How Strong Core Values and Leadership Mindset Shape Customer Experience and Service Excellence

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A lot of people want to deny that the customer experience is 100%. They're good or they're bad or their fault or whatever happens. Like, they're like, I just don't have. Like, I had a grumpy employee or whatever. And it's like, no, that 100% starts with you. And it's not just if your cashier had a good day or a bad day.

No, you're doing it wrong.

Ouch. You need to go back and listen to the last episode. Episode about emotions. Stay tuned. She's the CEO.

He's the marketing and operations guy.

If it's broken, you need the business fix. So what are you excited about coming up?

So we're working on rolling out Resilient operating system towards the end of this month. So I'm getting everything together and working on training a whole bunch of success salespeople at the same time. So, you know, not busy.

That would explain someone with maniacal smile how I feel. I'm excited for it. I know you've got a lot of work in this. This. I mean, I know you're excited about it. I know you're excited about, like, sleep someday.

Someday, like, November, maybe. I don't know. How about you, Josh? What's going on?

Just, we've brought on a couple of new clients, a couple of really cool new projects, so I'm excited about that. It. Not as bad as your boat, but same boat. You're like, oh, you're okay. Just bailing water. The bucket is slightly smaller than the hole.

Yeah.

But you're like, no, this is. This is good. And we do kind of love this, though. Yeah. If. If we didn't.

Oh, no, I love the chaos.

Yeah, No, I don't love the chaos. I love the challenge.

I love the chaos.

Yeah, no, the chaos is what makes me. Turns me into the crying fetal position.

You should listen to our last episode about emotions.

Right. Once again.

Once again.

Yeah, maybe we'll. We'll just go ahead and review that. So this Week we're talking about the customer experience.

Yes. This was your topic.

Yeah. Oh, 100%. Because. And I mean, we've both had really good customer experiences and really bad customer experiences and so much of that. I mean, I'm excited about this because first off, I know it's a buzzword in a lot of cases. Leadership has more of a role in this than people think.

Absolutely.

The action in action, it all shapes it. There's. We're going to talk about some of the pillars of customer experience. And the other thing is, is how is a strategic advantage so many people, like, they don't spend the time on it because they're like, this is time that I'm investing in this. And then I'm still going to get a bad Google review. You might get a bad Google review. It does happen if you deal more than. With more than like eight people.

Yeah.

Real quick, give me one fast good experience and one fast bad experience that you've had as a customer.

Okay. So good experience was. I dealt with an auto repair and I am not technical, so it's not my thing. Met me, went through like, this is what we're going to do. And then throughout the day sent me videos. This is what we found. This is what's going on. This is when you can expect your vehicle to be back. This is what we're going to repair. Super helpful. I love contractors that can walk me through a process when I have no idea, and then I can kind of feel more empowered and like, I can make a good decision. So great customer experience, awful customer experience. They will remain nameless. But it was a consultant that worked with us and gave them the expectations. They didn't follow the expectations. Went back, said, hey, just so you know, this, this doesn't work because this isn't what was in our project plan. And they got mad at us through that process, gave us landmines to find after they were done with the project that they didn't completely fully complete. And then they're like, well, do you want to give us a review? Do you want me to give you a review?

I don't think you know what you're asking for there.

I think your automated process that asks for a review should be turned off.

Right.

So, yeah. What about you?

It's interesting the other day, and I love the simple ones. It's leeches. Local. It's leeches. Meats and sweets locally here.

Nice.

You walk in, hey, how's it going? Doesn't matter who you are, they're just friendly.

Yeah.

Everyone There. I mean, the. The meat counter is incredibly busy. You got to take a number. They call out your number, like, hey, what can I get for you? It's friendly. I've gotten to know them there over the years too. And, like, this is the thing. There's girls in the bakery. They can have a line of 10 people. As soon as they see me walk in, they just grab an M and M cookie, shove it in the bag, and hand it to me. I can bypass. They just know. They just know. That is what's happening to me. That is amazing customer experience and also.

Speaks to your addiction for Eminem code 100%.

But the fact that they know that, to me, is just. It's an amazing customer experience. The flip side of that is I still remember, like, Core life, the restaurants.

Yes.

An operational nightmare. I love their food.

I did too.

But you walk in there and you knew that if you were four people deep in line, this is fast casual. You knew you're going to be there for 30 minutes.

Yes.

And I'm like, what? Their menu was too complex. There was just everything wrong. And the problem was, is you could see the frustration in the people behind.

The counter because they didn't know how to put things together right. Everything's.

Everything was specialized. Everything was complex.

Yep.

So when they'd see someone walk in the door, like, shit, someone's here. I have to. I'm gonna have to build something.

I have to think, yeah, yeah.

It wasn't just like, I have to throw food in a bowl. It's like, I have to build something. It was a task, and you could tell. So that, to me was. And that's why they're no longer there. But, yeah, those are the good and bad. What's like for you? What's the top thing that you think people miss that. I mean, it dictates the customer experience right off the top.

I think it's clear mission and values that prioritize the customer.

100 agree.

I think oftentimes with core values, we're thinking, how do we take care of our employees? How do we take care of ourselves? As a business owner, it is if you don't take care of your customers.

It's just the other thing that I want to add something to that too. The other one is just what cool saying, can we put on our wall that's going to blow sunshine with the sun normally does not shine. That is core values. In so many cases, it is.

But if your mission and values don't show up with how you treat your customers, it's just ugly wall art.

Correct. Correct. I wholeheartedly agree with that statement.

Yeah. Your team only prioritizes what leadership is visibly aligned with. So if your mission includes service, empathy, or excellence, it must be felt by the customer in your touch points. I mean, we have two of those are our service and excellence. And it is really important that our customers feel our level of service and our level of excellence around the things that we're doing and providing those services. So hiring for a customer centric mindset is also really important, not just hiring for skills.

So I, I, I could not agree more with that. In so many cases, every time we hire for culture, we hire for people that, especially in customer facing positions that are just friendly.

Yeah.

They may not know what the hell they're talking about.

Yeah.

But if they're friendly, oh, it makes all the difference.

You can train for software, you can train for a process. You can't train someone to care. You can't.

No, no, no. It's interesting. So like, when you're, when you're looking for those people though, what are you looking for?

So you look for someone who defaults to curiosity instead of control.

Oh, I like that.

Yeah. So that's the foundation of service. How can I help you? You're upset. Why are you upset? You're excited about our product. Why are you excited about our product? You need me to solve this problem. How can I help you solve that problem as opposed to, you must follow my process.

So how can I help? You should not just be on a script they have to recite.

No, it should be in. As you're interviewing them, you should be able to understand the tone and tenor of somebody if they're truly in that space. If they ask you questions in the interview process or ask about expectations, they're probably someone who can come from a helpful perspective as opposed to if they're looking at their notes going, how can I help you? Like, that's. There's a difference between someone who is naturally curious and someone who just wants control over the situation.

I actually had someone ask me that in a job interview.

Did you?

I was, we were hiring.

Yeah.

And I'm like, what questions do you have? And they said, how can I help you? Let's be honest. You did not start your business so you could spend your days buried in HR paperwork or Googling how to handle employee drama.

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I'll give you a few seconds to go to the website while we get ready to get back to the show. I wanted to jump across the table and hug the guy.

Yeah.

Yeah. It was amazing. It was amazing.

Yeah.

What are some of the things that. Like, how do you figure that out, though? I mean, like, to me, that was one of those ones where I was just like, oh, my gosh.

The.

The lights turned on, champagne rained down from the heavens. Angels. Ha. If. If you don't have that. Aha. Like, how do you. How do you get to that? How do you figure that out?

Yeah. Another question you can always ask, too, is, you know, in an interview is, tell me about a time you advocated for someone who wasn't in the room. Ooh, that's a good one. Because it kind of shows me how, you know, they think about impact beyond themselves. Skills get you in the door, but that mindset keeps the customer at the center of business. So really trying to figure out, you know, making sure that as we hire our employees and we train them and we give them expectations, they understand that our customers are the most valuable resource that we have. So how do we care for them? Customer experience falls apart in handoff, oftentimes within the organization. So, like, between sales and service delivery, it's not because people don't care. It's because they're not connected. So ensuring that you have connectivity between your teams, communication between your teams, understanding that, you know, making sure that we don't operate in silos, because that's one of the biggest gaps I see in small businesses is they. They operate in silos. And so, you know, client feels it before leadership even notices.

There's a. There's a process guy in the room that may have something to say about that.

You do? What are those things that you would add?

Oh, no. To me, it's just that process.

Yeah.

There's so many times where it gets missed. I mean, people like sales took care of it. They took the order, they put the order in the system. But then what?

The warm handoff is really important.

Oh, gosh, yes.

Yeah, yeah. Even if you're like, okay, you know what? Thank you for your order. I'm going to send you the invoice as soon as that invoice gets paid, this person's going to be reaching out to you. Even if you just explain this person, like, Julie's going to reach out to you, Misty's going to reach out to you, Alice is going to reach out to you. And they're not like, okay, what am I waiting for?

And that person's copied on the email. So they see it. They're now connected with that person.

In the meantime, I've cc'd this person so that they understand. And we want to make sure that you have that individual safe, centered, like, they're whitelisted in your computer so that they're not going to spam. Because oftentimes that can happen too. If, like, you're only dealing with one person and all of a sudden you get a spontaneous email from a new person, it's like, oh, your computer goes, no, can't have it. So it's really important. And then you follow up and then you ask the questions, okay, it's been five days since we've done this handoff. Have you reached out to that person? Have you communicated? And if that person's like, no, I was off site or on pto, we got. Wait a second. We got to have these conversations with. Got to make sure that we don't lose anybody in transition.

What's something that. Like, what happens when someone's upset? And. And in so many cases, what's interesting is it's. It's managing the expectations of people. If they expect nothing to happen and you make something happen.

Yeah.

They're. They're overjoyed.

Yeah.

How do you make it so people can make things happen?

I think part of it is empowering them to be able to make those types of decisions. So if your employees have to ask permission to do what's obviously right by the customer, you haven't empowered them, you have slowed them down, and you are making it difficult for them to do their job, and you're making it impossible for you to be able to step out of your business. So we equip our team with three key questions. So does the action align with our values? If they're going to make an exception or they're going to do something for a customer, does it serve the customer without creating a new issue? And would I be proud if this decision were shared publicly? So when we're dealing with a customer issue or customer expectations and how we're going to handle it, those are the three questions that we try to answer internally as we're making those decisions, and then as the business owner or as the manager leader, you have to trust them to act. So you allow them to answer those questions and you trust them to act because empowerment is alignment with the freedom to execute. It's really important that you allow them to be empowered. Now, that said, we have guardrails around that. I mean, Ritz Carlton is a great example. They have parameters around how much money or how much service or extras you are allowed to offer someone who is unhappy before you have to escalate. And so we have the same things and I have the same things around, you know, a decision or a financial decision that needs to be done. Managers have a dollar threshold. They are allowed to act within these parameters. If it, if it's X amount over, we've got to have a conversation about it so they know I don't have to go to Krissy. If we're going to authorize an hour credit or we're going to do an hour gratis for somebody. If we're going to authorize a free month of service, oh my gosh, we better go talk to Krissy about it because we got to make sure that it's exactly what we need to do with our parameters. We need to go above and beyond and answer a question. It's going to take us an extra 15 minutes. That's okay. Yeah, I don't want to know those. I don't know.

No, just done.

No. We're working on a sales process. We're working on closing a client. They have an issue that they may be as a prospect that may take 15 minutes for us to kind of give them a clarification on. It's probably going to close the client. You know what, we'll do that work ahead of time. It doesn't mean that we work for free all the time. It just means that we, we are willing to go above and beyond for X. Same thing with if they're frustrated and we have to escalate on the insurance side, if we have to ask for an exception. Asking for those exceptions on the insurance side can be challenging because you only get so many chips that you're allowed to cash in with carriers. And so it is, you know, what is the value of the organization? Was this a mistake? Is this continuous? Are they going to change? Let's say they forgot to take someone off of their plan and they've been on the plan for an extra six months. Well, you know, the carrier's only going to go back three months. Should we ask for this client or is this client do this repeatedly? If they do it repeatedly, we go, no, we can't.

They do it once in 10 years.

They do it once in 10 years. Oh, my gosh, let's crawl across broken glass to help them fix it. Or they had an employee that came in and they didn't know that they were on Medicaid. I mean, that's a huge thing. Like, as an employer, you have the responsibility to know. And so there's sometimes where we'll go back and say, you know, we can ask. We can't guarantee that we're going to get you the answer that you want, but we're at least willing to ask because this is important to you as a leader. Yeah.

What's your responsibility in this other than just saying, be nice to people? Damn it. Treat our customers awesome. Damn it.

So your culture mirrors what you celebrate. So if you want a raving fan culture, you've got to celebrate it and recognize it out loud. Your job as a leader is to model what you want to see in the organization, but it's also to call out when people are doing the work that you want. So recognition builds muscle memory. With the people on your team, what you reinforce becomes what gets represented. So you've got to continue to clarify and reiterate and praise. Remember, it takes people an average of 10 times to get something, so you need to recognize their behavior. 10 times. Yeah. Do it in meetings, do it in emails, do it in shout outs. Do it in. I mean, you have a standup meeting, you have the opportunity to say, you know, I'm grateful that you handled this customer issue. Thank you for handling this. So in one of our meeting agendas that we have, we have the opportunity to go around and say, what's a client win? What's something that's been going? And then the individuals can say, you know, I appreciate that you're doing that because that client's my client, too.

Nice. I love that.

Yeah. Do you have any tips on that?

No. That, to me, it really is. It is. The one that I would add to it would be consistency.

Yeah. So how do you make it repeatable in a reality operations guy?

If you could. If you handle things consistently, the same way people know what to expect if you show up and like, look, we're. We're good with doing this this way for these people, then they know what to expect. The same thing. If there is a. Like. Like I. You talked about having the guard rails around stuff.

Yeah.

If that's consistent, people know they can make that decision. And I've worked at Places where one time you did it for a client, and then the next time you did it for a different client and got your head torn off.

Yeah.

And you're like, wait a minute here. I did the same thing for two different people, and you lost your mind with one and you said, great with the other one. You have to be consistent in how you present it. Something that I find, too, is that we talked about hiring the right people for this.

Yes.

There is a regional. I don't know if they're regional or national. I think they are national. Yeah. National bank that has. You go in and the forced. The forced, like, hi, how are you? And you can tell that person, we.

Did not hire for friendliness, but we hired for following a process.

Right. They. I mean, you could tell some of these people. And it's so funny. I have a tendency to, like, break down walls with people sometimes, and they'll tell me anything. And when you go in and you start talking with some of these people, you're like, oh, this is a really nice person. But when I walked in the door and they said hi to me in this scripted like, oh, God, I want to go play in traffic voice.

Yeah.

It ruins it. It absolutely ruins it.

So, yeah. No rubber friendliness.

No. I always tell people. I mean, you have to let your people be authentic and realize that not everyone, every day is going to be sunshiny.

No.

If you give me a script and tell me to be sunshiny, oh, is that sunshine going to be mixed with some very, very dark, dark clouds. Very dark clouds. There may be a full eclipse involved with that. If you tell me to be sunshiny. Because I'm just not a sunshine. Not at all. Am I friendly? You can be.

Seriously.

I mean, I feel like I am friendly to most people. So it. To me, that is a big, big piece of it. The consistency. Once again, handle things the same. If you handle things the same, there's no problem with it. And I love your piece about empowerment. Let people make decisions.

Yeah.

There is no reason I have to go get a manager. No, you don't. Just do the thing. It's $5. Shut up. Yeah, there's. I. There's a restaurant owner here locally that I don't want everyone going in there and flooding him and complaining because I don't want that to happen.

No. We'd like to keep them in business.

Right. But I've talked to them about it, and he's like. He goes. As soon as someone says, hey, look, he goes, I'm sorry, your dinner's on us. No problem. He goes, I don't even hesitate. He goes, all my. All my staff knows.

Done.

He goes, because that will make that person come back. And he goes, we will recoup that money in no time.

Exactly.

He goes, but there's all these restaurants that come back. I still remember I had a bad experience at another restaurant. It took them an hour to make the food.

Yeah.

When the food. Like, right before the food. Shut up. The manager came up to me and he's like, hey, I. Sorry. I don't know why the food's taken so long. And I'm first off, like, why.

Why don't. You know?

Correct. And second off, and he goes, I'm gonna go back there and bust some heads. And I said, we'll do it after we get our food.

Yeah. I don't need other things in my food. Thank you.

Right. And I'm like, dude, you telling me you're gonna bust some heads in the kitchen does absolutely nothing for me. Did I want a free dinner? No. I mean, would I have taken a piece of pie? Yeah, look at me. I would take a piece of pie. I. It was just. It was just a terrible handle experience where they just didn't have the tools to it. The other thing to me is. And I. There's four steps to this.

Yeah.

There's process.

Okay.

There's process. There's process. And I'm willing to bet you know what the last step is. Process.

Really?

Yeah. If you have a solid roadmap for your customers. The thing that I always looked at with it is if there is. If you've got a process lined out and stuff goes sideways, you have to go back and look at your process and say, okay, did we screw up the process or do. Can we make our process better?

Yeah.

It. One of those two questions is going to have a yes next to it. Maybe both. I mean, really? So did we screw up the process, or do we need to adjust the process to make it a better customer experience?

Yeah.

If you're just doing random stuff every time someone walks in the door, as a customer, you. You never know how to get better. No.

Internally, we ask ourselves the question, are we solving this for our process or for the person we serve? Because process is so important.

Yep. The one that I like to. And I have a twist on this one. I always tell people, use technology to automate repetitive tasks wherever you can. But there's a twist to this.

Please, please. Talk about the twist.

It. Make things technology accessible.

Yeah.

Make it swift, easy. All this Other stuff. But the reason why you do that is the same reason why you should be using AI. It's to improve the customer experience. Not just to make it faster.

Don't make it clunky.

Don't make it clunky. Don't be like, look, we've got new technology. It doesn't work worth a damn. But to me, if you can use technology so you can spend more time engaging with the customer and making the customer feel better, awesome. If you're one of these people that just think technology is the be all end all for everything, guess what? There's a. A large subset of people over 50 that are going to argue with you about that. Oh, yeah. To me, it is one of those things. Use technology where appropriate, but so you can make the customer experience better.

Yes.

Not like, hey, we're going to give self checkouts. Go ahead, have a couple of self checkouts. But in the same sense, use it so that way you can make the people that want to go through the regular checkout so they can have a better experience.

Exactly.

Don't just do it so it's cheaper. Because there's a lot of people that still love going through the checkout. In many cases, I will still go through the regular checkout because I am the type of guy that I will talk to the person in front of and behind me.

Yes.

That makes for a great customer experience. I'm in the store, hey, we're buying groceries, whatever. I'm going to talk to these people. It's a better experience for everyone. If I want speed, I'm going to go to the self checkout.

If I got two items, that's it. If I've got 30 and they need bagged, then I'd really like to go to a different checkout. Here's something that frustrates me. In food service, when you have done all of the work yourself and then there's like, would you like to leave something extra? Like, no. No. It is literally a cafeteria. I have pulled everything onto my tray and I'm doing all of the work myself. I have to bust my own table. No.

You know where that actually stems from? Please tell me this is a customer experience technology thing that has gone sideways square.

Yes.

One of the largest companies that, I mean, does those types of things make sense? You see where I'm going with this?

We've normalized it.

Well, not only that, but what happens when you raise like square takes a percentage of every transaction.

Yeah.

What happens when you raise the price of every transaction by a dollar or by two dollars, they get an extra six cents. You do that a couple of million times a day. Like they did an office space that was very much driven by square.

Yeah.

So. And I am fully on board with you. I. It drives me nuts when I'm like, look the most. Like, if my kind of general rule of thumb is if we're both standing, you're going to get a quarter. If I'm sitting at a table somewhere and you brought stuff out to me, great. But if we're both standing, you're probably.

Going to get different.

Yes. But so, yeah, to me, that's. Once again, that's where tech has overreached.

Oh, gosh. Yes.

Into that. And it's like, okay, I. I just don't see how this is helpful. And tech used Covid.

Oh, it did.

As a way for that to get in some little bit insidious marketing. There is the. So to me, I mean, what's interesting is I've got a lot of process pieces. Once again, this should be process, process, process. Make this as smooth as possible.

Yes.

Make this as pleasant as possible. Make people walk out of that door and be like, wow, that was a great experience. There is a reason why I typically shop at Target instead of Walmart. I walk out of Target feeling not like I need to dance with a bus. I go into Target or Walmart, I don't feel quite as good about my transaction. I'm willing to pay a few extra bucks for. Is all about that customer experience.

Yeah.

It's the brighter lights, it's the brighter shelving. It's the, it's cleaner. It's. It's those types of things. How do you create the culture of that, though? What are some of the things that like, like the, the process can empower. Can empower?

Yeah.

The, the steps involved. But how do you make sure that the people consistently want to show up with a smile?

Well, part of it is clarifying your expectations.

Oh, I like that.

Yeah. I mean, part of you've got to clarify your expectations. And then also, if you're really talking about customer experience and how it relates to your team members, it's constantly revisiting the mission through the customer lens. So we ask in meetings, especially as we go through our quarterly meetings and as we look every year, as we re. Clarify what our mission, vision, values are, is would a client be able to describe our values based on how we're treating them today?

Interesting. I like that. If I can ask, like, what are the mission? What is the mission statement? And let's let's look at this from the lens. Is that.

Yeah. So we have, we have a purpose statement and then we have a motto. So our purpose statement is we provide peace of mind by simplifying the complicated. So we take things that are difficult to understand, insurance and hr, we simplify them into simple processes and we take, we take it off of your plate. And then our motto is do good, be good. So do good work and be good humans. And that falls with our four core values, which are service, excellence, teamwork and community.

Makes sense.

Yeah.

It all fits. And it's simple. It is. It's funny, like in our business we just have the core value. That's it. And for us it's success is a shared thing.

Yes.

And it's interesting as we work through problems. It, it shows because I was recently working through something with an employee like, look, we need to work on this. How's this going to work? My mindset was how do I make her better?

Yeah.

How do, how do we make this better? It's the same thing that we look at with our clients.

Yeah.

If, if they're successful, we're going to be successful.

Exactly. Our job is to provide peace of mind to our clients and to our team members. So how do we do it?

As some quick spitballs. What do you see as some of the long term returns on investment for investing in the customer experience, both from a culture side and from the process side?

I mean, culture side. When you are taking care of your customers and your customers are appreciative, I think it speaks volumes for your organization. It just continues to feed, it's self feeding. So there's that piece. And like it's just when, when you're doing good work and they're saying you're doing good work, you feel good, then you do better, you keep going. That to me, it's easy.

That to me is the biggest thing is if you, if it, if your employees, if the people that you work with feel like they're making a difference, they feel like they're making other people happy, it is a whole hell of a lot easier for them to feel happy about what they're doing.

Yeah. And impact amplifies momentum. You do more, you get faster. And the same thing with, with the customer side, when you are doing right by the customer, they tell people. And when they tell people, they become the marketing engine for your organization that you didn't really pay for. Which is really amazing.

It is, it is one of those things where I'm like, when I see customer Experience done poorly. And not everything needs to be this whiz bang. I mean, it doesn't need to be like, hot towel surface. No. If you exceed people's expectations, if you make them feel good and, like, they're getting a value, you succeeded.

Yeah.

What are some actionable steps? These are the ones I'll let. I'll let you pick one first, because we got a couple of them here from this.

I mean, first is really defining your vision, so articulating what great customer experience looks like for you and your business. It starts with your core values, but again, it's not just wall art. You actually got to do it.

I love the wall art thing. That is amazing.

What about for you?

I loved your piece about empowerment, and I feel the same way about that. If people are just able to make decisions, first off, they feel better about it because they're like, oh, I'm. I. I'm able to handle this, and they've got that responsibility and they're good with it. Plus, your customers feel so much better about it because they're like, oh, management has confidence in what these people are doing. If they're like, oh, let's see if I can do this. Even the customer is like, oh, we'll.

Give it a shot.

This feels slimy.

Yeah. I like what you said about mapping and optimizing, so creating that journey map of knowing, like, what are the things. Identifying those. Those key processes and streamlining them immediately. Keeping the humanity in the streamlining, too.

Another one that I like is lead by example. Now, there's so many different ways that we can talk about this. We talked about in the last episode with emotions, like, if you want your employees to throw stuff, go ahead and throw stuff. This one, I see so many owners that will walk through a place like a retail establishment and act like no one exists. And I'm like, dude, how can you not be like, hey, thanks for coming in. If you say that your employees are going to be like, oh, okay. But I see so many people that are like, they're. They're just walking through. They're like, I got a business to run.

Yeah.

Not realizing that the customers are the reason why they have a business.

Yes.

When you look for quick shots.

Yeah.

What do you see as a red flag? I love these red flag questions. When you walk in the door.

Yeah. You can.

You can see the red flags all over the place. They may not be red flags.

No.

But you see the things that make you think this is going to go sideways.

Yeah. It's when you first Start talking to someone, even if you haven't decided you're gonna work with them and you ask them a question, they go, that's not our process. They say that's not our process. Or I mean instead I wanna hear like, let's figure it out. Let's figure out how to make this right. So I mean culture is not correct when the default response to someone as a customer is, that's not our process. Yeah, that's mine.

Love it.

So what's one tool a small business should consider first to streamline their customer facing processes?

To me, if it's, if it's like a business to business and more complex process, some sort of task management tool, be it Monday, be it asana, whatever stuff doesn't get missed.

No.

There is nothing worse than a customer being like, hey, where's my, when's my project going to get done?

Yeah.

And you're like, oh we. Bob didn't get the email. There's nothing worse than that. We screwed up. It's just the absolute like worst way to do it. So yeah, to me, some sort of like operating software that helps you nail down those processes. So that way you've got the customer journey mapped out.

Yeah.

And you know what's going on. And like I said at that point too, you can look at it and say, oh, why did this go sideways? Or do we need to adapt? How can we get better quarterly? Look at those things and be like, what can we do to make this better?

Yeah.

I think we've got a decent wrap on customer experience. We could dive into this. All the topics we've talked about, we've given these base level things and I'm excited because we're going to end up revisiting a lot of these parts.

2 and 3.

Yeah. Like hey, we screwed this up still.

Uh huh.

Yeah. No, that's for all of you out there, make sure that your customer experience makes a lasting impression on your customers. The good kind, the five star kind, not the zero out of five would not recommend kind. You're going to end up with one or two of those just because you know you can't make everyone happy. But make sure that most of them are the five stars and give yourself the best chance for those five stars. Your insight and experience once again appreciated. It's, it's always nice to have someone that has that different, different perspective other than process, process, process, process, just do the damn thing. So I appreciate that.

Sure.

For those of you that want other episodes, you want more information, maybe you'd like to have us come in and talk to you about company culture, things of that nature. BusinessFixPodcast.com of course, it's dot com. We got that.

Yeah, we do.

Locked in the business fix on all of your socials. Go ahead, give us a review of Subscription always goes a long way. We'd appreciate it. Next week we are going to talk about navigating difficult cover.

What do you call those, dealing with difficult conversations? Crucial conversations.

No, but the sweaty.

Oh, the sweaty 10 minute conversations.

Yes, yes.

So much fun.

May. Maybe that's even the thumbnail we use.

Oh, I'm so excited.

As always, that makes one of us. Take care of yourself. If you can take care of someone else too, we will see you very. Ra.