Customer Service That Sells - Turning Customers into Raging Fans | MMP #026

Customer Service That Sells - Turning Customers into Raging Fans | MMP #026 Kevin King: I just want to point that out that customer service is not always fixing problems. It can also be surprising and delighting. Unknown Speaker: You're watching The Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Kevin King: Norm Farrar. The Misfit. The Misfit from the Great White North. Is that you? Norm Farrar: Yep, I am the Misfit and I guess you're the Cowboy Misfit. Kevin King: I'm the Cowboy Misfit and you're the Great White Misfit. Is it cold up in Canada already? Norm Farrar: It is, like right now. Since I visited you, it's got down to 11 degrees Celsius during the day, which is crazy. So yeah, it's not good cigar weather. Kevin King: 50 something Fahrenheit. Norm Farrar: I think that's 40, mid 40s. I think that's it. Kevin King: Why don't you double it and add 32 as the poor man's math. It's not accurate, but it gets you close. So 11 times 2 plus 32 is 54. So it's somewhere in the low 50s. Norm Farrar: All right. Kevin King: For us real people that still use proper Fahrenheit. Norm Farrar: I'm fact checking, just like the debate. Just a second. Kevin King: I guess we're the only country in the world that still does that. But UK, they use Celsius for their temperature, but they use miles still instead of kilometers for their roads. But we still have the old imperial system. Norm Farrar: I think you're the last left. You're the misfit. Kevin King: We tried to change it. I remember a couple of times it's gone up for a vote or something. I remember when I was a kid and it happened not too long ago and then everybody just votes it down like, no, that's too complicated. We don't want to be like them Europeans. Norm Farrar: You know what's weird and this comes back to marketing right because I don't think they marketed this properly so I grew up back in the seventies in school like I was in elementary school and they changed all this and to this day. I have no friggin' idea when they start talking about a kilogram. Like I kinda know it's two point some odd pounds. Yeah, or if they're talking about your height. You know, how many centimeters am I? How the hell am I? And you know, everybody, like my kids, oh yeah, it's only X, Y, Z centimeters. You're so much weight. My doctor says I weigh so much. I go, what's that? Like in real terms. I still haven't caught on, but maybe I'm a little dense. Kevin King: I can convert it, but still it makes me stop and think like, how many milliliters is an ounce? I think it's 100, actually. Norm Farrar: I have no idea. Kevin King: I just know that from dieting because it's like, you can have 3.3 ounces of meat. I'm like, well, how many milliliters is that? It's like 300 milliliters or whatever it is. I'm like, all right. The other one that still gets me is the British still use stones. You're six stones and seven. I'm like, what the heck is six stones and seven? What is that? Or you're a fortnight. It's a fortnight away. Norm Farrar: Yeah. Kevin King: Or something like that. I'm like, fortnight is 14 days. I know that now. Norm Farrar: Yeah, that's two weeks. Kevin King: 20 pounds or something, right? I think. Norm Farrar: So, okay. Here's something like the stones get me too, right? All sorts of stones get me, but that stone thing throws a confusion at my way. But here's one that I learned recently is a writing. Do you know why there are certain lengths to writing? Like when you have an electoral, like we're having an election here in Canada shortly, you guys in the States, but you have writings. Well, back in the day, it was how far your horse could travel. So in a day, so that was a riding. Kevin King: I haven't heard of writings. I know when I was a kid, we wouldn't say it's 100 miles away. We'd say it's three beers or something like that. Where are we going? How far we got to go to see these hot girls at this club? That's three beers away. We used to do that. How many beers can you drink? How long does it take to drink three beers or whatever it may be? Sometimes we wanted those trips that were 10 beers. We're like, ah, let's go on a 10-beer trip. And then you're stopping about every hour to pee too. Yeah. Norm Farrar: And, and if it was nowadays, it would be like every 10 minutes. Kevin King: When you get older, for you, I mean, I don't have that issue yet. I'm not getting up in the middle of the night. Some people I know have to get up a few times in the night. You stayed with me. I kept hearing the floor creaking. I was like, what the heck? It's like 3 in the morning. I was like, we just went to bed at 1.30. We smoked a cigar and we went to bed. I hear the floor creaking. And then around 5, 5.30, I hear one of the beeps on the little alarm things, the smoke detectors or something go off, something pass by. I was like, that ain't a cricket. That's not a grasshopper or a cricket. That's something big that caught that. That's not Zoe walking underneath it. Norm Farrar: So I'm like, it's one big cricket. Yeah. Kevin King: How many times in the night? Yeah, I don't know. I forget some of them. I think I sleepwalked some of them. Norm Farrar: I can't count. Yeah, I can't count on one hand. Oh my gosh. Kevin King: Yeah, that's the joys of growing old. Norm Farrar: Yeah, I'm there. Done it, did it, bought the t-shirt. Like I told you, I just had my birthday last week and I, you know, I got... Kevin King: Happy birthday. Happy belated. I think what I tell you, see, I was talking about these things. I didn't tell you happy birthday, did I? I told you happy third repetition of your 21st birthday or something like that. That's right. I was trying to put it in context of what we're talking about today, not even knowing what we're going to talk about today. Norm Farrar: See, even that I had to convert. I just put out a message saying, hey, thanks for the birthday wishes. I wish the fire trucks would leave, but I guess they have to wait until I blow up my candles now. Kevin King: Yeah, I saw that. That was funny. And you had the little AI picture too. I guess Kelsey or something made a little AI picture of you blowing candles. Norm Farrar: Yeah. Kevin King: And you're like, yeah, there's a lot more. It takes longer now to blow these things out. Norm Farrar: Got to watch my beard. Kevin King: That was funny. You should have done a little gif where your beard caught on fire. Norm Farrar: Hey, I did catch on fire once. Remember that? Kevin King: Yeah. Norm Farrar: I looked like Yosemite Sam for a year. Kevin King: Well, I hear you just recently had a really cool or interesting experience. You're down here in Austin smoking cigars. It was last December, I think, so a year ago. And you're like, Kevin, I was supplying you some cigars. So you started feeling a little guilty smoking these $100 Year of the Dragons. And you're like, this is really cool. I get to come to Kevin's house, get to stay here. I've got Coke Zeros. They never run out. I got my gummies and got these really good cigars. I don't want to feel like a little mooch, so I better get him a little present. So you bought this really kick-ass freaking case for yourself. It came and you're like, this is really cool. So you decided to surprise me and you bought one for me. It's like a $300 or $400. I don't know what it costs, but $300, $400 case. Kind of looks like a gun case, but it's for cigars. It's got a little lock on it. And you bought this thing and gave me one and then you had yours. And so now we carry that around when we go to events. We have a little rule when we go to events. We've talked about this before that smoking cigars at an event. Norm Farrar: People are going to know what we are doing. Kevin King: There's two different cases. For certain things and other cases for other things. So we had these cases we're carrying around and something happened to yours. It got kind of, I don't know, jingle jangled around in your carry-on or something got kind of messed up, scratched up and damaged. And I know you've talked about this a few times as you tell the story, but what happened next was you're pretty impressed with. Norm Farrar: Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Levanta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it. Kevin King: That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levanta, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high-quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right. It's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers, and media buyers, all in Levante's marketplace, which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from. Norm Farrar: So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits. So over a couple of weeks, I was traveling back and forth to your place probably twice that month. And I noticed that there was some paint that was chipping. And all of a sudden, you could just take your finger and the paint would come right off. And so this is, like you mentioned, it's a very expensive cigar case. It's a biometric cigar case. And I love it. So it protects your expensive cigars. It's kind of cool to just people, you know, whenever we go anywhere, people know that we're going to have a cigar night or nights. And so this is just a case that we use. And anyways, it just started looking like crap. So I had to go through Amazon. So I went through Amazon and the manufacturer got right back to me within a day and they apologized. They wanted to see if I could send a picture. I did. 24 hours, they said, we got something. I didn't have to prove anything. They just said, look, if you're not satisfied, we'll ship it out. I told them that I was going someplace and it was going to your place, right? So I had to ship the new cigar humidor over, it's a travel humidor, over to your place. And I said, look, I'm not going to, They asked me to send the other one back and I said, yes, but it might be like two weeks, a month later. No problem. We just want to take care of this problem for you. So sent it out. You got it. No questions asked. The last time I was there, I picked it up and it was perfect. And they followed up and they just said, you know, just hope you got this. They gave me their phone number and their email just to make sure if there was any issues whatsoever. So I was blown away because It seems nowadays and we've talked about this before kevin but a customer service goes down the drain and. Those companies that can provide exceptional customer service. I'm going to give all I can, all my support to, and this company deserves a shout out. I mean, they're called Lifepods. The company's called, I think it's Volt, but they're Lifepod. They do have gun cases. They do have the cigar cases. They could be used for a lot of different things and customized. Hopefully I can show a picture of it, maybe when this gets edited. But yeah, customer service has just gone down the tube. And the thing is, we're sitting on our butts accepting it. We're accepting this crap customer service nowadays. Have you experienced this? Kevin King: Yeah. Customer service is something that a lot of people, they don't like the expense. I see this more in the Amazon world for our day jobs a lot of times. We see people like us, this customer just complained that XYZ was broken. What do I do? Do I make them send it back? Do I make them send me pictures and prove it? I think they're scamming me. And they don't know what to do. There are going to be people that do scam you. There's no question about that. That's going to happen. Just immediately try to take care of them because an unhappy customer is going to tell, I think the rule is seven people. A happy customer tells one or two. On average, an unhappy tells seven. So if someone has a bad experience with you, they're going to tell people, don't do business. I mean, how many times have we been on a phone call and someone ghosted us on a Zoom call or didn't show up? We're like, that's it. We're not dealing with these people. That's not really a customer service, but people have a short spews, but they will tell people, don't work with this company. In today's world, I just recently did a Freedom Ticket webinar with Mark DeGrasse, who's a good friend of ours. He's been on the podcast here as well. He's talking about branding and AI. He's talking about how now in this competitive world of Timu and Sheen and Amazon and Target and Walmart and everybody, And all this price squeezing that a lot of times you might not be able to make money on that first sale. Maybe that first sale is just getting the lead in the door and getting the customer. And there's a small little margin, but you got to make the money on selling them other stuff, on building the brand and selling them other stuff. And part of that branding is customer service. How you take, I mean, look at Nordstrom's. Nordstrom is famous for you can return anything at any time, no matter what. There is no 30 day window or 60. I think they've changed this recently. They have tightened it up a little bit, but for a while there was you could buy something seven years from now and then return it. And they were getting scammed. Some people were buying stuff at a different store, buying it on sale or whatever. And so now they put, if you've ever been to a Norseman, they put a second sticker. So when you buy something, you buy a cologne, a nice bottle of Chanel or something. I used to do that for my ex-wife and they put a second sticker on there. It's almost like a transparency label from Amazon that shows that this came from their store. So if you are going to return it, they know it's not the bottle that you bought off the back of a truck somewhere for a dollar. You're returning it for a hundred bucks, but that's part of their branding and they're famous for it. Land's End, I think the catalog company of Maine is the same way. And so by taking care of that customer, you may lose money on that. And what I do is I send the stuff out fast. So if someone on my Amazon says something is bad, I'll pay the extra to ship it one or two day, unless it's just crazy. I'm not going to do that on a refrigerator or something, but unless it's just crazy expensive, I'll spend that extra 10, 15, 20 bucks to get them happy as fast as I can because then they're going to be just like you. And I didn't expect that. I expected this to take a couple of weeks. And by taking care of customers, You're actually paving the way for the future and it's part of your brand. It's part of your brand story. It's part of your message that you care. Like this company, this Lifepod company, now you're going to consider buying something else from them or you're going to buy another gift for another one of your buddies from them. You're talking about them now. You're going to tell people that are smoking cigars, like, oh, where'd you get that? Oh, it's Lifepod. Instead of just saying, oh, it's a cool case. I don't remember where I got it. You're going to say, oh, it's Lifepod. Go to Lifepod.com. You should check it out. Norm Farrar: How many times have we done that? How many times have we been, since that event, it was way more than seven people. We've probably talked to 20, 25 people easily that are cigar smokers about that. So, yeah, that's, you're 100% bang on. Kevin King: I mean, I used to do something with, now if you want to, you know, you talk about this from a misfits point of view, you know, one of the things I used to do with my calendar business, I don't do it anymore. I tested it. It worked well. I just, I don't know. I just, for whatever reason, I got away from it. But I shouldn't have, but I did it for several years. It's called a no dogs guarantee. So I would have people that would buy a wall calendar. And these are dated. You know, these are like, they're no good to me. Once you've opened and torn the plastic off or you've written something in it, they're no good to me and they'd buy it. And they're like, oh, I opened this up and you know, these are, these are calendars of pretty girls. And they're like, oh, all these girls are ugly. You know, and so they would be like, even though they're all some of the best models in the world or supermodels, they, oh, these girls are all ugly. Usually it just means they want some different kind of posing or something different that, you know, they, it's something they just didn't like. And so we actually implement something called a no dogs guarantee. And so for that no dogs guarantee, you could pay $3 when you placed your order, and that will allow you to return anything at any time and not for a refund, but you could exchange it. And so, you know, we kind of played off it, you know, the idea of, you know, it's kind of mean in a way, and I'm not trying to be mean or derogatory. But, you know, there's no dogs, you know, no bad product. Norm Farrar: And if you pay that fee, and so- We just lost half our podcast audience. Thanks, Kevin. Kevin King: But that's probably why I actually got away from it. But now that I remember, we did that and it worked. But also I do, you know, someone says, oh, I didn't get my order. You know, the first thing I'm like, you know, have you checked here? Did you check at the office? Did you check, you know, maybe it's behind the bushes? You know, they come back. Then, oh yeah, reship it or give them their money back. You just factor that in. When you're doing your forecast, you're going to have a, I think the average rate, I just had this in my newsletter, billion-dollar sellers, the average retail return rate is 18% in the United States. No, it's 15%. Average online is 18%. So 18% of all things ordered online are returned. And 15% of all things that are ordered in a store are returned. And so if you just got to build that in that know that some of this is going to get returned and you build that into your margins and you just accept it instead of getting upset about it. You just accept it. And that's what I think a lot of people are not doing. And another thing is in customer service is delight. Give them something. Customer service is not about just fixing problems. Customer service, you know, when something goes bad, like in your case, the Lifepod, that's customer service for sure. But customer service can also be surprising and delighting. And so like if I think I've given this example on podcasts before where I used to order We use VHS, not VHS, but beta tapes because we used to shoot a lot of television productions and this is before everything was digital. So you had these big like cassette tapes that you, they're not VHS, they're called beta because it's a little bit better quality and everything. And so we would put these in the cameras to shoot all of our stuff. And I would order these out of Pennsylvania because it was cheaper to go to them from this company in Pennsylvania and ship them down to Texas. And every time I would get in that box would be a couple of packages of M&Ms. And these are like these little small Halloween size packages, just a couple sitting on top of the little sticker, like a post-it note says, thanks for your order. And I remember one time I didn't get those. And it's a small thing. It's costing 20 cents or something. But just the fact that like, oh, when the box would come in, I'd tell my shipping guy, where's the box? I want the M&Ms. Norm Farrar: Yeah, exactly. Kevin King: I want those M&Ms. Don't you be eating my M&Ms. One time, it was like in June and there's no M&Ms. I'm like, why didn't I get my M&Ms? I messaged the company and I said, hey, I didn't get the M&Ms in the box. It's no big deal. I really like that you guys do that. And they messaged me right back and they said, oh, sorry, we don't sell them in the summer because the chocolate melts. And that text is a hundred degree heat. I'm like, ah, okay. I appreciate that. But that's a good point. So we're going to put a little note in there from now on that says that. So they actually start putting notes in the future orders. But that's delighting. And that's giving somebody or, you know, if somebody orders A 10-piece set of something, you give them an extra one. It comes with 12. We decided to give you two more and make it 12 or whatever it may be. You don't tell them that on your listing. You don't tell them there's a bonus, but when they get it, they see this and they're like, oh, I got two more free. How many times have you bought some cigars and you just spent You know, 500 bucks like you did in Pennsylvania or whatever, buying some cigars and the guy's like, oh, let me throw these three or four more in free. On top, you're like, oh, thanks. Those little things, that's customer service too. So I just want to point that out that customer service is not always fixing problems. It can also be surprising and delighting. Norm Farrar: But you know, Kev, when you start looking at how companies, now this is a little bit outside, this is a different rabbit hole, but it really pisses me off. Yeah, I'm a big guy. I like my food. But when I go and I literally, when I get a pack of Oreos, and I know people have talked about this, I've heard it before, but I know It's half the size. Or when I get a package of hot dogs, well, there's one missing. And now this shrinkonomics, it pisses me off. If the price has to go up a little bit, keep the quality there. And that's the same with anything. If you're going and you're going to go and pay for something, I'd rather pay a little bit more for a high quality product. Then, all of a sudden, it's half of what you remembered. Birthday, my wife got me a bunch of Kit Kats. The Kit Kat bars aren't even near what they used to be. Yeah, it's a little thing, but that's something. All these little things that's happening with shrinkonomics, it all comes back to bite the brand. I'll look for something else. I'll try to find ice cream bars. These little mini ice cream bars that don't even fit in my hand. I look like the Jolly Green Giant eating one of these ice cream bars. Kevin King: That's the calorie control. That's the 100 calorie bars. That's to keep you like, you get that hit of dopamine and then you don't eat too many. Norm Farrar: I'm talking about regular sized. Fudgios or whatever they used to be. And now you get them and it's the same Fudgio. It's the same amount in the pack, but you open it up and it's like this big instead of, yeah, Canadian sizing, I guess. Kevin King: What's a Fudgio? Norm Farrar: You don't know what a Fudgio is? Kevin King: Is that some Canadian rat food or something? What is that? Norm Farrar: Well, they're like fudge bars. Kevin King: I've never heard of fudgio. Norm Farrar: Well, you're missing out. I'm sorry. I'll bring some down. Kevin King: Down here in Texas, we just have Mexican Coke. We don't have fudgio. Norm Farrar: Well, just you wait. Next time you're up, I'll treat you. Kevin King: Tomato chips either or ketchup chips. What do you call them? Norm Farrar: Ketchup chips. Kevin King: Potato chips. Norm Farrar: You don't know what you're missing. Ketchup chips. Kevin King: And now a word from one of our sponsors, one of Norm and I's favorite tools, Stack Influence. Norm Farrar: Are you looking to quickly boost new Amazon product launches or scale up existing listings to reach first page positioning? The influencer platform Stack Influence can help. Stack Influence pushes high-volume external traffic sales to Amazon listings using micro-influencers. And guess what? You only have to pay with your products. They've helped up-and-coming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top category positioning, while also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilever launch their new products. Right now is the best time to get started with Stack Influence to crush it during this holiday season. Kevin King: That's right, Norm. Sign up today at StackInfluence.com or click the link in the video below and mention Misfits, that's right, Misfits, M-I-S-F-I-T-S to get 10% off your first campaign. Head over to StackInfluence.com right now. Norm Farrar: Now, actually talking about all this food kind of leads me over to another subject. Kevin King: Actually, before you go, on the Shrink-O-Nox, there's actually a company here in Texas called Blue Bill Ice Cream. They're only in the south. They're like in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, I think Alabama, maybe a couple other places. So you can't get it all over the US. It's my favorite ice cream. It's what you have when you, well, normally what you have. Sometimes you grab the wrong one. When you're here, they actually have, you know, it still comes in the big, if you buy the big ones, they still, it actually says really big on there, still half a gallon. Because all the other ones, you know, the Breyers and the whatever the other national brands are, has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. They're actually, they're the big, they're big. Buckets of ice cream are not what they used to be. They're actually emphasizing that as a marketing point. We're still half a gallon. The other guys, check the size, check the ounces or whatever it is. They're not nearly as much. You can use that shrinkonomic stuff to your advantage too and emphasize it. Norm Farrar: Absolutely. So, on a different note, kind of going back to customer service, I don't know about you, and I don't understand this, but you know psychology better than I do, but why do you think people settle for less than what they did before? Like Uber, okay? Not Uber, Uber Eats. You know, having cold food, having your food. We ordered some food the other day and the food I ordered, I got double of something and not the one thing that I ordered. You know, all of this crap is happening and it's cold. We live, you know, where I live in a rural town. So I got to wait 20, 25 minutes for the delivery once it leaves the store. By the time it gets here, it's cold, lukewarm, or it's mixed up. But we settle for that right now. Everybody's settling for that. Why do you think that is? Kevin King: One is because a lot of people are doing it, but the other is that you're settling for convenience. You're like, all right, yeah, this arrived a little warm and I'll screw it. I'll just throw it in the microwave for 30 seconds and it'll be all right. But the convenient factor, if you don't have to put on your pants and drive down to the place and order it and come back. You're like you're willing to you're willing to do those trade-offs. So that's where people like the convenience is over overriding the the factor of is it going to be hot or cold? Now if it tasted bad or something else was wrong or the mix-up, you know, that's I would be complaining about that. But some people just like well, They screwed it up. Well, it's not worth my time to complain. I'm going to spend 30 minutes on the phone trying to explain it and then I got away. So it's a hassle. It becomes a hassle. And so companies know that. That's the whole reason for the US just passed a law. I don't think it's going to affect it yet. I just heard it this week. I think the FTC passed a law about subscriptions. It used to be back in the day, I remember 20 years ago, people were making a mint by free trial. It's three, and they would tell you it's a three-day trial, but they know that a certain number of people aren't going to cancel. They're going to forget to cancel. We've talked about this where you write, you have a spreadsheet where you make a note and you tell your assistant, like, make sure you go in and cancel all these before the trial's up. And people don't, and they take advantage of that. And sometimes they'll go two, three months before they're like looking at their credit card statement and going, Oh, dang gum. And I forgot to cancel that subscription to Remney. Uh, let me go and cancel it. Um, and so, but the companies are banking on getting that extra two, three months of like free revenue when you're not even using the thing. And so that's, that's, it's kind of like the same thing with the Uber. You're just coming to accept it. It's not worth the hassle to go in and complain. And so that's, I think why some people are starting to accept it, but on the flip side, if you go over and beyond, if you got the wrong drink and you called them up and said, hey, I got a Diet Pepsi and I want a Coke Zero. A lot of people, I'm so sorry. Here's a dollar coupon or here's a $5 off your next order, which is a good first step, and maybe a good solution. But the better answer would be, I'm so sorry, Mr. Farrar. We'll have a Coke Zero. It's on its way right now. I have a special guy coming. That's going to cost that company $30 or $20 in special delivery. And I would bring two. Even though you order one, say, here's a second one. Sorry for the hassle, for the trouble. And those things will go a long way because then you're going to be like, all right, this company actually took responsibility. They owned up to the problem. It wasn't this guy's manager's fault. It was his driver or something got mixed up, but they fixed it. I'll order from them again because I know it's going to get fixed. That's why old people order from Amazon. They know if they have a problem, it's easy to return. It's easy to go. I mean, I just had this happen this week. I ordered some Some straps to like strap in, you know, on the back of your truck to hold the stuff from flying off the back of the truck. You know, you put these big straps and I order them from our buddy Ted, his company, Ted Repics company that was on our CMS trip. And so I ordered them from them and I ordered three different ones. One of them came on Sunday and it said the other two were delivered in a second package. Well, that package is nowhere to be found in my mailroom. And so Monday or Tuesday, I waited till Tuesday because sometimes the FedEx or UPS guys, they put them in random places or put them in the laundry freaking lockers or something. So I looked everywhere and I actually, I acted like a driver. So these drivers, we have these lockers at the bottom of my building and the drivers come in and says, UPS, enter this code, US Mail, enter this code, FedEx, enter this code, Amazon, enter this code. So I acted like a driver and I was delivering something and punched in a code to my thing. I have a delivery for Kevin. I'm working for UPS, punch to the code in and then opens up one of the lockers. I can go in there and there's two big lockers that are oversized. They stack like 30 packages in there. All the others are like one package per locker. So I was like, maybe they got mixed up in there. So I'm a misfit. So I figured out how the system works. So I figured out how to actually open those lockers without a code by acting like a driver, acting like I'm delivering a package to myself. And I went through them, they're not there. So then on Tuesday, I went to the office and, hey, I'm missing this package. She's like, oh, they went and they opened every single locker and like looking still not there. So I called, contacted Amazon. Amazon didn't show it as delivered, but they didn't have a picture of it like sitting somewhere. Like sometimes there's a picture. So I went on Amazon. Now Amazon has an automated chat bot. You don't even have to talk to a person. A chat bot, you go through a series of questions and within a minute of doing that, I had a full refund back to me. An option of do I want credit to my Amazon account? Unknown Speaker: Do I want to credit it back to the credit card? And they did it right on the spot, no questions asked. That was good. And I'm sure they have an algorithm that looks like this dude's ordered 7,000 times from us, and he's only returned three things. So let's just trust him. But if I had ordered 20 times and returned 17 of them, they might be like, well, hold on. Let's send this to a person, have someone talk to him. I'm not sure what the back end system was, but that's good customer service. And it could have been something that was my fault, but Amazon owned up to it and they take the hit. Probably the actual seller's going to take the hit. Amazon's not going to take the hit, really. The seller's going to take the hit. That's just part of it. That's good customer service. That's why people will go and keep ordering from Amazon because of that. Just like in your Uber example with this delivery, they mess it up. If they would have made it right, you would keep ordering from them. Now, the next time you order, you're going to hesitate. I don't know. Kevin King: Let's try something else. Are they using Postmates or Uber Eats or Dash or whatever? I don't know what's in Canada. Find a company that uses one of these other services. Norm Farrar: You know, Kevin, I'm one of those guys that, okay, it came, I got two hamburgers instead of one hamburger and a chicken burger. I'll eat it. My wife, My wife is like a dog on a bone. She'll call the store. The store doesn't do anything. She'll call head office. She wants to get something for whatever inconvenience it is. She gets it, by the way. Just two different things. Even when we call the store, so she calls the store, a lot of the times, again, it's 25 minutes away to the closest restaurant. She'll have to put up with a hassle in that restaurant. Okay, well, next time when you come in, we'll give you an extra whatever burrito. It doesn't work. And what you just said is 100% like just get a driver, drive the frigging thing out to this person. And it's a whole different ballgame. Instead of What am I going to get this time? Especially if it happens twice, twice in a row from the same restaurant. Another one that we settle for. Deliveries from all the major carriers, Amazon, UPS, FedEx, it's just drop it on the porch. If nobody steals it, it's good. I told you about the time I had bought my wife some chocolates. The one company has it in a styrofoam box so it doesn't melt. This other company, it was Amazon just, I guess, took these, put it in a box, sat on the porch for two or three hours. And when I got them, it was like one infused fusion of chocolate and flavors, you know, and that's okay. You know, but these things we settle for and I have to say it's I have a love hate relationship with with Amazon. There's things that they do as a seller. I hate there's things that I do like the delivery system. I hate but the time I was staying over at your place. I ordered a bunch of Buffalo jeans. You remember that? They came in and the one pair was too big. So it was around Christmas time. So I was taking that and I went over to my parents' house. I called Amazon and I said, you know, this one pair, it's too long. Or no, the waist was too big. And they just said, okay, we'll send you out a new pair. Just keep those, you know, give them away. And I thought, wow, that was really great. Kevin King: It's actually cheaper to do that than actually the return because the returns cost money. I mean, it costs money to process them, to check them, to repackage them, to get rid of them, auction off. Most returns do not get resold. So it's a big problem right now. If you look at a lot of logistics companies, they're talking about this return issue as e-commerce is exploding. It's huge. I mean, the UPS stores, I read something like 80 percent of their business in the United States is dealing with Amazon returns. Because now UPS stores in the US is where you can go take your returns and you take a little barcode in there, they scan it. And some of them now have automated machines where you just scan the barcode and drop it in the box. And they're bundling all that stuff. It's to save money because they're bundling a lot of little things and putting them in one big box. It's to save money and to help the environment, I guess is what they say. And they send them back to, a lot of that stuff goes to Las Vegas. That's one of their biggest processing centers and it's just like a big dump yard. If you've ever seen videos of this thing and they go through and see what they can salvage and then they create liquidation things and rust and liquidate that stuff out and people buy that stuff just like they did, you know, the TV show Storage Wars. I don't know if you saw that show when there's a hot show on reality. It's a reality show where Someone didn't pay their rent for one of these storage lockers. People would go and they do auctions and you bid on it. They'd open up the door. If you never saw the show, they'd open up the door of one of these 10 by 10 public storage lockers. You couldn't go inside, but you could peek from the outside and look over. Sometimes these things were full to the top and just crap. Sometimes you could see like, oh, there's a really cool power tool back there. There's a really cool something. Then they would hold an auction right there standing in front of it. Someone would win it. And maybe pay 700 bucks and then they get the keys to the place and then they have whatever it is, 24 hours to go through it and empty it out. And so they start pulling all the junk out and just some of it's going in the trash bin. Some of it's like, oh, this is something we can sell. And that's what happens now with a lot of these returns is that people are going on liquidation pallets and people are buying these pallets for 30, 40, 50, 100 bucks and then bring them into their warehouse and then seeing what kind of decent stuff they can salvage out there. And sometimes they can, it's not much. Sometimes they can turn that thing into five or $10,000. That's a whole nother business model that's emerged because of all these returns. It's just a fact. It's just a, you just got to build that in and then accept. Don't get mad. I used to get mad when a customer would email me like, I didn't get my calendar or these. These girls are ugly or something. I'm like, you freaking idiot. No, they're not. These are some of the prettiest girls out there. But you can't do that. You guys stay removed and objective. Everybody's got a different opinion. Everybody has different standards and tastes. And the thing is, if you want this guy to buy again, and sometimes you may not, you don't care about the guy. You're like, you're just a pain in the ass. People always say the customer is always right. That's a famous slogan. And I say, no, don't go by that slogan. The customer is not always right. And there's times where you should actually fire customers. You should actually tell people, sorry, we're not doing business with you again, go away. But for the most part, you want to take care of people. Because you never know, it may be next week or it may be two years from now, they're going to refer you, they're going to buy something again. And most money in today's world is made off a repeat purchase. It's not off that initial sale. And so many people, especially in e-commerce, are constantly focused on the initial sale. How do I get more sales? How do I rank better on Amazon? Or how do I sell more on TikTok? And they pay no attention to the back end. And that's a whole other discussion about getting email addresses and names and addresses and knowing who your customers are so you can remarket to them. Very few people do that. But that's where the money's at. I mean, you look at my calendar business. My calendar business is 25, 30 years, maybe 30 years old now. And that business is repeat customers every year. And I repeat customer, so if a guy has a problem with the counter, it didn't get delivered or he says it got torn up in the mail or something got ran over by a truck, I replace it because that guy's going to order another $100 worth next year, another $100 next year and that cost, that replacement was next to nothing compared to the value of that customer. And I can use that to relaunch products every single year without doing advertising. And that's what a lot of people are missing. And the customer service is a big part of that. And answering quickly is something else that a lot of people, you should, that, you know, Amazon has a rule of 24 hours, seven days a week, pretty much. And you should, you need to answer people quickly. You can answer within the hour when they're hottest and calm them down. That's when you can get the best results and the best long-term positive goodwill. And don't take a long time. Fix the problem right away and don't ask too many questions. I mean, sometimes you want to know, like in the case of the Lifepod, maybe they wanted that back so that they could examine it and see what the heck went wrong here so they could reverse engineer and try to fix problems. But they paid to ship that back to you. They gave you a prepaid label. Norm Farrar: One of the things I want to get to, because we've got to pretty much end the podcast in a minute or two, but you mentioned something about We're going to be talking about firing your customers or clients. And I think we have to be careful when we say that because it almost sounds contradictory to what we're just telling about customer service. So I know, like for me, when I've had to fire a client, you had to use a bit of psychology on it. And when you're talking with them, These are pain in the ass clients that would just drive you crazy. So what we had to do is we'd switch it around and we'd say, look, you know what? We're probably not the best fit right now, but we have somebody that would be and we would just mention one or two people and then we could terminate them without them feeling really pissed off or anything. Kevin King: Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm? Norm Farrar: Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast? Kevin King: Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not gonna know what I say. Norm Farrar: I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too and we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another. Unknown Speaker: Yikes! Norm Farrar: But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of The Marketing Misfits. Kevin King: Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. Norm Farrar: And I think that's something that everybody has to do. You're going to have those jerks or the people that just don't fit your personality of your brand or your business, and you got to get rid of them. And you can just sleep better at night. I don't know if you want to add. We got about a minute here, Kev. Kevin King: You just said it all right there. Sometimes you do it. They're either costing you too much money in the end of the day or they're causing too much pain for you or your employees or causing stress. Sometimes it's not always about bending over backwards every single time. Sometimes you got a divorce. You know, you can only do so much. So don't always think you got to do everything, but give them the benefit of the doubt initially until proven otherwise and just build it into your numbers. I mean, build in, I'm expecting a 3% return rate or if you're selling shoes, a 30% return rate. And then build into your plan, what are you going to do with returns? Are you going to ask them to return it? Are you going to tell them it's not worth the hassle? I'm just going to throw it away anyway. So don't make them jump through hoops to go package it back up and ship it to you just because you want it back. Just because you want to prove that they're not ripping you off and trying to get a second one for free, just let them keep it. Depending on the price point of it, it's not worth the hassle. Just understand there are going to be some people that take advantage. That's just part of it. Just like some people are going to issue a charge back when they don't recognize the charge even though it's a legitimate charge and you got to fight it. Sometimes it's just not worth the extra effort to, like you said, your wife, get on the phone and go through all that. It'd have to be an expensive item for me to do that, or I have to be on some sort of principle where I'm just like, I'm going to prove something to them. But sometimes I look at my time. It's like, I'm not going to sit on hold for 30 minutes and deal with this if I don't have to. But now, like back on that FTC rule that I was saying earlier, the FTC in the U.S. has passed things where there has to be an unsubscribe link, there has to be, you can't force people to call if you're going to cancel your cable bill anymore. There has to be a link online to be able to do it with one click because the calls were actually meant to deter it and so that they could upsell you or downsell you onto something else. And so all those things are going away that people are trying to use psychological things to actually get out of doing returns and actually minimize those returns. When I should have actually been doing the opposite and just taking care of the people and putting that into projections. And if you're having to give away that many refunds or that may you got a problem that you need to fix. And so I mean if it gets to the point where you're trying to deter them rather than fix the problem, that's a different issue, underlying issue of something else that you need to fix. Norm Farrar: All right, buddy, that should wrap it up. Why don't you close us out? Kevin King: Oh, we're already done? That was fun. It's always fun. Shooting the chap with you. Shooting the chap? Norm Farrar: What is the chap? Unknown Speaker: I don't know. Kevin King: I just made that up. Norm Farrar: I know what you wanted to say. Unknown Speaker: Yeah. Kevin King: I can't say shooting the... Well, I could say. It's our podcast. I can say shooting the shit. What the hell? The kids are listening. I'm sorry. Shooting the chap. It's always good. We enjoy doing this. Every Tuesday, we've got a new podcast. Sometimes it's just Norm and I, just like today, just bantering back and forth and talking about whatever's on mind. Nothing's scripted here. We need to know what we're going to talk about before we got into this. We just started going down. That's just what we enjoy doing, talking marketing, talking business. If you know someone that you think would actually be good to come on and And let us pick their brain about marketing your business. Feel free to reach out at marketingmisfits.co. It's .co, right, Norm? It's .co or .com? Norm Farrar: It's .co, Kev. Just to be clear here, it's not .com. Kevin King: Marketingmisfits.co. You can message us. Say, hey, this would be a great guest. Or maybe it's you. Maybe you're listening and you're like, I'd like to be on this show and shoot the chat with Norm and Kevin. That could be you. If you like this episode, there's a few more in the hopper, so you can go back and listen to the past ones. But we'll be back again next Tuesday with another one. And if you like it, forward it on to a friend, forward it on somebody and let them know that, hey, this Marketing Misfits is kind of cool. You should listen to it. Be like Chad. That's right. Yeah. I said, be like Chad. That's my chef. Every time one comes out, he messaged me and said, hey, That was a really cool episode. I really liked that banter you and Norm had or that guest. That was really cool. So Norm, I guess that's it, right? You want to say something? I've been talking here for like two hours. Norm Farrar: You know what? I'm just saying what you said. I'm just going to point that way. Kevin King: You just say ditto? Norm Farrar: What he said. Kevin King: You just say ditto? Norm Farrar: Yup. That's it. That's it. Kevin King: Yup. Norm Farrar: And when you see the captions going across, it's just ditto. That's it for this week. See you next Tuesday and we're out of here. Kevin King: Ciao. Norm Farrar: See you.