Doing what’s best for your customers, not your business.

“You are serving a customer, not a life sentence.  Learn how to enjoy your work.”  Laurie McIntosh

That’s the truth.

Throughout my career and all of our businesses, we have kept a few things close to heart.  One of those that we don’t give the customer what they want, we give them we what they need.  Another is that we always do what is best for the customer.  Third make sure that everything we do we keep God as the reason.  Lastly always do what’s best for the customer, even if it means a hit to our businesses.

Let’s break those down a little and make them easier to understand.

We don’t give the customer what they want, we give them we what they need.  It seems easy, but if you have ever dealt with customers or employees you know that giving someone, what they want and need can be two completely different things.  This is where underselling and over delivering is a huge part of our success on multiple platforms and in multiple industries.  We discovered early in our careers that if you over sell and under deliver then you don’t keep customers very long and the customers you do keep aren’t happy.  That’s why we are constantly looking for ways to improve our customer experiences. 

What if Walt Disney built Disney Land and never made any improvements.  Can you imagine?  It wouldn’t have the same feeling it does today.  In life, we have to do that same thing. 

Giving people what they really need comes with time, energy, and effort.  It’s not easy.  when you over deliver though people are happy to pay a little extra because they know that you will be there for them, they understand that you are constantly working to improve their experience.

Next, let’s talk about always doing what’s best for the customer.  I had a sales person one time who sold a customer something they didn’t need.

  Then a little bit into the contract, the customer reached out and said, “I’m not sure that we are getting what we really need!”  As a business owner, these are the words that you never want to hear, because that leads into them talking to their friends and other people who you might be able to service and not having GREAT things to say.  The word of mouth is either your best seller or your worst competitor.  Anyways back to oversold contract.  I immediately reached out to the company and asked what we could do to help keep them on the right track.  I offered to send them a few more estimates with some different options to meet what their real goals were.  I sent three different estimates each at different levels of service.  I did what was best for both companies.  They came back and said that they would love to keep working with us and were so glad that we were willing to work with them. 

The moral is that we could have lost that client for life.  All because of one sales person who wanted to make a bigger commission check.  He didn’t do what was right for the client or our business.  He is no longer selling any of our products, and never will again!

Having a moral compass to work by is HUGE!  This why we make sure that everything we do we keep God as the reason.  God, the big guy, the kahuna, leader of the world, whatever you call him is the best moral compass you could ever have.  Being a Christian based business, we find that it is extremely important to keep God at the center of everything.  That doesn’t meant that we can’t try to make money, but we have to do it with morals.  When a customer is not happy, we help them.  If someone truly needs help, we offer to help him or her.  There is a difference between offering a hand out and offering a hand up, but that’s a different blog.  (No literally a different blog we already wrote, putting in the work! shameless plug lol.) 

Make sure that you are keeping the big guy as the reason you do everything.

Always doing what’s best for the customer, even if it means a hit to our businesses isn’t going to be easy.  There will be times when you have to make those hard decisions of how to handle a situation.  It might mean that you have to let an employee go, or that you have to re-negotiate a contract.  One thing to remember is that you have to live what you do.  I learned a quite a while back that if it comes to doing what’s right or making a $$ then I’m going to do what’s right.  Because if I do what’s right then the $$ will be there.  I don’t worry about how many 0’s are in the bank account, I focus on how many happy customers we have!  Customer service is key to success. 

There are so many different things that can happen in business and life, many of which you have no control over.  What you can control is how you react, and how you treat others, what decisions you make.  If you put your customers first and absolutely love them, then you are sure to succeed!