MBA1100 Q&A Wednesday: How do I know I can trust my customer support team with my company’s financials?

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. Because working harder is not enough. You got to work smarter. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode where I answer a question from you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Bill and Bill asks how do I know I can trust my customer support team with my company financials? What Bill's referring to is that when customer service has to answer billing inquiries, billing questions from customers, they're going to have to have access to your payment processor like Stripe or PayPal. And access to that account also gives them access to information like your banking account and all the data, like how much money you're actually making. And Bill wants to know how can I know that I can trust my customer support team with that information and that access? Well, that's what I'll be answering in today's episode. They need that information to do their job right, but you might be concerned in terms of security and Your financial information. Is there a way around this? How should you approach this? How does Bill know his information is safe? Well, we get into all that in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Bill asks a very interesting question about trust and your customer service team having access to information like your financial information, your banking information, access to your payment processor, and of course, how much money your business is making. It's a valid concern, but my job is to be completely honest with Bill and everybody who's listening that has the same question in their head. Your financial information is important, but your customer service team is the face of your organization. They're handling something much more important. Your brand and your business. When anybody contacts you, your business, they're going to be speaking to the customer service team. That is their impression of your company. For example, if somebody reaches out to our software company, Webinar Ninja, they want to learn about our features, they have some questions about our prices or something like that, they reach out to support or they jump on chat and they're going to reach one of our customer service agents. What happens next is really going to be their impression of Webinar Ninja. The experience they have on that chat, on that email, is going to shape their understanding and their impression of our company. To me, that's a bigger responsibility than anything else. They're the voice of the company. So I wanted to mention that first because that's really a huge responsibility in itself and that you're trusting your customer service team with something much bigger than your financial information. Why do I say that? Because there's recourse. Right? What's the worst thing your customer service team can do? Change some banking details or something like that? Well, you'll find out really quickly that that's happening. You're going to get a flag in your email that somebody's doing some change or something like that into your account. You'll notice that you're not making money and you can obviously call your payment processor and rectify that. I've been running businesses for over 15 years now, and this has never been a problem. Your customer service team is not going to do something illegal, a crime, and lose their job. They're upright people. They're people that are trying to do a good job. And you hire them because, hey, you probably saw something that's noble in them. But let's go back to the interaction they have with customers. If they give a customer a poor impression, if they're nasty, if they're rude, there is no recourse with that. That's the impression they have and it's hard to take that back. When it comes to banking, you can always have some sort of recourse. Number two now, when it comes to your financial information, how much money your company is actually making, a bit of honesty, a bit of transparency can go a long way. There's lots of companies that have open door policies when it comes to their financials, like BareMetrics or Buffer or ConvertKit, where they actually publish all their financials, how much money they're making, how much money are they spending, all that kind of stuff. So even if you're just transparent within your team internally, it gives your team an overall understanding of how well the company's doing, how well it's growing, and how their efforts as the customer service team is paying dividends is helping the company grow, helping them feel more significant. So this is not a bad thing. Now you might be thinking, well, this is a complete stranger. I don't know if I want to give them this information from day one. Well, you don't have to. You can give access to your payment processor like Stripe to just a customer service manager. There's a lot of applications that have APIs that have integrations with payment processors like Braintree and PayPal and Stripe, where it can pass on the customer information, their monthly plan, how much they're being charged, last time they were charged, all that information can be passed on to that app. Apps like Intercom, which is like a customer support chat and messaging service, they have an integration where you can just get all that information, pull it out of Stripe, and that way your customer service agents can see all the important information they need to know to handle a ticket, like when the billing cycle is when they were charged last, the type of plan they have, all that kind of stuff without actually having access to the Stripe account. And all your agents can have this access or this information via an integration. And only your customer service manager will have direct access to Stripe to maybe issue refunds. The other thing is that if you're using Stripe as your payment processor, this is the payment processor we use, there are levels of access you can give. You can give developer access, admin access or support access. And this kind of limits their ability to see certain information as well as being able to edit certain features inside of the app. So this has been thought through anyway by some of these payment processors. Stripe in particular is really good at that. Now, remember I talked about, you know, some companies are very transparent about the financials and they show the whole world how much money they're making, how much money they're spending, and how you can also do that within your company only and not make it completely public. Another version of that is, you know, showing the revenue you're making month after month, or sharing that with your team, but also sharing your tax return. So at the end of the financial year or the end of the quarter, depending on the way you have it set up in your company or in your country, you can share how much money you've spent that year or that quarter and on what and where you made the money. It gives you more of an appreciation of what it takes to run the company. A lot of your team members might be surprised when they see these financials, like, wow, a lot of money. Money is being spent on payroll. A lot of money is being spent on server power. A lot of money is being spent on marketing. And it gives them a greater respect and insight of how their role contributes to the overall success to the company. And this doesn't have to be detailed documentation. It can be your simple profit and loss sheet that you have at the end of the financial year or quarter. If this makes you nervous or you're not used to kind of sharing this information with your team, you can start with just sharing it with the managers in your team. Another very important point, when it comes to customer service and billing and finances, a lot of the questions they're going to get is about the customer's billing, whether they want to know how much they're being charged or a discrepancy on their credit card. If you have international customers, they may get a different charge every month because of conversion rates. Like, you might be charging, you know, $95 a month, but if they live, let's say, in France, that might equal a different amount of euros every single month. And they want to know, like, what's going on? Why is that? And you'd be like, well, we charge by the dollar. They need to know that. They want to know exactly how much you're being charged every month. They may need a receipt or an invoice so they can be able to deduct it on taxes. There's a whole lot of questions that it comes to billing and finances that customer service has to answer. And they need to have that information at their fingertips. So in order for them to do a great job, you got to trust them. You got to trust them with that information. And if you show the indication that you don't trust them, that's going to cause some ill feelings between you and your employees. They're going to feel like, hey, I'm not a criminal here, you know, I'm somebody trying to do a great job for you. So be aware of that fact, of that interaction, of that relationship factor between you and your customer service team.

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Trust is a huge, huge factor in building a great team. And your customer support team is the face of your organization. They're the voice of your organization. They represent you and your company. They're the people that are going to interact with your customers the most. They're the ones who are going to get berated with questions. So they need to have all the information possible to serve your customers properly. Of course, you can have access to only this information and you're going to have to answer all these questions yourself. But you're never going to scale your business if you can't trust your team. And remember, there's always recourse. There's always a way for you to make sure you are secure and that your financials are not being used. That should be in the back of your mind. The front of your mind should be, I need a great team that's going to take care of my customers just like I would. In fact, your goal should be finding people that can do a better job than you. I know that our customer service team does a great job, much better than I would ever do. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. That wraps up today's lesson. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I used to be a lone wolf. I used to build businesses on my own. I used to be a solopreneur. Build businesses with nobody around me. I used to have maybe some freelancers, maybe some contractors. And one of the reasons I never scaled a larger business in the past was because of this trust factor. I didn't trust people like I should. Once I got over that, I was able to really build significant businesses with significant impact. Understanding that I can't do it all. I need experts in different areas. I need people that are specialized, that are focused on certain parts of the business. Ultimately, your goal should be the leader of the company, the person that makes the bigger decisions, the person that leads your team to success and allowing everybody in your team to. To do a great job. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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