Customer Service Horror Story

Alright, so I want to talk about one of the things that can kill a business faster than pretty much anything else. It is having poor customer service. Listen, you could have the best product in the world. It could solve every single need that I have. But if the customer service that I get when I reach out to you guys is bad, then it is going to negatively impact the impression that I have of the company and it might put me in the mind place where I’m willing to take the second place. A product that’s maybe not quite as good as yours, just so I can avoid it dealing with you. People are petty like this, and I had an experience like this very recently that I want to share with you because it’s a perfect example of how customer service can ruin an otherwise great relationship with a company and how we can use this, knowing that customer service is so important. We can use this to our advantage as entrepreneurs to make sure that we are following up with customers and we’re putting ourselves in a good position to outshine our competition.

This is something I think we did really well at escape climbing is we weren’t the best product on the marketplace, but we committed to having the absolute best customer service to always do what was in the best interest of the customer. As a result, that customer service becomes part of the product, the value proposition. And so it might not be technically the best product, but when you take that in conjunction with the customer service, a lot of people are like, you know what? I want to do business with you. So the example I want to give here is I use this mouth tape for sleeping. And I recently did a video on the YouTube channel called this evidence based sleep routine will solve 87% of your problems or something like that. Right where I kind of go through all that I’ve learned over the last three years of how to get really great optimized sleep. And one of the things I share in there is using mouth tape and using nose strips so that you can encourage your body to breathe through your nose, which is the ideal way to breathe. I am a mouth breather, so if I don’t tape my mouth, I will just breathe through my mouth.

I’ll get dehydrated, I’ll have a sore throat in the morning and it’s horrible. So I use mouth tape and it’s been wonderful. But I’ve gone through probably a dozen different mouth tapes and experimented with them, and they all have different pros and different cons, and I landed on one that I more or less enjoy. It’s not perfect by any means. But I think mouth tape is one of those things. You’re never going to find the perfect product. However, this company that I’d been using, I’d used them for about six months and very regularly. I was on a subscription plan where every month they would send me out a new batch and a three month batch every three months, and it was wonderful.
Then, for whatever reason, on the last batch that I got a month or two ago, it was about a month ago, actually. Something happened. Something was different with the formulation of the glue on the back of the product. So when it was sticking to my face, it was very chemically. It smelled very chemically. Chemically. I don’t know how to say that, but it had a very strong scent. Since it’s right next to your mouth and your nose, that’s not pleasant.
And it was so sticky that in the mornings, I could not wash off the sticky residue from my face. I used, like, five different soaps. I would wash over and over and over and over, and I still could not get the sticky residue off of my face. And then it got to the point where it ripped the skin off of my lip. It was so strong. And I was like, okay, something’s happened with the formulation of this product, because I didn’t have this experience with any of the other mouth tapes that I had gotten from this company. And this was, like, after two days of usage, three days. I think it was three days where it ripped my lip.
And I was like, what is this? This is crazy. And I reached out to the owners of the company or to their customer service line and explained the situation. I was like, listen, guys, I’ve been buying your products now for six months. I love it. It’s great. Something seems wrong with this newest batch, though. I cannot clean the residue off my face. It’s ripping up my lips.
This isn’t that good. And the guy, one of the co founders, he reached back out and he’s explaining the situation. He’s like, yeah, we had this cold snap of weather where our product is being housed, and it caused the glue to take on a new form. And then when it heats back up with your mouth, it takes on a different form than it had previously been intended. Okay, so I don’t know if any of that’s true or not, but cool. Sometimes these things happen that are outside of your control. So he says, I’ll send you out a new batch. And this was, like, three weeks ago.
About a week and a half later, I reach back out. I’m like, hey, I still haven’t seen the replacement for these come by. I’m not using mouth tape at the moment because I’m not going to use this stuff that you sent me. So when can I expect that? And he waits a couple of days and then comes back and he says, oh, something happened over here. And for some reason that order didn’t go out, but I’ll make sure it goes out today. So here we are, like three weeks later, I still don’t have the mouth tape. And this is just a really, it’s, it’s an annoying experience from a customer perspective where you have to be the one that reaches back out and like, hey, guys, I’m still here. Haven’t gotten the thing.
And that stuff does happen as a small business, you’re going to have situations where, fuck, we blew it. We were supposed to send out that package. It sat on the desk and it kind of fell through the cracks. I have been there countless times. But blaming the situation on other things, and that was really what happened here twice was like both blaming the weather and then blaming something else with the shipping company not picking up the order. These are the things that kind of point to that company is having a hard time. And if that’s how the customer service is going to be, it’s going to be very problematic for them to keep growing and scaling. So here I am.
It’s been a month. I would love to keep using this product. I physically can’t because I don’t have the product. And so it’s made me. So I have to go out to the store and buy an alternative product. And at this point, the thing with customer behaviors is that we’re sticky. We tend to be creatures of habit. Once we do a thing, we just keep using that thing.
And so they pretty much have lost me at this point. And the bigger damage that I really want to share here is that you need to treat every single customer as though they are the most important customer even on a small product like this, where they’re maybe only making $100 per customer. Right. You have to treat each and every single one as vitally important. Because what they don’t realize, I suppose, is that I just did a video and just did a newsletter article and I write about sleep for peak performers. And so I get a lot of people dming me and emailing me and saying, hey, what do you recommend for this product? That product. This product and their product was one that I recommended before and now I won’t. And so when you treat every single customer as though they’re the most important.
You put yourself in a position to get lucky by extension, right? If you’re not treating every single customer as important, you’re like, oh, that’s just one customer. It’s not a big deal. You don’t know the downstream effects of that. And I’ve seen this play out at escape climbing. We had plenty of customers who were locally famous, but globally, nobody knew who they were. And so if you don’t treat those people like the local celebrities that they are in their marketplace, then if you have a bad interaction with them, they’re going to spoil that entire market for you because they have a lot of power and influence within a micro niche. And so you need to go into every single customer interaction and say, okay, how would I treat this person if I thought that they had a really large. If I thought this was Joe Rogan? Right? Treat every single person like Joe Rogan.

Somebody who a good word or a bad word could either explode your business in a good way or in a bad way. Not to say that they’re going to do that, but that’s a good mindset to have for everybody on the team to follow through and treat each and every single customer interaction as though it is critically important because you never know. It could be. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here. I am not that big of an influencer that this is going to make big deal for them at all. But it’s just an example to show the mindset you have to have as a business owner in the way that you service your customer interactions, because things are inevitably going to go wrong. That’s not the problem. It’s how you deal with the thing that goes wrong, how you respond to it.

That’s where you have the opportunity to go on above and beyond and create customers for life. And if you don’t nail that, then you’re going to drive your customers away. So wanted to share that with you guys. Hope that brings you a little bit of value. And if it does, do me a huge favor, share this with somebody who you think might get some value out of it. The only way this podcast grows is through word of mouth. You’re spreading the word. I don’t run ads or anything like that on it.

So you could just share this with somebody and say nice, positive things. That’d be awesome. I would really appreciate it. So that’s going to do it for me. Guys and gals, we’ll catch you in the next episode, but until then, stay hyper focused. My friends.