my employees to have a conversation.

Right.

Like, oh, Shannon, you know, hey, we really value your relation, long term relationship. Here's what's happened. Here's some actions that we would like to see.

Okay, so this is great. Not only, not only. I mean, there's two pieces of advice here. One is always be telling a story. I'm the same way as you.

Right.

You know, because that's it. People, it. People like to read stories. They don't like to read just rambling series of facts.

Right? Yeah, that's right.

So tell a story. But the twist on that is tell the story you wish had happened.

Yeah, well, we always create our own reality in the story.

Yeah, but I mean, just being upfront instead of telling the story that happened and you know, highlighting the portions that, you know, didn't go the way they should have or whatever, tell the story that happened and then say instead, what I would have liked to have seen happen is, you know, alternative reality number one. And being again, all of this is very sincere and upfront. You're, you're sure explaining what you want, but you're not trying to hide it. It's just all very transparent. In fact, you know, entertaining.

But yeah, I'm trying to tell them, look, you know, had it been handled this way, everything would have worked better for you and for me. And you know, I don't understand why it didn't happen and that, you know, when I finally got the call yesterday afternoon to resolve things and for this person just apologized over and over and over and he said, you know, we need to treat customers, you know, we need to fix this. You know, kind of fell through the cracks and got handled this way. And I just reminded him, I said, well, you don't want to handle any customer that way just because, you know, I may be a quote, VIP type of customer because of X, Y and Z. Anybody who uses a service, if they get treated like this, they're not going to come back and use the service.

They'll find somebody else that offers a competing service.

And there are tons of competing services like this and it's not an talking about large amounts of money here. And I said, you guys are better than this.

What a great line.

Yeah. And he agreed. And he's like, we are better than this and I'm going to resolve it. And he said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm putting this in place. I'm going to do X, Y and Z and I'm going to call you tomorrow and we'll get it resolved. And I said, great.

Suddenly you went from being this person that was being ignored to the person to whom they are now reporting.

I like that.

Right. I mean, you know, you're now their manager. Like, we will, we'll make this right for you. Yeah, that's good. That's how it should be.

Yeah. And a lot of times, you know, you can make this argument and you just get ignored.

Right. You can't expect, you never go in expecting justice, pave the way for justice, but, you know, prioritize what it is you actually need versus justice in general.

Yeah. And you know, with the Google Doc method of getting support or solving this problem, you can also share that with other people. So, like, you know, say, hey, this is what I sent. Here's the date. Da, da, da. These are the things that I've done. And if you have to maybe escalate things further, if you do get ignored, it really shows that to your point, you're the reasonable person.

Right.

You're trying to explain what happened. And it may take you multiple pushes to get to the right person that will pay attention.

So here, here's because as, as you were telling this, I'm, I have had this idea swimming in my head, like, how could we leverage the fact that a Google document is a living document, which means you can make changes to it as time progresses and I, and I started thinking like, okay, is there, like, how would it. Where would like, I mean, you. Now you' playing close to the edge here. But is there a moment in time where it makes sense to change the document after you figure, okay, it's been escalated. So now I've gotten past tier two, now I'm going to head towards tier four. Again, this is swimming in my head, but initially I couldn't come up with a reason where it was like, yeah, that's a safe bet, let's do that. But as you said, as it escalates, you just start adding to the bottom of the document.

Create a timeline.

Create a timeline. And you just, that as your timeline to track everything that's happened or not happened, who you talk to, you know.

This kind of thing. And so, yeah, I think it's a great idea. And I think I also want to point out is, you know, there's a real tendency, you know, with the Internet to just blow everything up and share with everybody to get, you know, to get things solved. You really want to give people, companies or whoever they are the opportunity to solve problems in private first.

You do.

I think that's very important.

I was going to say that rarely does the blowing it up actually get your problem solved. Although as soon as I say that, I'm reminded in Apple's developer guidelines, right. They say, please try to work out issues with us and very explicitly say, please don't go running to the press with your complaint. It won't help. Unfortunately, Apple has proven that particular clause wrong almost every single time.

Like, because they react. Right.

Running to the press actually is the thing that has, you know, the only thing that has solved several problems with Apple's App Store. So I mean, you know, I mean, that's a very isolated thing, but it's just ironic, you know.

Yeah. And I've done this. I mean, I had. This is kind of a silly example, but I had a problem with a really nice couch that we had bought for our home. I mean, it was not inexpensive. You know, big thing we always wanted and I couldn't get support for if my life depended on it. So I went up to LinkedIn and I was not a paying member at that time, but I found a guy who was like the VP of something something, you know, with, with this company. And, and I paid my, you know, upgraded my LinkedIn account so I could send him in, you know, they call it mail, so I could send him a message. And I wrote this long letter about how man, you know, and I kind of, of course I fluffed it up a bit and said, you know, I've wanted one of these, your brand couches forever, and da, da, da, da. And this is what happened. And I didn't do it publicly, but I sent that and the next day I got a phone call and it got resolved. So reaching out to people and giving them the opportunity in private to respond is a critical thing.

No, but you have to. This reminds me of when I had that problem with the hospital and I didn't use LinkedIn, but I was able to get the phone number for the CFO of the hospital. I had a problem with the billing. No one at this hospital would even consider hearing me out, let alone changing this exorbitant bill that they shouldn't have charged me. And as soon as I called the cfo, I mean, he called me back, I got his voicemail or whatever and the problem went away. Because I knew that this person was a decision maker. And he even apologized. He's like, yeah, I know our system sucks because there's no one that you're officially put in touch with that has the ability to hear you out.

Yeah, that's right.

But, you know, so he knew that. And a lot of times people, you know, up at the top will know that. I never thought about using LinkedIn.

Yeah, it works really good because I couldn't find how to connect with this person any other way.

Any other way. Right.

And that's the thing with the, you know, creating that Google Doc and then getting that shareable link. It's very easy for it to get pushed along to the right person.

Yes.

And that may be, you know, know it's more than half the battle because it's 95%. Yeah. Most companies don't empower their employees to solve problems, especially significant ones that are high monetary, you know, value. And so giving them the ability to just say, hey, take a look at this, you know, and this and this. And then being able to sit there on your monitor in a web browser and watch the numbers go up as it gets logged in. You know, I wanted to throw my hands up in the air and was like, woo hoo. I was, you know, I mean, the only thing could be better is if you could really see. Exactly. I guess if they have a Gmail account, you could see, but you know, they're not, they're not using their personal accounts or corporate. But, but anyway, I thought it was worth sharing. You know, if, if, you know, if, if our listeners have had other ways at work, you know, we'd certainly love to hear about them. We'll share this over at the small business support group which you can get to businessshow co Facebook and come tell your story. We want to hear about how you can got some awesome service.

What a great story, man. I am so glad you decided to bring that on the show. What I. I feel like today I'm the one that learned the most. This is.

Well, it. It's great and it's. It actually helps just to be able to talk it through and see now, you know, it's not totally resolved yet. So I will update you as we go along and we'll see where it went. And, and.

But you got like, you got the attention of the people that can choose whether or not to solve your problem. And that's the key key like that, you know that that's what you need in 99% of these things is just. Can I have a conversation with you, please?

You. Yeah. That's it.

Awesome. Thanks, man. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks for listening, everybody. It's great.

Keep. Keep living that charm life. Lots of tips on how to do that in this week's show. I like it. It's good.

Take care, everybody.

Good.