Recently I did some customer service training for a client. While we were talking about good service versus bad service, something happened that provided a great example of the impact bad service can cause.
Typically when I do customer service training, I will ask them what they think of good service, and who comes to mind. Then I’ll ask them what they think of bad service, and who comes to mind.
When I posed those questions to the group, there was a lady that immediately piped up with no hesitation at all.
You could see the emotion spilling out of her. She shared that she had her house re-roofed the year before. The experience was so bad that had to have the city come out multiple times to tell the contractor what to do.
The roofing company had been in business for a while, the type that has billboards all over the city. They actually ended up having to get the city inspector involved.
They nails they collected from their yard after the job was supposedly completed filled two one-gallon ice cream buckets. That’s got to be the whole roof worth of nails!
It wasn’t just the fact that she shared that story, but it was the emotion behind the story. Immediately after she told the story, everyone else in the audience wanted to know who the roofing company was, so they didn’t ever accidentally hire them.
And in that room full of people, everyone immediately wrote down the name of the company when she shared it.
After the first lady was done sharing, another lady in the group mentioned home building.
About eight years prior, she set out to build a new home with a company. It kept getting goofed up and delayed. Finally, they ended up getting out of the agreement.
All of the challenges they had stirred up so much emotion in her, that she had to share with everyone else what home building company it was. She actually went home after our training session and called friends over the weekend, just to warn them not to use that company!
That emotional connection is unbelievable when there’s a bad experience. When it’s bad, it brings up a lot of emotion that doesn’t go away. With the home building, the experience was eight years old! And she still couldn’t wait to tell people not to do business with that company.
When you start cataloguing those experiences that you have, and when you think about where that all starts, it’s during the initial bonding and rapport.
I asked one of the ladies, “If I met you out in public and said I worked for the company you mentioned, what would you have thought?”
She responded, “I would have immediately hated you.”
That’s pretty powerful stuff! It shows why we need to have good bonding and rapport with people, and why we need to establish and maintain those good connections and good customer service.
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