How to Sell Cars to Today’s Connected Customers (Edited excerpt from Assumptive Selling: The Complete Guide to Selling More Vehicles for More Money to Today’s Connected Customers – available for $49.99 on Amazon.com.) Either during the initial job interview or your first week in the car business, you were probably told (as I was) that […]
How to Handle an Employee’s Stupid Questions When There are No Stupid Questions I was recently asked how a manager should handle an employee who continues to ask the same question over and over; this, despite having been given the answer repeatedly in the past. The issue, as this manager saw it, was how to […]
What being late says about you (One of the 83 quick and practical life & work lessons from Sh*t Sandwich: Quick & Practical Success Lessons for Practically Anyone.) 5 Minutes Early is 10 Minutes Late Packers’ Coach Vice Lombardi is famously quoted as saying that “If you are five minutes early, you are already ten […]
Customer Service at the Counter – How to Manage the Unmanageable A reader asked a few questions that included coping with angry customers at a service counter recently that I thought made sense to share with all. When you are working at a busy place where there are constantly overcrowded lines, and impatient people, we […]
Pigs get Fed and Hogs get Slaughtered I’ve written a few times about the adage ‘pigs get fed and hogs get slaughtered.’ The meaning (as it applies to business) is simply that it’s okay to make a profit, but when that profit is the result of price gouging and/or taking advantage of people, you’ll […]
How to Solve 99% of Customer Service Issues: Empower your Front Lines If you’re in the service business, there’s a simple way to solve nearly every customer issue that you’ll ever create: Empower your front lines. Many of the issues, in fact, are created specifically because your front line is not (or does not feel) […]
In a recent CBT News interview (that aired this week), Joe Gumm asked me the following question: “We’re about two months from wrapping up 2017; and some dealers are already thinking about 2018. So, if you had a top five list of things dealerships need in order to be successful from this point on, what […]
Why Bosses are Proudly Serving Shit Sandwiches to Their Teams Recently, three different senior managers I respect asked me where they could buy extra copies of my book, Sh*t Sandwich: Quick & Practical Success Lessons for Practically Anyone. All three were looking for the same thing: a success book their respective teams would read, […]
The Coming Automotive Retail Disruption? It’ll be about Price and Convenience (and Nothing Else) (This is a follow-up to an article I posted on DealerRefresh a couple of weeks ago that focused on the myth that dealers are behind other industries in terms of tech, marketing and the customer experience.) Can we please stop talking […]
There is no “rule” in your dealership more harmful to your long-term success than that asinine, unwritten guideline that basically gives half the deal for any previous customer to the salesperson who sold them the last time. Ugh. I wrote “rule” in quotes, because this isn’t so much as rule as a copout on […]
Lots of you, whether you are a frequent flier or involved somehow in digital marketing and reputation management, are aware that United Breaks Guitars. That is, you’ve viewed the nearly 8-year old music video written, performed and produced by a band that claims they watched as United Airlines’ employees carelessly flung their guitars around the […]
Wait, what’s a CSR again? CSR stands for Customer Service Representative. For some of you this might mean anyone who answers your phones. It might also mean everyone on your sales team. You see, any employee or manager on your frontlines should be solving customer service issues; and anyone who should be solving customer […]
Okay, you’ve got an empowered customer service team, but their average call times are still too high! What the heck? Average call times? You’re measuring average call times for a customer service team that’s supposed to be solving issues? Is this 2017 or 1967? If you’re like a lot of the call centers that […]
It’s time to stop escalating the customer service issues in your business. While good leaders allow their subordinates to escalate customer issues, great leaders don’t see many escalated issues at all. This is because great leaders not only allow those on the frontline to solve issues; they expect it. Would you like to solve […]
In the last post from this series, we learned to picture the customer with the issue as someone’s slightly confused, 95-year-old great grandmother. We do this primarily so that we’re always on our best behavior; but this exercise will also help us handle the nastiest of irate customers by teaching us to kill them […]
Resolving customer issues is not actual customer service, it’s reactive customer service. Businesses that assume this is actual customer service completely miss the point of managing the customer experience. The goal, of course, is to eliminate issues before they occur. When you’re faced with resolving an issue – that is, practicing reactive customer service […]
I think readers of this series are fairly clear on my feeling that great customer means never having an issue in the first place, right? Well, okay, but what happens when we mess up? What happens when we screw the pooch? Responding to and solving a customer service issue is required whenever your team […]
There’s a great 2002 study on manipulating the customer experience that was published in The Journal of Applied Social Psychology detailing how something as small as an after dinner mint can be used to dramatically increase a waiter’s tips. For those of you not wanting to read the entire study (I don’t blame you), here […]
Lesson number five of our Five Simple Strategies to ensure we never have customer service issues, is to always maintain the goal of Customers for Life. Why customers for life? Well, as we learned in the first post in this series, it costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than […]
Fourth on our list of the 5 Simple Strategies that guarantee you never have customer issues in the first place is dubbed Real Alignment (like “wheel alignment,” get it?). The alignment I’m referring to here is getting your customers’ expectations aligned with your realities. In other words, we are going to manage their expectations […]