MBA1647 How to Deliver Tough News to Customers + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course Arthur, a 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse co. Or you can win it for free. Just head on over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review and then just listen in on Friday to hear if you won our weekly random draw with everybody who's left us a review. And guess what? You enter the random draw every Friday until you win. Thank you in advance for showing us love on itunes. Let's jump into today's episod. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show Daily Fitness for your business every single 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 $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online or at 100mba.net and in today's lesson you will learn how to deliver tough news to your customers. We do not live in a perfect world. We can't have control over every aspect around us. Our business will make mistakes and sometimes we will disappoint customers in that process, and we're going to have to deliver that news to them. Bad news. It's not a matter of if this is going to happen, it's when it's going to happen. It's inevitable. Need to be prepared to be able to deliver tough news to your customers. This could be an unexpected outage, a delay in delivery of your service, or even a major change to your offering or your product. How do you convey this news to your customers? How do you make sure it's delivered in a way that they understand? And it's couched in a way for them to understand that, hey, you're doing your best and you value them as customers. That's what we discuss in today's lesson. I'm going to give you my best strategies when it comes to delivering tough news to your customers. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to begin by saying what you should not do when it comes to delivering tough news to your customers. And it's only one thing, and that's you should never avoid it. You should never not do it. Not communicate. As painful as it may sound like it's going to be, or as much as we kind of don't want to have any kind of confrontation in the situation, the worst thing you can do is not communicate with your customers. Transparency and communication is always the right way. People do not like being in the dark, especially if they're a customer. No matter how devastating the news is, people appreciate knowing where they stand, knowing what's going to happen. Information really helps them feel like they have control over the situation and they can make some decisions based on that information. So whatever you do, don't be silent. Communicate. So whatever the situation is, whether you had an outage, you have a problem, you didn't deliver what you're supposed to deliver. My first advice is communicate as early as possible. The sooner the better. Just like they say, it's better for you to get in front of a story in front of a situation. This is paramount when you're running a business. You need to be the first person to be talking about a situation. Number two, immediately take ownership and responsibility. Whatever happened could have not been your fault. You know, you could have an outage, and that was because of your service provider. It could have been like AWS went down, not you. You know, Amazon went. But like I mentioned in a past lesson, responsibility doesn't mean your fault, but you have to take responsibility. You have to get in front of it and say, hey, I am responsible for delivering our service. I'm responsible for making sure you have a great experience. And I wanna take ownership, I wanna get in front of it. I wanna say, this is my responsibility and I'm sorry that I didn't deliver. By getting in front of it, you protect yourself and you protect yourself from negative feelings. You know, when it's the first thing that comes out of your mouth, you know, there will still be people that will go back and say, well, this is not good and you didn't do this and you should have done this, you should have done that, or even like, how dare you, you know? But when you get in front of it, that really drops to a minimum because people said, hey, they get it, they took ownership, they know it's their fault or it's their responsibility. At least in their eyes, they might see it as your fault. And I have to accept that they got in front of it. So taking responsibility from the outset sets the tone that you are taking ownership of the situation and that, you know, that they're disappointed, you know, that, you know, the news that you're delivering or that has happened is not so good. Next. I personally believe if you can communicate in person, that's the best thing. Now obviously we run different kinds of businesses, remote businesses, there's Covid happening, all that kind of stuff. So you can't communicate in person with every single customer. But that is ideally the best way to communicate this news one on one, hey, I gotta pull you aside and tell you what's going on. I want to get in front of it, right? I want to take responsibility. The next best thing, in my opinion, is a video. They're going to see your face, they're going to hear your voice and you can scale a video. And I've done this several times when I had to deliver news to customers. Whether there were delays or whether there was some sort of thing that we didn't meet expectations with. I shot a video, it was a quick 2 minute video with my phone. And I just, just flat out told them what's going on. I'll tell you a little bit more about the delivery of the news, but I think if you can shoot a video, it's more sincere. People see you and your expression and your sincerity in that video. It's a lot more impactful. And the amount of feedback I got from sending those videos was incredible. Our customers, even though they were inconvenienced by the news, they got back and said, hey, I'VE never received a video like this from any company. I gotta give it up for you. As much as I don't like hearing this news, the way you delivered it is honorable, and that's why I'm staying a customer. So I highly recommend that the next strategy and the next tactic I want to share with you is incredibly important. Don't tiptoe around the subject. Don't tiptoe around delivering the actual news. Don't try to sugarcoat it. Just say it like it is. A good example of this is a scene from the movie Moneyball starring Brad Pitt. And Brad Pitt is the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a baseball team, Major League Baseball. And part of his job sometimes is telling players they've been traded that they're no longer going to be working for their organization. Then he's talking to his new assistant manager and telling him, you just got to tell them straight up what's happening, right? And he just straight up says, john, you've been traded to the Twins. All the information you need to know is in this envelope. If you have any questions, contact so and so and when it's delivered. And I'm not trying to say be cold or clinical, but I'm saying when it's delivered just straight up, people can process it and just understand, okay, this is the situation. This is what I got to do. And people are adults. They like being treated like adults. They like knowing the information and the reality of the situation so they can deal with it. There's nothing wrong with saying this nicely, but don't take forever to get to the point. If you're going to tell your client that there's going to be a delay in the delivery of their project, just say, we're behind on your project and it's going to be two weeks late. There are a few things that we need to work on to make sure it's going to be perfect. I've outlined them in an email you'll get shortly. I ensure you the project is going to be delivered at the best quality possible and you're going to be happy with the results. That's it. Straight up. Don't try to prance around it, don't try to justify. Don't say, well, there was delays because of this and that and the other thing. The whys are not really important. The bottom line is that they're not getting their project on time, okay? And you need to tell them what's going to happen next, when will they get their project and what will the result be? And that's really what they want to hear. At the end of the day they want a positive result and they want to know when they're going to get it. They didn't hire you for a bunch of excuses to tell them a bunch of excuses. They hired you for a result. So tell them about this and tell them when they're going to get it. Just be straight up. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

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I got one more tactic when it comes to delivering tough news to customers. I alluded to it before, but let them know where they can ask questions. Let them know if they have questions, where can they go to? And this could be if you guys have any questions about what I just said or what I just talked about, please feel free to email support or contact this number or submit a ticket on this page. The point here is that they may have some questions afterwards and you don't want to leave them high and dry. You want to make sure that they're supported and that you got their back and that hey, if there are any questions that come up after this, even though you may have explained things thoroughly, this is where you can go. So it makes them feel like, okay, I don't know what my questions are right now, but if I ever do have questions, I know where to go. It also lets them know that I'm still in touch. I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to deliver for you. And you can reach out to me here or you can reach out to my team here. Delivering tough news to customers is never easy because these are your customers. You need to please them all the time, right? But part of that is also just being honest and upfront with them. People will respect you for it and that's how you do business, right? And I always say it's easy to start a business, but the challenge is staying in business. And if you want a long term business, you need to treat your customers with respect and sometimes do those tough things and have those tough conversations. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Today's episode's not over though, because it's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride and the winner is Nathan Shooter. Nathan Shooter says every episode delivers five stars. Omar and Nicole's $100 NBA show is part of my weekly development. It was great to connect with them recently at two podcasting conferences, which they delivered a very insightful presentation. I'd encourage you to subscribe. Every episode delivers well. Thank you Nathan for that great review. You are a Free Ride Friday winner. So make sure you email us over at Omar at 100 MBA net so I can hook you up with a lifetime membership to Easy course. If you want to win a lifetime membership to one of our programs, some of them retailing over $500, just leave us an Apple Podcast review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that easy. Thank you in advance for doing that. And while you're at it, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you get every episode automatically. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes you earn your customers trust and loyalty through tough situations like this. Like I mentioned in the example where my customers emailed me and said, hey, no one's ever sent me a video like that. I have a newfound respect for you. So see these opportunities as exactly that. An opportunity. An opportunity for you to reach out to your customers and say, hey, I respect you enough to give you the truth and tell you what's going to happen now. Not all of them are going to be thankful. Not all of them are going to respond positively. Some of them will be negative. Some of them will give you a piece of their mind. But that's okay. You can't please everybody. But at the end of the day, you just got to do what the best thing is for your business and your customers as a whole. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood. What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Tuxt and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling Only at Metro by T Mobile Just.

Bring your number 31st month and 25 after with autopay not available.

If with Metro T Mobile in the past 180 days.