Positive Reviews, “Cheap Customers” & Charging Movers For Damage?

Hey, my friend, it's Louis Massaro, CEO of Moving Mastery and founder of Moving Sales Academy. I recently received a Facebook message and from a moving company owner asked me a couple of questions and I think it's really important that everybody hears the answer to this question. Alright, so I want to go ahead and I want to share with you the question that he asked me and then tell you what I responded to him. Alright, so his question was, he said, I'll read it to you. He said, I have a quick question since I'm working on gaining more positive reviews. What is the best way to solve these issues? Number one, the damages, like scratches that the movers did. And number two, how to handle cheap customers that were expecting to get the move done in three hours, but it took six hours and then they're complaining about how long it took and asking for a huge discount, he said. Then he went on to say, in my opinion, I think that we should reimburse 10 to 30% of the deal and take the money out of the mover's salary, otherwise I'm going to be losing money every time I give them a discount. So you know, the objective here, what he's really trying to do is he's trying to gain more positive reviews, but he's got a couple of issues, right? So the first issue is damage, right. The second issue is really a miscalculation of the move estimate. Right? So let's kind of break them down one by one. All right? As far as the damage is concerned, you need to address the damage, you need to resolve the issue with the customer to make them happy. You can't have a process of saying, you know what, I'm just going to give them 10 to 30% of whatever it is and it's a done deal and that's it. Right? Go back, watch my previous video on how to deal with damage claims and follow that step by step process. I'll put a link down below so that you have it and you can go and follow that. But the idea is that you need to make the customer happy, number one. Number two is that you want to make sure that when you're focused on these problems, you're focused on the cause of the problem and you're not just trying to put a band aid on the effect of the problem. That's what he was trying to do here and that's basically what I told him, alright? I said you can't put a band aid on the effect of the problem. You have to resolve the cause of the problem. So with the damage, the cause of the problem is your movers aren't trained to not damage furniture. Yes, claims will happen, damage will happen here and there, but it shouldn't be to a point where you're. It's putting you out of business. All right? And it shouldn't be to a point where you have to make the decision on should I pay customers or should I not pay them? Because his goal here is to get a better online reputation, to get better reviews. And that should be your goal too. If you want to stay in business long term, you should want to have a good reputation. You should want your customers out there saying good things about you. And if you damage their furniture and say, listen, we're just going to give you 10% or 30% of what it is, and then you turn around and take the money out of your movers check. So you're going to have a mutiny on your hands with your movers too. Right? So basically I told them you need to take a step back and you need to look at this, the big picture here, all right? There's a couple of problems. Number one, you need to do a better job of training your movers for, to not cause damage. All right? Again, go watch the video on dealing with damages and resolving complaints. And his second concern was how do I handle cheap custom. How do I handle cheap? Customers that were expecting to get the move done in three hours, but it took six and then they're complaining and want a huge discount, so they're expecting three hours. Why are they expecting three hours? Something that was said on the phone with your company or doing an on site estimate made that expectation. Right. So even if you're just quoting somebody an hourly rate, how did they get the expectation of three hours when it really turned into six? You need to look at your estimating process and not worry about, you know, the customer wanting a huge discount. It's actually not a discount. The customer wants to pay what they were expecting. So take a step back and instead of trying to look at how to resolve those issues, how to, you know, only give the customer back a certain percentage of the month, focus on how do you do a better job estimating the move so that the expectations are set correctly. And Yes, I understand 100%. There's going to be times where, you know, you do your best. Given an estimate, you go out to the job and it ends up being longer than it was estimated. Right. How you deal with that on a customer by customer basis is you resolve it with the customer. The customer's adamant with, hey listen, I was expecting three hours. Hours, it depends on what the expectation was. Did you send them an estimate that says it's going to be three hours? You know, did that estimate clearly state that this is just a ballpark estimate or did it say this is how long it's going to take based on the information that you sent? You know, it's all about setting the customer's expectations correctly at the time of booking the move so that you don't run into this problem. And if you only run into this problem here and there and in order to keep the customer happy, you have you just charge them the three hours instead of the six hours, it's not going to kill you unless it's happening every time. Unless you have a faulty estimating process to where almost every move the customer has an expectation of a low estimate and it ends up being double or even more. Right, so you want to focus on the cause, not try to put a band aid on the effect of it. Alright, so in this case, you know, he's looking to just give the customer back 10 to 30% of the deal, take the money out of the mover's salary and he says if I do this, I'm going to be losing money every time I give the customer a discount. Don't focus on that. Focus on fixing the cause of the problem. All right, so basically I went on and I just said to him, I said the way I like to handle things is to fix the cause of the problem and not put a band aid on it. So if you look at these two situations, I would focus on the cause the is problem. The best way to deal with damages is to train your movers to get less damage. If you want to keep a good reputation, which you do, then you want to repair the damage and give the customer the money back. Yes, that will cost you money, but a bad reputation will cost you more money. The cause is the movers. They need to be trained and held accountable for their damages. On your second question, if the customer was expecting three hours and it ended up being six hours, then I would focus on doing a better job giving estimates and setting the customer's expectations. Sometimes something was said in the conversation with your company that made them expect three hours. It will be a problem if it's six hours, period. All right, so listen, these things are going to continue to happen. So if you find yourself constantly struggling and you know, he used the term here, you know, with cheap customers, you know, it doesn't make a customer cheap because they were expecting to pay something and then it doubled. Right? So I just, you know, if you struggle with these issues, I just challenge you to kind of change your perspective on the way that you look at it. And instead of trying to keep putting band aids on the issues, Band aids on the issues, Band aids on the issues, focus on the cause. All right. I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, as always, leave them in the comments below. Go out there. Every single day. Profit in your business, thrive in your life. I'll see you next week.

Hey, my friend, it's Louis. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do me two favors. 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 it into a multimillion 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 S A-R-O.com ten rules. 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.