Customer Service Wins and Learns with Ben and Pete

Speaker: [00:00:00] One, two, three, four. Welcome to the Business for Unicorns podcast, where we help gym and studio owners create a business and a life they love. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me and the Business for Unicorns team each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym.

Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.[00:00:30]

Yeah, yeah. Ah, yeah. Baby, wanna get down. Yo. Hello, my friend. If you’re a gym owner with 30 clients or more, you may just be a few strategies away from adding 5 or $10,000 to your monthly revenue or more. So what we’re offering you is a free 10-minute call where we’ll help you get clear on what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s possible for you over the next 90 days.

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You will leave with a real plan for the next 90 days. And all you need to do is click the link down below in the show notes and schedule your call today. Hope to see you on one soon.

Speaker 2: Welcome to the Business for Unicorns podcast. My name is Pete Dupuis. I’m your some of the time host. Today I’m gonna be hosting you as I interview my [00:01:30] friend and colleague, Ben, who has probably interviewed me more than I have interviewed him, so it’s good to flip the tables here.

Before you say anything, Ben, tell me about what you’re wearing today.

Speaker 3: So we didn’t plan this, and for the people who are in the video, I am wearing my Crazy Sports Performance T-shirt that Pete was kind enough to give me at our Atlanta retreat, and I love it. Not just ’cause I like CSP, ’cause I’ve also got your shoes that you sent me, too, but you guys use Next Level Apparel, and I love their T-shirts.

This isn’t even paid promotion. I order… [00:02:00] I’m the dude who when I find a thing I really like, I buy 12 of them, and this is the shirt I buy that are the unbranded T-shirts that I wear. I just don’t have a logo on it. So I wear this shirt all the time. Yep. We,

Speaker 2: we stick with Next Level. We have for years.

They’re soft, they’re nice.

Speaker 3: So

Speaker 2: good. They do pretty well in the wash. You just had me, or reminded me, of a lesson that has nothing to do with today’s podcast topic, but I think we should get into it-

Speaker 3: Let’s do it …

Speaker 2: because there’s value here. You had a experience wearing that T-shirt during a sales pitch [00:02:30] recently-

and we both had a little bit of a takeaway. Please do tell.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I had a, had a sales call. I do all the sales calls and my jo- my job, as everybody knows who’s been on a call with me, is to see if we can help. If we can, I save you some money and get you started right away. If we can’t, I actively discourage you from giving us money because I wanna help gym owners win, whether it’s with or without us.

Anyways, I can play like sports bro. I look the part. I’m wearing a backwards hat. I’m six feet, I’m 200-plus pounds. I look like a dude who likes [00:03:00] sports. Don’t know anything. If Pete was like, “Hey, did you catch the game last night?” I’m legitimately like, “What sport is on right now?” Someone was talking about the Raptors yesterday.

Don’t know. Anyways, so the contrast is just hilarious that I know absolutely nothing about sports, but I kinda looked the piece and I had a call with somebody, and they were like, “Oh, that’s a nice shirt. It’s CSP.” And they were a sports performance gym. And I s- it wasn’t even planned. I just thought it was, like, a fun thing with the name recognition of [00:03:30] CSP going well across the United States.

Speaker 2: Yeah, but it im- it delivered some assumed competency in speaking to the performance space.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 2: For me, the takeaway is if you vet the person that you’re going to be pitching a little bit, the least you can do is look the part, and-

Speaker 3: Totally …

Speaker 2: you closed some business there. You faked it till you make it, and you had the right outfit on for it though.

I

Speaker 3: did, yeah.

Speaker 2: I said, “We just gotta get… I need, I need a theater outfit [00:04:00] if I’m gonna sell to the people in Broadway that Margaret Michael managed to get enticed in the community forever.” Okay, I don’t know anything about that space, but if I dress right, I might be able to fake it just long enough to get people to join us.

It’s

Speaker 3: true. It was one of the few times I wasn’t wearing… My go-to outfit is Costco jogging pants, plaid shirt, backwards hat. This was the few times I actually had a T-shirt visible for, I think it was just nicer weather.

Speaker 2: I can picture the outfit you just explained. [00:04:30] Okay. We’re gonna pivot into our topic of choice today, which is customer service, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Yeah. You’ve had a good, and you have had a bad. It almost seems like it’s in the last 48 hours or so. Oh. So I’ll ask you this- 24 hours. Do you wanna open with the good or the bad?

Speaker 3: Let’s start with the bad. I’d like to end on a high note, so we’ll start with the bad.

Speaker 2: Okay. So we’re gonna preface this with, no, we’re not gonna air the di- dirty laundry of any one specific service provider, AKA, we’re not going to shit on any [00:05:00] one company by name.

But you’ve had a pretty, uh, unforgivable user experience from what I understand in the last 24 to 48 hours. And explain to the community how you got burned, or at least why you feel that way, and we can probably find some takeaways in the experience.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So I’ve been with my booking and billing provider for my gym for, I think since 2018 or 2017.

Pushing a decade now. Eight years. And I just found out today that we have been [00:05:30] auto-enrolled into a bunch of add-ons that total about 13 or $1,400 a year that we didn’t even know about. So this is, this would be the example of, “Hey, Pete. You’re a client at my gym, and I just wanted to let you know we’ve automatically enrolled you into the we send you your program at the end of the month digitally.”

Program, and it’s $50 a month, but I didn’t actually– You didn’t find out about it till you saw the bill on your credit card statement. [00:06:00] I cannot find any communication that this happened. I didn’t know we had the service. We weren’t using the service. My GM didn’t know about it. Our admin didn’t know about it.

Neither of them could find the communication. And the goal here isn’t, like Pete said, shit-talking one thing or the other. The goal is there’s a really remarkable experience that I’ve been with a company for eight years, I’ve been mostly satisfied, and this is just such a rub on the values perspective that I’m, I wanna go scorched earth.

I wanna quit just out of principle. It’s just very [00:06:30] difficult to change those providers. And there’s a lesson in here with, I think it’s really easy to take your long-term clients for granted, right? You’ve probably got some people on your roster or any of your rosters listeners that they’re consistent, they show up regularly, they let you know when they’re away, they’re good people to be around, they put in the work, and they’re just like, honestly, they’re the people you wanna clone and have more of.

And we also know that the, it’s all, it’s the squeaky [00:07:00] wheel that gets the grease. They’re probably the people who are getting relatively little praise because they show up consistently, they’re not on your MIA list, you don’t have to call them ’cause their payment’s failed. They’re the clients you want more of and you wanna win with.

And I don’t know, I’m wondering if, assuming none of us are trying to pull the wool over our customers’ eyes, obviously, but I’m wondering if there’s any potential that they could feel a little bit slighted due to the time they’re with them. Because part of the reason I’m so unhappy about this is in my head I’m like, “I’ve been a customer for eight fucking years, and this is the [00:07:30] shit you pull?

Come on.” It’s one thing if it’s like, “Oh, I’m brand new. Did I miss that? I don’t know.” And I bet you there’s been some times at my gym where I’m like, “Crap, I was taking a long-term customer for granted,” not doing anything evil, but am I going out of my way to praise the winners all the time? I don’t know. I think I could do better there.

Speaker 2: I have a couple thoughts. One of the ones that just came to me was about how I have discovered a trend in recent years with customer service where some service [00:08:00] providers, I think, have very smartly opened our conversation with, “Thank you for being a member for X number of years.” Obviously, they’re sitting in front of a computer.

“Thanks for being a Bank of America member since 2006,” or whatever it is.

Speaker 3: Yeah. ”

Speaker 2: We value your service.” And I think that serves a couple purposes, both from the, the mind game perspective, the psychology of this. One, they’re reminding you, “We’ve been here for a long time. You’ve trusted us for a long time. You can continue to.”

But two, it [00:08:30] becomes a tool that you, the user, can use during that conversation, where if you don’t like the response you’re getting when it’s like, “Hey, make this right,” you can say, “Hey, as you mentioned, I’ve been with you guys since 2017, and you’ve never had to call me once about this missed transaction.

Are we really ready to burn this all to the ground?” Because you guys don’t wanna bend on this thing that feels fraudulent to me. Yeah. And make them people. Make them think like people. I even get to the point sometimes where I ask [00:09:00] customer service providers, “Out of curiosity, off the record, does this feel right to you?”

Speaker: Does

Speaker 2: feel- ”

Speaker: Are you

Speaker 2: comfortable with the company line that you’re in right now?” And it’s fun to watch them squirm. Yeah. And it, that’s the best path forward when we’re dealing with small businesses. Totally. And the one you’re working with is biggish.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Big enough that they don’t know who Ben is, and they haven’t been, they haven’t got any sort of emotional attachment to your brand or your relationship with their business, which is [00:09:30] concerning.

But all of our listeners do have that type of relationship with the people who could theoretically call to bitch us out over a new system or a policy or a price increase. And that’s probably my first piece of advice is, it, if you’re on the receiving end of this challenging feedback as the business provider, you gotta stop being a business and be a person.

Speaker 3: 100%. ‘Cause like, I called support today, and I opened with, “Look, I’m pretty unhappy about [00:10:00] this, and I am 100% certain that because you’re picking up the phone, it was not your call.” Not in a disrespectful way, but the person who answers customer support when you call internet because it’s down is not the person whose fault it is that the internet is down.

And the difference there is at our gyms, if they’re unhappy about a policy, it’s very likely that they’re talking to the person who created the policy. So there is this human element of a big company can hide behind layers of… People can hate on them, but they never actually have to deal with it directly.

Small businesses, [00:10:30] we’re really accountable for our actions, ’cause we’re looking the people in the eye every day who see that.

Speaker 2: Yeah, look, this is a competitive advantage for us. Let’s lean into the small business thing. I had… We mistakenly overcharged a client by $60 a couple months ago, and they brought it to our attention.

I was like, “You’re 100% right. I can apply this toward his future training balance, or I can drop a check in the mail for you,” ’cause they had written a check. It wasn’t- Yeah … a credit card [00:11:00] transaction I could refund. And he said, “No big deal. Let’s just apply it to his next training balance.” And then the kid had to step away, ’cause he decided to play a different sport that he wasn’t expecting, and he’s gone indefinitely, like 90 to 120 days.

And I just wasn’t comfortable with riding on it, ’cause they were new-ish clients.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And I felt like there’s a chance we might not get him back, which sucks. But I didn’t wanna feel like I had the bad juju attached to this, so I wrote the check anyway, and I put it in the mail, [00:11:30] and I put a T-shirt with it.

And I was like- That’s awesome … “Hey, I’m so sorry for totally disregarding your request that we apply this to his future training balance. But when he comes back, I want him to be at a zero balance, and I want you to feel like we did right by you. Here’s a T-shirt that will fit him. We can’t wait to see him at the end of his spring sports season.”

And

Speaker 3: even if he doesn’t wanna come back, even if he’s done with sports, he’s gonna come back just because of that.

Speaker 2: Not only that, the dad showed up. He came into my office and he’s, “Hey, I wanna introduce myself. We’ve only had email [00:12:00] correspondence to date. I wanna thank you for doing that, and I drive by this place every single day, and I’ve been meaning to pop in and say hello, but that got me to pop in.”

And that dad asked for details on our adult fitness in that moment. And it was just because I had this anxiety attack. It, it was honestly, I woke up a day like th- three, four weeks ago, and I was like, “Oh shit, I forgot to apply that forward balance. Oh wait, where did I leave that with him?” And I was like, “I can’t go to [00:12:30] bed with that again.”

And e- even though it had all been resolved and it was just sitting as, like, a forward balance in this kid’s account, it was giving me anxiety, so I just wrote the check and got it off of my mental kind of open loop. Cool. And it ended up being a competitive advantage that turned into more business when I was really just anxious about a refund.

Speaker 3: I was just gonna say that, like, y- clearly your intentions in that weren’t like, “Hey, I’m gonna do this clever thing so they give us more money later.” You were trying to … You’re genuinely trying to do the right thing, and people can tell. Yeah. And that’s where, yes, there’s some businesses [00:13:00] where, like, depending where you’re at, 60 bucks might be, like, a big deal this month in making your bills.

And I’ve said it on a podcast years ago, but one of the benefits of th- in my experience of having a profitable organization is you don’t have to think twice about that. Because I always wanna be able to do the right thing and not have money get in the way, and money’s a real thing and sometimes shit costs money, and if you’re like, “Man, I wanna send him this check, but I gotta wait till a month from now because I got this other thing to pay,” just puts you in a tough spot, and you’re totally right.

It’s a competitive advantage so that … [00:13:30] And if you keep doing the right thing, you’re gonna have more opportunities like that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. All right, so our quick takeaway is we have the flexibility to be nimble as small businesses, and we’re not stapled by d- unrelenting corporate policy that someone else has to parrot to someone on the phone.

Let’s jump into your good experience. Yeah. Because your good experience could’ve been bad because the company you’re dealing with is big enough that they could be corporate problems. Yes. And they aren’t.

Speaker 3: So I’m gonna call out the company ’cause I think they’re great. MAN/MADE, [00:14:00] it’s a Canadian boxer brief company that keeps your junk in the right place, and it’s made out of fabric that’s nice, and all the whatevers that I don’t know.

I know their, I see their advertising all the time on social media, and they were on Shark Tank at some point for underwear, which I don’t really follow Shark Tank, but that’s kinda cool. So anyways, you gotta buy clothes online. I don’t like shopping on a good day. There’s a reason I’m wearing Pete’s T-shirt.

He gave it to me, I’m like, great. One, I love C- CSP and I’m happy about it, but two, I don’t like shopping. So if I can do it from home, that’s great, but there’s a risk [00:14:30] because if you lift weights, your ass and leg size and your waist size might be… Sizing charts are a little wonky, right? So they’ve got this thing where you, if you buy your first pair and you don’t like them for any reason, you can get a refund or a different size, no questions asked kind of thing, which is like unconditional guarantee.

We say the same thing you should do in your low barrier offer. So I order the underwear, they’re too big. I’m like, “Shit, I followed their w- their sizing guide,” all the things. I said, “Shoot them an email.” So I’m not even going through like [00:15:00] official channels here. I’m just like replying to the order. I’m being like a little bit difficult, right?

I’m like, “Hey, I wasn’t trying to screw you guys over. I went by the size chart. It didn’t fit. Can I go down a size?” 30 to 45 minutes later, I kid you not, I have a couple different emails in my inbox. One is that I’ve got a new order that was processed for a medium, because large is too big, for $0. The second email is a response saying, “Hey, no problem at all.

We’ve got that taken care of you. Hope the n- new size fits better.” [00:15:30] Instantly. Plus, I’ve got this handwritten note that says, “Hope this pair fits better,” signed by the owners. I swear, I think this is handwritten. I know you can print handwriting, like I’m not, it’s not my first day on Earth. This looks like you can see the indentations where the pen is.

So $30 pair of underwear as a first time customer, they put the note in, and I’m not even crazy about not gushing over handwritten notes on a regular basis, particularly cra- [00:16:00] contrasted with eight years of service and thousands of dollars spent. It was a really good lesson and like I just absolutely wasn’t expecting that, and the funniest part is I’m not actually a huge fan of these underwear.

Even with the right size, I don’t think I’m gonna buy more. It’s not for me. But I’m talking about it on the podcast right now, and I’m probably gonna recommend it to friends, and I like that they’re Canadian and I like that they’re free shipping, and they were definitely soft as hell. Like where are the make magic opportunities when…

Is there someone that you know isn’t a [00:16:30] good fit for your gym, but they’re inquiring about your services? You have the option to just blow them off ’cause you know they don’t have enough money for it or whatever, or they don’t live in the right town. You also have the option go above and beyond ’cause you never know what’s gonna happen.

Honestly, not that different from you sending that check even though he said to not send the check. That was a make magic moment on a small thing that like isn’t really make or break for either party.

Speaker 2: I think there’s also an opportunity in the, if you conclude, “I’m going to make it [00:17:00] right,” making it right before apologizing is a special kind of magic.

Yes. So when you respond, it’s, “I’m so very sorry. I’ve already addressed this for you. It’s in the works, but I need you to hear from me. I apologize.”

Speaker 3: Yeah. ”

Speaker 2: We can and will be better, but we value your service, and like I said, the thing’s already in the mail. So let us know what you think.” Yeah. It’s so refreshing for someone to be like, “I didn’t even need to hear you tell me what was wrong.”

I fixed it, but now let’s talk. How can we be better? That’s

Speaker 3: awesome. They [00:17:30] didn’t… I didn’t have to jump through hoops. I didn’t have to fill out an official form. They didn’t put a bunch of things in place that they knew X percent of customers wouldn’t do so that they could have extra money from it. Like again, polar opposite of the other thing, and it’s just like, I like that approach.

They, I don’t know what the margin is on boxer, Canadian-made boxer briefs, but like they probably lost a little bit of money on me as a customer between two shipments, two pairs, whatever. But I bet you somebody listening to this podpast- podcast in [00:18:00] Canada is gonna go to Man Made and buy a pair of boxers.

Totally in line with my values as a human being, and I suspect in line with a lot of other gym owner values as well, because we started wanting to help people, not just optimizing for profit.

Speaker 2: Yours is a wild experience because you’ve publicly declared you won’t buy from them again. They still don’t text.

But they could, they could quantify the lifetime value of you as a non-client, ’cause you’re out talking about their service and telling people, “Go buy from this place that I don’t like the things from. They’re really great.”

Speaker 3: I, hey, there’s… [00:18:30] Think of every person who’s come into your gym, and, and you can sometimes tell if somebody’s kicking tires or maybe price is an issue.

And we’ve had a few people like this, where you know what? We know they’re only gonna do the low barrier offer. They’ve said that continuing is out of their budget. I’m gonna blow their fucking mind in our three-week trial, because at some point, maybe finances will change and they’re just in a price situation instead of a price objection, and they’re probably gonna come back.

I don’t know. I don’t have a process for this. I’m just putting juju and karma out [00:19:00] into the universe. For all I know, they also host a big ass podcast and are gonna tell a bunch of people about the good customer service they had, even though they weren’t the ideal customer for that thing.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I’ll tell you, one of my best all-time lead generators for our adult fitness is a guy who I could tell was a real good fit for CrossFit, and I told him that, and I suggested that he take a step away and go work at the local CrossFit, because he just was hungry for [00:19:30] that competitive dynamic and that environment.

And he did that, and he never misses a charity event that we host now. And I get one or two leads a year from this guy for a decade plus, people who’s, come in and say, “He says you’re the best.” He hasn’t been here for 13 years. But the guy… We created good karma, and he’s now knows, he’s smart enough to know what he does and doesn’t want in a gym, and he understands that his needs [00:20:00] are kind of outlier in relation to people his age, and that maybe we’re a better fit for taking care of people in his community.

And he’s been really great about it, because when I have seen him in the year since, he’s so appreciative, so thankful that I helped nudge him into this community that has become such a part of his identity. Yeah. And it, was I really going to keep him forever? No. And the fact that I pushed him out the door a little bit earlier than he was going to ’cause I saw something that [00:20:30] made sense for him has just returned financial returns in spades for a long time.

And so it’s totally okay that we are not a fit for everyone, but everyone can be a lead generator for us if we spin things the right way. Yeah.

Speaker 3: In- interestingly in that one, your service wasn’t the solution for him, but him engaging with you got him to the solution.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 3: And that’s where, like I said at the beginning, it’s genuinely my intention with sales with BFU, it’s genuinely my intention at sales with my gym, is [00:21:00] we might not be the right fit.

You p- possibly should go to Planet Fitness, and if that’s the case, I wanna point you in the right direction because one, again, maybe you’ll be back, maybe you’ll tell some people, but look, I wanna sleep well at night knowing that I did the right thing by that person.

Speaker 2: Beautiful. All right. Should we leave it there and come back with an update, hopefully sooner rather than later, on whether you got those fees wiped?

Because I know I’m interested, and I’ll stay tuned.

Speaker 3: Yeah. We’re gonna see if we’re gonna go scorched earth or not.

Speaker 2: Yeah. We have a plan. We [00:21:30] discussed it off air. It’s gonna be great. It’s gonna- Cool … we’re gonna be, like, absolutely terrorizing.

Speaker 3: We’ll, we’ll keep you posted, BFU World.

Speaker 2: Thank you all for listening.

Uh, I hope you enjoyed the Pete Interviews Ben experience. We’ll come back with the flip here sometime soon. And Ben, I will talk to you in the coming days and weeks.

Speaker 3: Thank you, sir. Talk soon.

Speaker 2: Take [00:22:00] care.