Does Your Moving Company Have an Awareness Board?

Hey, my friend. It's Luis Massaro, CEO of Moving Mastery and founder of Moving Sales Academy. Today I want to talk about awareness, right? Having awareness of all of your customers and the status of the move. And if everything went good, if it didn't go good, are they happy? Are they not happy is something that's really important because you don't want to be in a situation where all of a sudden you think everything's fine and you get a negative online review, you think everything's fine and you get a Better Business Bureau complaint. Right. You want to have awareness of these problems and there's some things you could do and set up to make sure that that happens. Right? So maybe right now you're a little bit out of touch with customer service and you have somebody in your company that might be dealing with any customer complaints or issues to resolve them. And maybe you only hear about them when they get escalated, or maybe you're dealing with each and every one of them as they happen. The idea is that you need to be aware of any customer that is not 100% happy. Okay? Don't look at it as only if it's a problem, only if they're complaining am I going to be worried about it and concerned about it. You should be worried and concerned about any customer that's not 100% happy. Okay? Number one, you want to create raving fans, Right. You want to get repeat referral business and you want five star reviews, period. That's going to help grow your business at tremendous levels. But what you don't want is you don't want to be in a position where all of a sudden negative review and you had no idea that there was even an issue with the job. Right? So I want to talk to you about something that I put in place years ago in my business. It's called an awareness board. An awareness board is basically a way to keep track of any customer that you've already moved that's not 100% satisfied with their move. Okay? Anyone that might have an issue, you need to have it up on the wall. You need to have it visible for you and your team to see so that you could work to resolve these issues. Because if you don't work to resolve them, they're just going to come and bite you from behind unexpectedly. Right? Right. You're either going to get a, you know, like we talked about, you're going to get a BBB complaint, negative online review, they're going to charge back their credit card. You have to be aware of them so that you can resolve them. Right. And for me, you know, when I came up with the Awareness board, I had already had a team of people that were handling any customer issues. They knew how to resolve them, they knew how to walk them through, you know, the customer complaint resolution form and just kind of go through the steps, step by step on what to do to get their issue handled and make them happy. But I needed to know what was going on. I needed a way to see any issue that could possibly be a problem to make sure we were resolving it. So what we did at first was created a Excel spreadsheet and I called it the Awareness Board. I put it up on the wall on a flat screen TV in the office and basically it listed every customer that was not 100% happy what their complaint or issue is and the status, what we were doing to resolve it. We later then started using a software called Zendesk. I'll put the link below, which if you do get it needs to be configured, it's not ready to go out of the box. But we basically took the Excel spreadsheet that I'm going to go ahead and give you, by the way, in the download down below, you'll be able to download it, or if it's not in the link down below, go to lewismassaro.com awareness board and I'll go ahead and attach it there to where you can download it and use it in your company. Once you download it, you'll have it. I won't be able to see anything. But basically we took that Excel spreadsheet and had Zendesk recreate it so that we had a software to make sure that we were resolving issues quickly. You know, at the time we were doing 12,000 moves a year and you know, there was customer service issues. I had 10 people in customer service and I needed to make sure that we had a system for staying on top of everything. So even if you're doing, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 moves a month, you know, you need to be on top of it. So even if it's a whiteboard, even if it's a list that you keep in your phone, if you're a one man show and you know, keep a list of customers that aren't 100% happy. Because if you don't, you forget about them. If you don't, you only address them when they call with their complaint or when the review shows up. Right? So by having it in your face, it reminds you these are issues that need to be resolved. You know, a Lot of times we focus solely on book and moves, book and moves, book and moves, service and moves, service and moves, service and moves. We need to remember that after the move is serviced, you need happy customers, you need raving fans. And a lot of times there might be a really small issue that if you're on top of it, you can turn it around and create a raving fan. So first thing you're going to want to do is create a system and an environment within your company where the complaints make their way to where they can get on the awareness board. And what I mean by that is, sometimes I've worked with companies and there's an environment where the problems kind of get swept under the rug, right? The owner doesn't really want to know about them. There's no real process for walking them through a resolution. And it's more of like firefighting. It's more of as complaints pop up, they're putting out the fire, the customer seems somewhat satisfied, so they hang up the call and don't really do anything with it again unless they call back. You have to create an environment where everything comes to the surface. All right? So the first thing you want to do is have a meeting with your staff and say, listen, I want to start creating raving fans, and I need to know every Customer that's not 100% happy, all right? We're going to start using an awareness board, whichever however you want to go about using it. But we're going to have an awareness board, and we're all going to be aware of every customer that's not 100% happy, so that we could work to make sure we get it resolved. And, you know, create open lines of communication. Right? Make sure that any customer that calls on a certain number that has an issue, whoever's answering those lines, knows that it needs to go on the awareness board. Okay? So just having the awareness board doesn't do anything for you. Your staff needs to know, hey, I got a customer that's not 100% happy. Let's put them on the board. Don't look at it as a negative thing. Don't look at it as a bad thing to find these customers, because by putting them on the board, that's the first step to getting it resolved. What you don't want to do is you don't want to shoot the messenger either. All right? So you want to create an environment where your employees feel safe to bring this issue to you or to whoever is going to be getting things on the awareness board to where you Know if they speak to somebody. If your sales rep gets a call back from a customer and the customer says, hey, listen, I just want to let you know this or that happened on the move, you know, everything was fine, but you know, I'm not really too thrilled about it that the salesperson feels compelled to bring that information to you so that you can get it on the awareness board. So the idea is that you just want to create an environment that will allow the complaints and the issues and the customers that are not 100% happy, right? Don't just look at it and say complaint or issue. Customers that are not 100% happy need to go on the awareness board. Then you need to go through the process of resolving them all. It seems like extra work, but you know what you need? Good reviews, bad reviews are going to be damaging to your business. So it's like one or the other. Why put in all the work to have marketing to pay for marketing, to set up your sales team to get everything going, to service the move, right? To send the truck out to go do the move. And then maybe there's like a little issue that you could fix and there'll be a really happy customer that then will refer you to people, they'll use you again, they'll leave a five star review. Why let something small, let that issue, let that customer not be a raving fan. All right, so again, an awareness board, you want to get it up, you want to make it visible. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to include the Excel spreadsheet. You're going to need Excel in order to download it. Go ahead, take a look at that and it will kind of open your eyes to walking through the complaint resolution process. Even if you get one complaint every three months, get it up somewhere, Maybe it doesn't need its own board, right? But get it up visible for everybody to see so that your team knows we need to work to resolve this. Because otherwise you're just waiting for them to call you. And when you do that, you're putting yourself in a bad position. Alright? So hope this was helpful. Make sure you go out there every single day and profit in business and thrive in your life. I'll see you later. Hey, my friend, it's Louis. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do me two favors, please. Number one, subscribe to this channel so that you continue to get updates every time I release new training for you. And number two, if you'd like to get ahead a little bit faster and become more profitable in your business, What I'd like to do is give you a copy of my 10 rules of a profitable Moving company. These are the same 10 rules that I applied in my business that helped me grow into a multi million dollar nationwide company. Okay? So all you need to do is click on the link on this page or head over to louismasaro.com tenrules so that's Louis L O U I S Massaro M A s s a r o.com 10rules. Just put in your name and email address and I'll email you out a copy. Okay? Until then, every single day, go out and profit in business and thrive in life. I'll see you later.