MBA1508 Guest Teacher – Clay Staires – How to Create Repeat Business and Customer Service Experiences That Wow in the Digital Age

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals foreign. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the podcast that always has your back every day with our 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 guest teacher episode. Today we have a very special guest TE Clay Stairs. Clay is the founder of the Leadership Initiative who has helped thousands of people with his leadership coaching mindset Coaching mentoring and is a firm believer that if you want to learn how to lead, you got to learn how to lead yourself first. Clay is incredibly inspiring and you're going to love today's lesson. He's going to be teaching you how to create repeat business and customer service experiences that wow. In the digital age. I cannot tell you how important customer services to your business. A lot of people think the hardest thing about business is getting sales. No, the hardest thing is keeping the sale, making sure the customer is happy so they continue to buy from you. Whether it's a reoccurring charge or a membership or a repeat customer going into your restaurant. And today Clay Stair is gonna show us exactly how to do that. He's got a great formula for you to follow. He's gonna show you how to Define your goals, define your roles in the company, how to design the system to ensure you get repeat customers and happy. He'll show you how to implement a culture of accountability and follow up and show you how to track what matters. So much value in today's episode. I can't wait to get into it. So let's get down to it. Let's get down to business. Clay Stairs is incredibly successful. He's helped so many entrepreneurs. He's a great speaker, great teacher, but it wasn't always great for him. Clay actually started out at the bottom and when I say bottom, I mean bottom. He, he was literally homeless, living out of his car, a 1988 Oldsmobile Delta. He had to find a way to change his state, change his situation. He started with himself and then he helped others. And today he's one of the leading voice in leadership, business, customer satisfaction and culture. Today he's going to show you how to make sure you get repeat customers. How do you win them over with incredible customer service and the impact of great customer service as well as poor customer service. What happens to your business when you don't deliver? This is a great, great lesson. I'll passing it on to Clay now, but I'll be back to give my takeaways and to wrap up the episode. But for now, take it away, Clay.

Hey, back at you, Omar. Hey. Hello. This is Clay Stairs, America's millionaire schoolteacher and self proclaimed hairstylist for Dwayne Johnson, the Rock. Hey. I spent 47 years of my life working hard, putting in crazy hours, only to find that I still wasn't tapping into the true gold that was inside of me. You know what I mean? You know, just feeling like there's more to me than I've tapped into yet. Well, hey, at the ripe old age of 47 years old, I decided to jump off the proverbial cliff and become an entrepreneur. I wasn't born this way. It wasn't natural. I had to become the person that I wanted to be. And now I run a business consulting company called claystairs.com I'm a venture capitalist and author and husband and father of two wonderful little gals. So, Omar, thank you so much for inviting me me to be a guest on your show today. Today I'm going to be teaching you all about the five stair steps for how to create repeat business and customer services that wow. Now, so let's get down to business. So poor customer service always, always comes down to the responsibility of leadership. There are two reasons for poor customer service. Training and accountability. Too often learning leaders give people tasks to do, but they don't train them well and they don't hold them accountable to what they've been told to do. As a result, you find yourself just relying on people to be great on their own. And they're not. I have a friend, Arthur Greenough, who owns a Chick Fil a store here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has people asking him all the time, how do you get these kids, these young kids, to say, my pleasure. It's my pleasure all the time? His response is beautiful. I love this. He says, we tell them what to do and then we fire the ones that don't do it.

Boom. Wow.

That is genius. Do this or you're fired. Hey, there's a motivational talk. I love that. I think we can all agree that Chick Fil A hits it out of the park when it comes to customer service. Great customer service is not rocket science, everybody. Ford's magazine gives us a wonderful stat here. They say 92% of consumers say they would stop purchasing from a company after three or fewer poor customer service experiences. So let me give you five very practical stair steps to help you create repeat business and customer service that wows now. And I'm going to be going through a lot of information here. So I have this all documented. I've got it all set up for you. If you want to go to www.claystairs.com 100. That's www dot. So let's dive into this. First of all, step number one, define your goals. What are your goals for what you want people to say when they encounter your service or your product? Write these goals down, keep it simple, and then communicate those goals to your team. You got to say it all the time. You got to write it everywhere, and not just in some handbook that sits on the shelf. You got to show it in pictures hung up all over the place. And you've got to model it every day to be their example. Make sure that your business exists to serve you and that you don't become the servant of your company. Napoleon Hill gives us a great quote here. I love this. Napoleon Hill is the best selling author of Think and Grow Rich. He says a goal is a dream with a deadline. Another great stat from Forbes says according to a survey of over 2,500 participants, 71% of the customers desire a consistent experience across any encounter with your company, but only 29% receive it. Let's see if you just subtract this. Carry the fourth. Let's see. So 42% 42% do not receive good customer service on a consistent basis. So action item for you here with step number one on Define your goals. First of all, you want to take at least one hour to write down your goals for your company. What do you want people to say about your product and your service? 2. Post these goals in a spot where everyone on your team can see them. 3. You want to go to www.claystairs.com and watch our client video testimonials on growing your business and vision. So step number two again, step number one, Define your goals. Step number two, Define your so what key positions do you need to have on your team to turn your goals into reality? Before you can appoint who, you've got to know what. So what do your customers want most out of your service or your product? Speed? Knowledge? Friendliness? Best selection Price? Do you know what they want? Don't just assume, you gotta ask them. Next of all, always understand what positions will your customers come in contact with on a consistent basis? Is it on the phone? In the field? Online? At the counter? Where will your customers encounter your service or your product? You gotta know these things if you endeavor to create consistent customer experiences. Remember, 42% of customers say they don't get quality customer service. But you can do this. It's not rocket science. Steve Jobs tells us that a small team of A players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. Also, you've probably heard of Maya Angelou, best selling author, actress, playwright. She says nothing works until you do. We've got a story of a client that we have that's in the aerospace industry. He's got over 400 employees and a budget of over $200 million. But his leadership team of 12 people are running around crazy. It's hilar. It's like some peewee soccer team with everyone just chasing the ball around. Everyone seemed to have to be involved in everything else that was going on. On a winning sports team. Everyone has a responsibility and as a team you rely on each other to play your position. It has taken some time, but now we have clear responsibilities for each person on the team and they have moved from planning with no execution to knowing their individual roles in that so they can execute with confidence and stay out of each other's way. So here's some action steps for step two. First of all, create a responsibility chart. It's kind of like an org chart where each box is a responsibility and not just a person's name. Then assign names to each responsibility and put this chart up in a spot where everyone on your team can see it. Finally, you want to go to YouTube and just type in traction accountability chart and watch Geno Wickman's three minute video. He'll explain it really well. You can also go. Remember, go to my website www.claystairs.com 100 we've got this all mapped out for you. Step number three. Remember step number one, know your goals. Step number two, know your goals. Step number three, design your systems now that you know what that needs to get done. Now we want to move on to how to do what you need to do. This is one of the biggest complaints we hear from business owners that reach out to us for coaching. They can't seem to find employees that will do what they keep asking them to do. Most of the time when we dig a little, we find that the employees were told what to do, but they were never told how to do what they needed to do. This is where your written systems come into play. You want to write scripts for phone calls and presentations. You want to write scripts for how you want your employees to welcome your customers. They come into the store. You want to create checklists for all of your repeating activities. And also write down begin to create autoresponder emails. These are just a few things that you can begin doing with systems after seven years in business. My company has over 300 systems that we rely on to make sure that our company runs smoothly. We have a system for just about every activity that we do on a daily basis and we refer to them all the time. Atul Gawande is a best selling author of the Checklist Manifesto, how to Get Things Done. I love the way he really gets practical. He says that we don't like checklists. They can be painstaking, they're not much fun. But I don't think the issue here is mere laziness. He says there's something deeper, more visceral going on. It somehow feels beneath us to use checklists to use systems. It's an embarrassment. Can you get that? Do you understand that? Oh man. Forbes magazine, another quote from Ford's magazine says a statistic here, they had a survey that indicated 68%, 68% of consumers would pay more to the company that provides great service. Did you catch that? I just told you how to increase your prices and make more money. 68%. And I know that I'm throwing a lot of stats at you here, but again, I've got it all documented and all set up for you so you can take a look at it at www.claystairs.com 100. So step number four, we want to implement a culture of accountability and follow up. Trust but verify that great Russian proverb that was made popular by Ronald Reagan. This is where most businesses drop the ball. They don't hold their team accountable. So I want to give you some action steps here, okay? As a leader, you must hold your employees accountable for what you're asking to do. Video cameras in your store, GPS locators on your vehicles, call recording on your phones, daily scorecards. Only the paranoid survives. As Andy Grove, the co founder of intel, you've got to act like no one will do it unless you're checking up on them, because they won't. So step number five, Track what matters. As leaders, we must measure what we treasure. And I treasure your time. So for the sake of time, we're going to wrap up there. And for all of the other notes and all of the other action items again, come and Visit me at www.claystairs.com 100. This was the five steps for how to create repeat business and customer experiences that wow now. So back to you, Omar. We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store. But then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons. Do you think this one's still good? Free milk. Oh, mate, that expired in 1993. Dang it. Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico. You could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon. Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks. Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

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What a great, great episode by Clay Stairs. To learn more about what Claystairs can offer and great content, go to claystayors.com that's S T A I R E S.com what an insightful lesson. I think Clay really highlighted the importance of great customer service. What I took away is that the bar is so low. 42% of people are not happy with the service they're getting. That's nearly half. So if you make an effort, if you do everything you can in your business and in your team to make sure deliver exceptional customer service, you're going to stand out, you're going to beat your competition on that alone. People will forgive you for maybe some shortcomings or features or things you may not have if they're getting great customer support. I know this for a fact. With Webinar Ninja, our webinar software, we prioritize customer support so high. It's one of our unique selling propositions. People come to us because they heard our support is fantastic. And even if we don't have every feature under the sun, people are happy to stay with us because they know, one, they're supported and we always got their back. Two, they get answers quickly and they're complete answers and they're served with professionalism. And three, they know that, hey, we listen to our customers and eventually we'll be able to roll out that feature at some point. The other stat I thought was incredibly important is that 92% of people say that if they get three or more incidences that they're not happy with when it comes to customer support, they leave. They leave you. So the vast majority of people will not tolerate poor customer support. You got to make sure you deliver with customer support. You have to train your team and make sure they know exactly how to serve your customers in every channel, whether it's Twitter or your inbox or whether it's an intercom or whether it's just even in person at a conference. One of the things that my co founder and COO and producer of the show, Nicole Baldino, really did is she invested heavily on building a solid foundation for our customer support at Webinar Ninja. She really made sure that one, the whole team is trained properly, two, they're evaluated properly, three, they get increments based on their KPIs, and they know exactly how to win in this organization, how to deliver for our customers. She has trained a great customer service manager, cj, who helps us run this team. We incentivize great performance when it comes to customer service. On the individual level, we have like, you know, agent of the month, but we also have a team goal to make sure that a whole team is working together to hit a certain goal, a customer satisfaction goal, and they get rewarded for that. Everything is based on how we delight our customers. There's so many levers we can pull to make sure our team is motivated and incentivized to serve our customers right. But that takes years. We've been doing this for six years now. But it takes time. It takes time to build and to refine. And we're still refining it. We're still trying to figure out how to improve our hiring process to recruit even more talented people to join our team. But none of this happens if you don't prioritize customer support. A lot of people don't do this. They prioritize other things, whether it's marketing or sales. Now these things are important, but I believe it's more important to keep the business you have than to try to get new business. You know, a lot of people think they have a traffic problem, but really they have a conversion problem. And conversions happen when people come to your business. They come to your product or service. They become customers and stay customers. That's a converted customer, not somebody who buys and then refunds. So take another listen to today's lesson from Clay Stairs. Make sure you take notes and you implement because this stuff is gold. It will help your business grow and stay in business for the long term. Your biggest asset in business is your reputation and that gets built with customer service. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 VA Show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now. Also, if you want to get a free little goody from Claystayers, check out our website. Go to the show notes for today 100mba.net mba1508 A free 13 point assessment for your business, your website, your branding, your marketing. It's all in there. Before I go on, I'll leave you with this. One thing people forget about customer service is that when people get great service, they talk about it and that becomes a viral marketing. People will become your evangelists. They'll start being your best salespeople with no commission. Right? They're talking to other people. Hey, I just had a great interaction with so and so. They'll tweet it out, they'll talk to their friends, they'll mention it in the next mastermind group they're part of or even in an event or meeting. They'll pass it on and talk to their colleague about it. There's so much great word of mouth that happens as your company grows and you continue to give great support. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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