How to Approach Service Quality When You're Scaling

You're never going to have 100% satisfaction rate at scale. It's just impossible. So I met someone there. He stopped me before I went on stage to speak and he said, Neil, I'm really disappointed with your agency. And I'm like, who are you working with? What team? What department? Because we got like 1,000—

Oh, he's a client.

1,000+ people. Or he was a past client, right? So I was just like, all right. And we typically do enterprise work. He was in this new program called Level Up. I don't know how much it was, call it $1,000 a month where we just help out startups just get things off the ground. And I was very transparent with him. I'm like, there's only so much we can do for $1,000. And he's just like, I get it. He got it. And I was like, if I gave you the people I put on an enterprise account, you know, a big global 1,000 company, I'm like, I would lose my shirt. Really, I would be just losing my shirt. So I was like, what was your problem? So he tells me some of his problems. I was like, cool. So I introduced him to someone on my team, the president of that division. I said, make sure you refund his last month's worth of money. And then on stage, uh, right before I went on stage, I said, when are you free next week for a call? He's like, with who? I'm like, me. He's just like, what are we going to do? I'm like, You're going to give me your website URL. I'm going to get on the phone with you for 30 minutes to an hour. I'm going to break down everything I would change to grow your revenue. So then I was on stage and people were talking about marketing and stuff. And I was giving an example because they were mainly entrepreneurs.

You spoke to them?

No, I was just speaking, but I was giving an example during my speech in marketing that not everything goes the way you want. And in business, because most of these people are entrepreneurs, you got to adapt and you got to take your licks and you got to, improve based on data. Because in one of my slides, I was talking about reviews, and this was an example of like a real-life review. Now, everyone in the— no one in the audience knew that he gave me this feedback other than Steve. Steve may have felt bad. I didn't care. I was, I was happy that he brought this to my attention.

Yeah.

And I use him as examples on stage. I'm like, look, reviews are important. I'm like, you know, I was talking to this guy named Charles. Charles is the one who gave me the complaint. I'm getting on the phone with him for an hour next week. I'm like, how much did you pay Charles? I'm like, around $1,000? And he's like, yeah. And I was like, guys, do you think it's worth my time to go on the phone with Charles for an hour to break down everything he needs to do to grow his business? He wasn't happy with my company. And I'm like, we have some amazing people who are extremely satisfied. You're never going to have 100% satisfaction rate at scale. It's just impossible. And what he ended up telling me, he was happy at the end that I'm doing this. People are like, no, it's not worth my time. And I said, it is worth my time. The reason it's worth my time is one, Charles is now much more likely to evangelize my company. 2, I'm righting a wrong. 3, I'm learning what we did wrong in his opinion, so I can go back to my team and work on fixing it to create a better experience in the future, which will cause less churn and grow my overall revenue faster in the long run.

Mm-hmm.

Assuming my team takes that feedback, which they're really good at, especially Sarah who runs that division. But the point I'm getting at is I was just really transparent in front of an audience. And at the end of being transparent, I had a lot of people come up to me who wanted to hire my agency for marketing, even though I was transparent on stage that Charles was not happy, he didn't get results, and I was working on fixing it.

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And just people didn't care.

People like stories too. It's, it's a, like us talking about this now might, lead to more leads as well, right? Yeah. But the problem is there might be an expectation now where if they aren't happy, they get a 1-hour call with you.

I would do that. Anyone who's not happy ever hit me up. I'm always willing to get on the phone with them.

Would you do it with 100 people?

Yeah.

Would you do it with 1,000 people?

Yes.

10,000 people?

If time permitted, yes.

Yeah.

Um, I think, but I think it's a really important part.

I think you have to do this, especially when there's, if it keeps popping up, you have to get on all of them. 'Cause then you, you're the one that can drive the pace at the end of the day. You have to.

But I hate to say this. One, it wouldn't ever happen with 1,000 people. You just look at client count. Um, 2, a lot of people would've been fired if it happened with 1,000 people way before then. I'm not trying to be rude, but it's just reality.

Yeah.

Because they're tarnishing our company's name. And 3, I look at every experience as a way to improve revenue and reduce churn, which grows revenue and profitability faster. if the team wouldn't take action on that, if I'm giving them solid data that's actionable, not fluff, not just someone saying, ah, I didn't like this creative, this is why I'm not happy. And if my team actually showed positive results and they didn't like creative, there's not much I can do on that other than to try to make them happier with the creative. But this guy wasn't happy with the results, the actual revenue increase on his end. So I was like, all right, sounds good. I don't think he was in the program long, And at $1,000, there's only so much we can do from a consulting standpoint because it's just, it's hard. The costs are high. But for me, the way I look at it as every interaction helps me make my product better, which is how you build a big company.

Yeah. And you can't build a product or a service in a vacuum. At the end of the day, this is interesting cuz I, I talked to someone on my team, um, he likes to build products in a vacuum, right? Uh, sometimes, and I'm, he's not used to talking to customers as much. Same thing with his last startup. He's just not talk, used to talking to customers that much. I'm like, we have to talk to customers a lot more and we have to, not only that, we have to be using our products and services ourselves. Um, and not only that, um, it's, it's not, it's talking to customers, but it's also talking to prospects too and understanding what their problems are because that's what business is at the end of the day. It's just solving problems.

So let me reframe, reframe the question. Would you rather talk to an upset customer Or a happy customer?

I don't learn anything from happy customers.

Bingo. And I knew you were going to say that. And he's spot on. If you talk to happy customers, and I still think someone on your team should, I don't think it's a good use of your time, but someone on your team should, because if they can figure out what are the commonalities and they could push that messaging forward with your marketing, maybe you'll get more conversions on the front end. But the bigger thing is by talking to all the upset customers, you now know what to fix and improve. By talking to the happy customers, it doesn't tell you what you should change in the business.

Have you seen that show on Netflix called American Factory?

No.

Okay. So this is where a China, a Chinese company buys an American factory in the Midwest. And there's a, there's a breaking point where the Chinese people are basically on one side and then there's the American people. Right. And the Chinese HR was talking to the Chinese people, was like, wait, go back.

I'm confused. When you say Chinese on one side, American on the other, are you talking about in the US factory or in the China factory?

I think they're in the US factory collaborating now. So this is a story that was told to me, right? So basically the Chinese HR talking to the Chinese people, just you have to watch when you work with Americans, they really need compliments right now. If you're Chinese and like I'm Taiwanese, right? So whatever, right? It's, you're, we're wired to take criticism. You're wired, like if you're Asian, you're, you're wired to take a lot of heat. You're just never quite good enough when you're growing up. Right. And so my point of saying this is I learned a lot more from criticism and my coach, my coach, haha. He's like, yeah, you've done something sick with your mind. You disregard compliments and you take criticism as compliments. Right? And so I think if you, I'm not saying you should be like me guys, but I'm saying if you can learn to seek out more criticism, you're gonna grow. 'Cause even, even, uh, Bill Gates himself, love him or hate him, has said that success is a lousy teacher. And it is. I don't learn much from, from successes.

Yeah, I, I don't either.

Yeah. And when I read like a biography, for example, I wanna know the tough things that they went through, the tough experiences. So then I can know maybe how I might want to adjust when that happens to me.

One of the best lessons I learned from Elon years and years ago, uh, not in person, but he just talked about this in an interview or somewhere online, was he reads a lot of biographies. And when he was asked by the interviewer why, he said, I like reading biographies of some of these successful people because I can learn from all their failures and mistakes and avoid making those same mistakes. And, uh, for himself, right? And because if you look at technology, it's changed over time, but business strategy and concepts and principles, they've actually stayed very similar.

Human psychology doesn't really change.

Yes.

Yeah.

So learning over time from like the Rockefellers and people like that, it can help you figure out what mistakes to avoid going forward in the future.

Have you listened to the Founders Podcast?

No.

That's the one that's worth listening to, cuz all he does is he look, he, he reads biographies and he deconstructs it into like a 30 to 40 minute podcast. And, and he's done like 1,300 of these so far. And he'll deconstruct like Sony, uh, Microsoft, uh, Walmart, um, the freaking, um, Raising Cane's, which is like multi-billion dollar company. Yeah. You, you would like— Who does it? It's David Senra. This guy like lives in Miami and he's like, it's, it's great because you can get it really quickly. He did, he did a Michael Dell podcast, but the thing that's common with all of these people is they were maniacally focused and they did it for a very long time. Um, and that actually brings me to my next topic over here. I think we should kind of go back and forth here. These are the first principles of building a generational business or the building blocks. People like to say first principles. That gets a little confusing to me. I just like to say the building blocks, right? Anyway, that's it for today, guys. We'll see you tomorrow.