There is a fine line between doing too much customer service and just refunding people for their money. Learn where the line is. But also take customer service information as direct feedback on fixing something wrong with your product or buying process.
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Transcript…
Jim Edwards: Hey guys, Jim Edwards here along with…
Stew Smith: Stew Smith.
Jim Edwards: And this is episode 45 of the Sales, Copywriting And Content Marketing Hacks Podcast…
We are live with 45 and…
Stew Smith: I like that!
Jim Edwards: That is not too bad…
Stew Smith: I like that one…
I was going to say something with beehive, but it didn’t make sense…
Jim Edwards: Okay…
Stew Smith: That was the first thing that popped in my head…
Jim Edwards: Did I show you my new garden gnomes you like garden gnomes, right?
Stew Smith: Sure…
Jim Edwards: You like garden gnomes?
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: Okay…
What do you think of this one?
What the hell are you doing?
Stew Smith: I like this one…
I’ve got one right here…
Manny Machado…
Jim Edwards: There you go…
Stew Smith: When he played in the minor leagues…
Jim Edwards: There you go…
So this is my new one…
This is my friendly one…
Even the squirrel looks pissed off…
Stew Smith: Everybody’s pissed…
Yeah, he’s pissed…
Jim Edwards: This goes with my other garden gnome.
Says hello to my little friend…
So we do things a little differently around here…
So what are we talking about today Stew?
Stew Smit: Well we are going to talk about customer service because I know you just had a book launch, probably dealing with a lot of customer service issues that come with shipping and, dates and know processes of purchasing it and how can I pay for it this way?
Can I use this way?
Can I mail you a check instead?
I mean you got all kinds of customer service questions that occur…
Jim Edwards: Yup…
Stew Smith: And what is too much for a small business?
What is not enough?
Jim Edwards: Not enough, what?
Stew Smith: Not enough customer service…
Like when you’re starting to piss off your customers, I think there’s a fine line…
I think we all kind of straddle that line of like…
Hey, this is really taken a lot of effort to make this customer happy.
How much effort is normal…
Jim Edwards: Right?
Stew Smith: How much effort is way too much above and beyond the customer service requirements…
Jim Edwards: Right?
So we do it like an all-day seminar here…
I mean you keep just coming out with this stuff that it’s like, well, we could do this, could do that…
I’m just messing with you…
Stew Smith: You’re going to drive this pony…
So, I’ll guide the direction…
But I just curious I know you’re dealing with a lot of stuff…
I deal with stuff every day, whether it’s an ebook that didn’t get downloaded and they missed the download button, what am I trying to do, (rob) them with their money?
You get it all the time…
Jim Edwards: Okay…
I’ve been doing this for all these years, and I am going to ruin my reputation by stealing your $7 and 95 cents for shipping of this book…
And I’m going to go out of my way…
Seriously…
I’m going to go out of my way to piss you off…
And if you’re in another country, I’m going to purposely make you wait, and I didn’t really send it because I want you to go on social media and chastise me and question my family lineage…
Just everything about me based on the fact that I’m paying for this book, and I want people to just jump all over me and crap all over me…
And my staff was the whole reason that we did this.
Stew Smith: Right.
Jim Edwards: So obviously that’s not the answer…
Obviously, that’s not the case…
So here’s my philosophy on customer service…
I had a teacher one time tell me everybody starts with an A and you whittle away at that A through your performance, whether it’s the first test, the last test, but everybody starts with an A.
Stew Smith: I like that.
Jim Edwards: And I remember thinking, wow, that’s really cool…
And so our attitude towards everybody is they have good intentions, and they’re doing the best they can with what they have.
Stew Smith: And I want them to receive results from this product that I’m selling them…
Jim Edwards: And, to have a reasonably good customer service experience because there’s no such thing as perfection.
Okay…
So that’s my philosophy.
I also keep things in perspective, meaning, okay, the level of customer service, and I know this is going to piss some people off, but that’s okay because I’ve spent my whole life pissing people off since I kicked the nun in the first grade and she throw me across the classroom…
I realized there are going to be some people you’re going to piss off.
Stew Smith: Sure…
Jim Edwards: Man, I’ve just had a little PTSD from that.
I can’t remember what the hell I was talking about…
I really can’t, what was I talking about?
Stew Smith: You were getting into everybody has an A
Jim Edwards: Oh, everybody has an A, but it’s reasonable customer service. It’s like there’s no such thing as a perfect customer experience.
There’s a reasonable customer experience, which means I really want you to be happy.
I want you to be satisfied.
I want you to get your product as fast as possible.
That’s mainly why we’ve always done digital stuff because digital, you get it instantly…
We can get it straight instantly…
You either have access, or you don’t…
If you don’t have access, we can get it for you pretty quickly.
There’s no waiting for a software box to show up and all this other stuff.
But here’s the problem with a book like this, even though I started out selling eBooks, a situation with a book like this is that if I were to publish this as a PDF, it would get passed around more.
Oh, you got a hard copy…
You, I sent you one of the hard copies…
That’s right…
Excuse me, Mr special man…
Stew Smith: Everybody jealous?
Jim Edwards: So, it would get passed around so much that you put yourself out of business…
You can’t do a PDF version of this…
Okay…
Unless there was some way that by people ripping me off, I could make money, and there really isn’t a way…
Yes…
The ultimate objective is for people to buy Funnel Scripts as a result, but people would just be passing it around.
Plus, when people rip it off and pass it around, nobody really gets value from it cause nobody reads it and it’s just,
“Oh, I have it. I’ll get around to it.”
So the way to do this, we had to do a physical book…
So my desire is that you get your book as fast as humanly possible within the context of the offer.
And the offer was,
“I’m paying for the book, you paid for the shipping.”
Now my gamble is that you’re going to go and you’re going to buy the book, and you’re going to go through, and you’re going to say,
“oh, that audiobook looks cool…”
And I’ve heard that’s really good cause it is cause it’s, cause is Stew and I reading the book and then talking about it, doing like a podcast slash radio show slash coffee chat while reading the book…
And so people love that…
So that’s how I’m actually making money…
And it’s also a lesson in and of itself…
When you go through the funnel, you could see that’s how a book funnel is structured…
Number two…
In fact, we’re putting together an audiobook of one of Steve’s books, which we need to finish, by the way, Stew…
Stew Smith: Yup.
Jim Edwards: So then the next thing is we’ve got a $97 upsell for a really cool course that I put together…
It’s not available anywhere else…
And then the last thing is an offer for Funnel Scripts that if you take the first one, then we give you money off and it’s a really cool funnel, and it’s working really, really well.
So your objective is to get the book, my objective is to sell stuff.
And for you to get a lot of value and in the course of getting value, then you see me as a good guy, and I over-deliver on the book, which I really honestly believe that we do.
And so that’s kind of where we got to play…
We got to agree those are the rules…
It doesn’t mean that I’m going to overnight you the book for $7 and 95 cents.
That doesn’t mean that I can overcome the laws of man God and your local customs.
If you’re in another country, there’s nothing I can do.
If you’re in Canada, Australia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Mozambique…
I mean, I’ve got to get the number of countries and stuff that we’ve done, but I don’t have any control over your customs…
And in order to keep the shipping costs low, here’s what we gotta do…
In the US, we can basically send it bulk mail…
And it’s a break-even type thing…
All right…
Internationally it used to be you could send through the US post office…
They had international flat.
You could just throw one of these into an envelope, and it was a flat fee basically to anywhere in the world.
They stopped doing that obviously because they lost money.
So the way things work now, the way we’re doing it when you have this many…
Cause I think I told you in the first three weeks, we sold 10,193 copies…
I ordered a thousand…
Okay…
So we got whacked with that…
It was a blessing, but we had to order thousands and thousands and thousands.
I just ordered 4,000 more yesterday laid out $25,000 to order 4,000 for books.
Okay…
And the reason I’m telling you this is because now we’re kind of ahead of it…
And so now when you order it internationally, it should go out in a couple of days…
And with the other ones, it should go out in three days to three business days…
That’s one thing I didn’t communicate in my mind; it was business days and other people, they’re like counting…
Stew Smith: Sunday…
Jim Edwards: Sunday…
Stew Smith: Holidays…
Jim Edwards: and they’re counting the first day…
It is not the first day, it’s the next day they’re counting holidays.
So Monday and then Thursday it’s like,
“Oh, I ordered this four days ago.”
“No, you didn’t, it, you ordered two days ago.”
Okay…
So they’re just little stuff…
But literally with the way it works with international stuff is they gather them all up and then every few days they ship them all to a place in California where the place in California then packages them up to go out UPS…
And so then it’ll notify you that it’s been shipped…
But then it goes into this giant black hole, and it will not up reappear on your radar until hopefully, it shows up at your front door in a country different than the one that I live in.
There’s no other way to do it unless you wanted to pay 50 or 60 bucks in shipping, in which case everyone would say “there is no way it cost $50 or $60 to ship a book”…
Stew Smith: It does.
Jim Edwards: Right.
Stew Smith: I was just shipping this one the other day…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: And I think it went to Austria…
Austria…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: And it the lowest rate I could find was it was like $27 on the, yeah…
Jim Edwards: It costs a butt-load to ship a real book…
Now that’s why everybody’s gone to digital…
But the problem with digital is everybody will rip you off…
I mean, there’s so many off-color metaphors I could use that would instantly describe what’s going on, but I just can’t cause this is a family show.
So my point is that you got to understand customer service from the customer standpoint, and from the provider standpoint, my desire is to provide great customer service, reasonable customer service, customer service that should be expected.
We actually massively exceed that.
I see other people where they say, “Hey, give us three days to respond to a ticket”…
We respond the same day when we get the ticket in and stuff, we do our best to make people happy…
But there comes a point where you can’t beat yourself with the punishment stick over the fact that somebody didn’t get their book, that somebody can’t figure out how to open something.
There’s a certain percentage of the population that is just incapable of interacting online.
They’re not capable of opening a book.
They’re not capable of registering for a membership site.
They’re not capable of apparently putting in their shipping address properly.
Stew Smith: Yeah, that happens.
Jim Edwards: And it’s not my fault.
And you and the merchant, you cannot internalize this stuff.
Stew Smith: No.
Jim Edwards: Because I’ve seen so many people, a really good friend of mine, she literally had to shut down her business because she could not deal with people ripping her off through the customer service.
Somebody abused her through her customer service, abused her as far as taking advantage of her time.
She was over-delivering.
She was trying to really provide extra value, help this person, really concerned about them getting results…
And then the person took, took, took, took, took, and then did a chargeback and ripped off my friend for a good chunk of money.
And it hurt her so badly.
She shut down her business.
And I’m just like, what are you doing?
You can’t do that.
There’s what we call the 10% chucklehead factor.
That’s not actually what we call it, but you can call it the 10% chucklehead factor.
About 10% of the people, for whatever reason, they’re having a bad day.
They’ve had bad experiences.
They have an issue that has nothing to do with you.
But yet they have what we call “web balls,” where they think that since it’s through the web and since it’s this nameless form and they don’t envision a person on the other end of it, they will say things and do things and behave in ways that they would never do…
If it was face to face, you wouldn’t talk to me this way.
Stew Smith: No…
Jim Edwards: If we were face to face, I guarantee you wouldn’t.
You just wouldn’t, not because I’m…
Normal people don’t behave that way face to face…
And you’re nodding your head about this stuff like this happens to you all the time…
I can’t believe that somebody would be abusive towards a former Navy seal.
I just figured people were not that dumb.
Stew Smith: Well, they may not know it they may find…
Jim Edwards: What the hell you mean they don’t know it.
It says it all over your books.
Stew Smith: They may not know it…
I’m telling you they may find an article that I wrote, they may not read the whole thing.
They see a click button for a beginner workout, and they don’t read through it, but I’ve had that.
“Oh wow, I didn’t know that.”
Before all the time…
But, dealing with people who you can’t download a book, you can’t put there address in properly…
They think they ordered a book, but they ordered the ebook…
So I’m understanding of those people…
Jim Edwards: Sure…
Stew Smith: I’ll say, “Hey, look it, this is what happened”…
And they feel stupid, and they say, look if you need to charge shipping again, do it…
I’m like, thank you…
That’s nice.
Cause when you’re selling on a book, yeah.
The margins, if you have to pay shipping twice, it’s gone…
Jim Edwards: Yeah.
Stew Smith: But nine times out of 10, that doesn’t happen…
Right.
It happens at 10%…
Sometimes maybe be even less than that.
But you have to deal with it.
And what I like to do is, like you said…
They start off with an A they keep pulling, they keep pulling, they keep arguing or whatever.
I said, look, I’m just going to refund you…
Right.
If you get the book in the mail, keep it.
Jim Edwards: Yeah.
Stew Smith: You don’t have to send it back…
I’m done.
Jim Edwards: And we operate on a strike system, especially you’ll get, there are people that are serial refunders that are setting out to rip you off…
Just whether you realize it or not, there are people that want to rip you off.
So the first time somebody buys something and they refund a man, I’m not talking about the book, I’m just talking in general…
The first time somebody does a refund.
You know what, I understand it’s not a problem…
We offer it…
We don’t worry about it…
Especially if someone bought stuff from us
And then they’re like, “Hey, I bought this but is too similar to this”…
And even if it’s not…
It’s for whatever reason, I, it’s just not right…
I want a refund.
No problem.
No problem at all.
Stew Smith: (I don’t argue if) someone wants a refund…
Jim Edwards: Sure…
Stew Smith: No problem…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: That’s easy, easy, don’t be offended…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Right…
It’s not a problem…
But some people get “what do you mean you want…
It’s like, look, don’t worry about it now…
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: Second time, that same person asked for a refund…
Stew Smith: Banned from the website…
Jim Edwards: No.
Stew Smith: I don’t let them purchase anything else from me…
Jim Edwards: After the second refund…
Stew Smith: Yup…
Jim Edwards: Okay…
Jim Edwards: Even if they bought a bunch of stuff…
Stew Smith: They’re done…
Jim Edwards: Really…
Okay…
I say if you want my product you can go from Amazon…
Jim Edwards: I always give him til three damn Stew is hardcore Stew don’t play…
Okay…
Stew Smith: Well yeah, I said there’s other places to buy my stuff you don’t have to buy them from me.
Jim Edwards: All right.
You don’t have to cause me a trip to the mailbox.
Chuckles.
Okay, Stew gives them two…
We give them three.
Unless it’s obvious that.
Stew Smith: If is something I screwed up.
Yeah…
That’s never an issue.
Jim Edwards: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah…
I’m talking about…
You all send now the people that order an ebook and then five minutes later they’re refunding, not even five minutes later, it’s like they order and they’re getting the refund.
No, you need to know this, this is not…
Unless they actually explain what’s going on…
So that’s another thing you got to watch out for…
Again, you can’t get wound up in it…
You can’t get caught up in it.
It’s just, it is what it is…
There are people like that in the world…
They’re shoplifters…
It’s a breakage…
You just don’t worry about it.
The other thing, though, is also what is your focus?
Meaning, okay, we’re talking about customer service and customer service challenges and that kinda stuff…
But you always got to bring it back to the fact that for every one person who’s going on Facebook and saying
“Oh I ordered your book 10 days ago”…
Actually, it was seven, and it’s five business days…
“And is not here”…
And they’re in a faraway place…
I’m like, dude, I’ll explain it…
It’s no problem…
But you can’t let that bother you when you have 99 other people that are like, “This is freaking awesome, and I love you, and where have you been my whole life?”
But for whatever reason, we don’t tune in to that 99.
We’re tuned into that one…
Like my buddy that I wish she had called me when that happened because I could have talked her out of it in about five minutes…
I would’ve had her laughing…
Hell, we probably would have mailed that lady at box dog turds or something just to make her feel better.
But got to focus on the ones that you’re helping, not the ones that nobody can help…
Stew Smith: Yeah.
Jim Edwards: And there are little techniques that I use that you probably do something similar Stew, little mental jujitsu things where I…
Just cause you have a problem doesn’t mean I have to accept responsibility for your problem…
If it’s something I did, just like you said Stew…
I mean, if I messed up, send the book or dam the order didn’t go out crap, I’m sorry…
I will pay extra to have it sent priority mail something like that…
Then people are like, okay cool, thanks…
If it’s not your fault though and there’s nothing you can do about it, then I can’t accept responsibility for your problem…
I’m sorry.
And this is the way I always phrase these things…
I’m sorry you entered your address incorrectly.
Stew Smith: Yeah.
We can send another one out if you want to pay shipping just cause I understand those things happen…
I mean every once in a while you gotta realize to (err) is human and to forgive is divine…
I messed up real bad on one of the orders of 2000 books where I put in the wrong shipping address to have 2000 books sent, and I’m freaking out on customers service…
(That could get it fixed…
I know I did it wrong…
Can we please get it fixed?)
And I mean the customer service person, I wasn’t rude, but I was spastic…
I knew I was being spastic, and I was like…
Damn, karma, karma dammit karma term is getting me right now.
And I was cool about it, but I was kind of spastic.
Stew Smith: Sure.
Jim Edwards: But I profusely thanked the person and told them I would never do it again and consider myself properly chastised, and then I sent a nice note to the person’s supervisor.
The big thing is that if it’s their problem, then you say, I’m sorry you had a problem and that takes it off of you…
It’s like the problem is over there…
And if they’re coming straight at you mentally like…
Blah, blah, blah, blah…
You got to mentally just let it go past you.
Like a Jiu-Jitsu move…
Like a (high Quito) move where you use their momentum against them.
And I’m going to tell you something that…
This is mean, but I love doing this…
When people are nasty in the help desk, the ladies will come to me.
Now, my wife, my daughter, my niece are the ones in the help desk.
So when someone’s nasty, I mean like super nasty…
I’ll jump in there, and I’ll say, “Hey, this is Jim”…
I’ve read the tickets, and I don’t really understand why you’re being nasty…
And by the way, you’re being nasty to my wife this is the trap…
So then they always come back with, Oh, I’m really sorry…
I didn’t realize it was your wife, and then I immediately pounce with, it doesn’t matter that it’s my wife.
You shouldn’t treat customer service people this way…
It’s very rude…
And it’s like, eh…
Stew Smith: That’s not mean.
Jim Edwards: Dude, every time.
The other thing is when you have customer service people working for you, you need to back them up.
You need to empower them, you need to make sure that you’re…
It’s a hard job…
So you need to coach them and make sure that they are not taking stuff personally.
They’re taking it seriously…
They realize that they’re on the front line of your business, but they can’t take it personally because if they do, you’re gonna lose them.
They’re gonna turn over…
And part of that is making sure they’re really well trained, making sure you really communicate with them what’s going on…
Like I just sent out an email to my big list about the book and, I’m starting to really ramp up doing some advertising now cause I’m at not the two, not the through, but the have after a stage of marketing this which is going to go on for years.
And so I gave them the heads up of what I was doing and just that little bit they emailed me back.
“Thank you!”
Thank you for the heads up, so we know what’s going on…
So a lot of it also is communication, communication of expectations, communication of what their expectations should be…
And here’s the other thing…
Excuse me…
Good God, strong coffee…
The other thing you’ve got to do is pay attention to that feedback from customer service because people aren’t attacking you.
It’s feedback.
It’s not an attack.
Every once in a while, there’s an ass hat that’s just attacking people, but it’s feedback.
And so you got to look at your process and say to yourself, Hey look, one out of every five people is contacting us and asking this question, we need to address this in our process…
For example, one of the things that was going on with the book process was that no point was there a way for them to see the address that the thing was going to get sent to until they got a notification…
So that was not good.
Cause if somebody puts it in wrong if we knew that we could fix it…
Ahead of time before it got shipped.
So we have added, or we are adding it should be done today…
The process where on the order confirmation page it shows the address that the thing is going to get sent to and they’re also going to get an email that tells them this is the address that we have that you want to send to it…
This is not the right address…
You need to contact us here…
That’ll cut down on a lot of the BS, and you gotta pay attention to the feedback.
I’ve been talking a lot, Stew, what do you think on all this?
Stew Smith: Yeah, that was how I was going to close this is that I use customer service exactly as that, whether it’s an emails asking a question or it’s an actual shipping issue, download issue.
I use that as feedback to help me make my process better…
Jim Edwards: Right…
Stew Smith: But whether that is, Hey, I need to put this in all caps, that this is a downloadable product, not a book that’s going to be mailed to you on all my pages…
I will do that.
Jim Edwards: Right, right…
Stew Smith: Because people, or assuming this is a book, not an ebook, right…
That happened 15 years ago…
Jim Edwards: Right?
And the other little things as well, whether that is something that is actually inside the product itself…
Say, Hey, I didn’t understand what you meant by this…
I can go back in and fix the actual product itself…
Because a lot of people are asking questions about me, how I explained this particular workout, for instance…
So you can use it for multiple reasons that will make your business better.
Jim Edwards: Sure.
Stew Smith: Not only on the product itself, but also on the process of people understanding what it is that they are getting when they are going to get it…
Like I said, all that needs to be communicated within somewhere in the sales copy or even in the no post-purchase email that they get…
That allows them to thoroughly understand…
This is what I like to do…
I like to refer people to the email that I sent them immediately after purchase…
Jim Edwards: Right.
I said, Hey, check out our thank you email cause it explains everything…
This book is going to be shipped in five to seven days…
You will receive it…
You’re not going to get it in two days…
Jim Edwards: Well, and that’s a great point.
And one of the things that you should do is don’t hide from customer service either.
And I listen to this, I feel like maybe I was too negative earlier…
Do you feel like I was being negative about customer service earlier?
Stew Smith: No, but I mean like I said, there is a line…
Yeah, there was that line that we have where you’re going to have good customer service, and then you’re going to say this is not worth my time…
Jim Edwards: Right…
Stew Smith: Providing good customer service anymore…
Jim Edwards: They’re not capable of being satisfied is really what it comes down to, but the thing is, again, your customer service can actually be a gold mine as far as content, as far as questions, as far as improving your process and we expect whenever we launch something new, we want those questions, we ask for the questions, we ask for the feedback so that we can make the process better.
We can make the product better and smooth the whole thing out…
We just know that’s going to happen, and that’s an important part of the process.
I guess what I was focusing on is talking about the occasional negative person or the occasional negative thing that exactly what you said…
You got to decide,
“Okay, where is my line?”
Because there is a line where you just have to do a refund and say, I’m sorry it didn’t work out, and my exact words are…
We’ve chosen to issue a refund because we want to avoid disappointing you further in the future…
So we just don’t want to do that…
So we’d rather end it here and give you your money back…
And if you get the book, great…
If you don’t, sorry, it didn’t work out.
It’ll be on Amazon eventually…
And that’s true, but I mean that’s some good verbiage though that I’ve found really works well rather than risk disappointing you further, we’re just going to go ahead and issue a refund and when you do that, it also takes all the wind out of their sales because it’s like, Hey, I gave your money back…
If it’s a digital product, keep access to it…
Get the best out of it…
Have a great day…
Cause In fact, if they’ve downloaded a PDF, it’s not like you can take it back…
Stew Smith: No, no…
One thing good to is about issuing the refund is, do you feel internally that it is gone?
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: Now, this is no longer an issue I need to stress out about…
Jim Edwards: Right.
Stew Smith: Not that you need to stress out about anyway, but sometimes it’s just an extra work that gets on to your to-do list cause you got to deal with whatever issue it was…
Jim Edwards: Right.
Stew Smith: But you don’t have to deal with it anymore and it just kind of wipes it clean.
Jim Edwards: There’s also one last thing on that, and again this is an extreme but…
We tell it to you, we talk about the real world here…
Okay?
In an extreme example, when you’re doing enough, you will have the occasional person that wants to complain again about you to the better business Bureau or maybe even the attorney general…
I’ve had one person complain about me to the attorney general in the last 22 years…
I solved the problem in five minutes…
We showed all of the correspondence that we had with the person, and we showed where we had refunded everything they ever purchased, and the person from the Attorney General’s office was, that’s fine.
No problem…
She couldn’t say, yeah, they sounded like a psycho, but we have to look into this…
She said you will not hear from us again.
This is fine.
Stew Smith: That’s my way of saying that or illegal way of saying,
“Good Lord.”
Jim Edwards: Exactly…
And the same thing with the better business Bureau because it was the same person that did both…
You showed them all the correspondence, we showed them the timelines of responding to these people, and we showed them that we had refunded all of their money and had allowed them to keep the product, and they said not a problem…
No, never had an issue…
So that’s another reason to have a separate email account…
I mean we can go on about this forever…
I don’t want this to go forever, but that’s one reason why we use a help desk.
And if you don’t use a help desk, have a separate email that you use for customer service so that you can archive all of those emails…
Cause you never know when you might need to go back through and look for questions…
It’s like,
“Hey, let me go question mining.”
But also you never know when you might have to just document interaction with somebody…
I mean, I had to talk to the FBI one time because the FBI called me because somebody who was on my list the hundreds of thousands of people, they were going through his computer and my email was so well written, the email marketing message, it was so well written that the FBI agent thought that I knew the guy…
Stew Smith: Oh…
Jim Edwards: And so they contacted me…
I have no idea who this guy is…
I showed them when he subscribed and what he subscribed to, and she says, okay, cool.
That’s
“Hey, good email.”
It just weird stuff happens, and you need to document…
Stew Smith: Well, here’s a good example too, of how customer service actually saved me a lot of work…
A customer service complaint saved me a lot of work…
It was a mild complaint…
Nothing crazy…
This book right here probably about a month into me selling it, I got a box that the entire print was all jacked up…
Like, everything was blurry…
It just didn’t work like something was wrong, and it was all in a box…
And probably by the time I had shipped about five of those out of that box of 25, I guess…
I got an email saying, Hey, I can’t read anything that’s in this book…
I’m like, what are you talking about?
I mean, what’s wrong with it?
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: So I pulled out other copies…
And I said, “Wow, this whole box is screwed up.”
I said, well, thank you…
I apologize…
I’ll send you a new one…
Cause I had another box of them too…
I’ll send you a new one right now…
And I was able to track down four other guys that I had sent out of that same box…
I said, Hey, you may get a bad book…
I’m shipping another one right now…
Know just be worn…
And sure enough, they did…
And they were like, Hey, thanks for catching that…
But I wouldn’t have caught it…
If somebody said something and said it quickly, so I’m not gonna go through every book and make sure that the print is good…
Jim Edwards: Yeah, we can’t…
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: So I think the bottom line is I love my customers.
I’m grateful for my customers, my customers make it so that I can have a lifestyle I never dreamed of…
I’m only working half days from six in the morning till six at night…
But I love what I’m doing, and I love my customers, and I want them to have an amazing experience…
And you can’t let the occasional chucklehead ruin your attitude for the 99 out of a hundred who just love you back and are just so excited that they’re able to have a connection with you.
So be careful of your attitude as it relates to your customers.
Stew Smith: Yeah, I like it.
Stew Smith: So yeah, I would end with that…
Jim Edwards: Oh, shameless plug…
If you haven’t gotten Copywriting Secrets yet, go to copywritingsecrets.com I bought your book…
Unlike Stew, who charges for his books, I’m going to pay for the book for you, and all I need you to do is just pay the shipping…
So a great job Stew…
Stew Smith: Thank you, Sir!
Jim Edwards: And we will talk to you guys soon…
Have a great day.
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