Your customers don't care if you're busy!
Here’s another topic that came both from my personal experience and from conversations I’ve been having lately, both with engaged couples as well as wedding and event pros. For many of you, juggling doing events while handling inquiries, especially in your busy season, is a challenge. Your customers don’t care. And you don’t either, when you’re the customer. You want a reply, quickly, and responsiveness, from the companies you do business with.
Listen to this new 8-minute episode for some introspection and an outside view of this topic, and maybe a few ideas you can use, too!
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I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
©2024 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com
Customers don't care if you're busy. Listen to this episode, see where I'm going with this one. Hi, it's Allen Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions Podcast. I was having a discussion just recently with some businesses and what it came down to is As a customer, when you're reaching out to a business to get information for yourself, personally, or for your business, you want a response right away.
And you don't care how busy that business is. Matter of fact, the busy business is probably a good sign, but you don't want to be too busy to respond to you. And we see this in our secret shopping. And I've experienced this personally. And I, other people have told me the same thing where You reach out and well, let's just talk about the wedding and event industry.
Somebody reaches out to you in the middle of your heavy season, and they reach out probably, let's say, on a Saturday because they're working during the week, and they reach out on a Saturday for information. They're expecting a response quickly. Now, that might be Saturday, that might be Sunday, that might be Monday.
I would think not later than that. And when you don't get back to them because you're busy, what that says is you don't have the bandwidth to be available to them when they want it. I'm not saying they're right or wrong, I'm just saying this is the way it feels. Again, just think about yourself as a customer.
You reach out, you want to get a response right away. Something I've noted noticed myself kind of post COVID is a lot of businesses that used to have 24 hour phone support. Now it's Monday through Friday during certain hours. And and I always wonder, cause some of them are Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm Eastern time.
And I always think, what about the people on the West coast, right? Which is three hours behind. That's now two in the afternoon. And people know why that's 11 in the morning, right? And if you're internationally, that's, it makes it even worse. So what now is the availability to the customer to get the support that they need as opposed to 24 hour support, which they used to have.
And I'm not saying you have to have 24 hour support. I think you just have to know your customers. And so. Are they going to want to reach out in the evening? Because some of them, if they're dealing with themselves for personal use, you know, for their personal themselves and not their business, some people need to reach out in the evening because they can't from work during the day.
Right. I know there were times when there were things I'll do during the week, during the day. And there are things I'm going to do in the evening. And then you get that recording that says, sorry, we're not here. And I'm like, really? It's 5 p. m. on the East Coast or 6 p. m. on the East Coast. That's only three o'clock in California and you're not there or noon in Hawaii and you're not there.
You know, you're not making yourselves accessible for that. So when you're busy, what's your plan B? Right. What's plan B for your customers? There are some high tech and low tech ways to handle this. There's certainly some AI and AI chatbots and things like that. There's the low tech way, which is an answering service.
They still exist. You can actually have a person answer your phone. And I think you'll get more messages left after hours than you would. And not just after hours, but while you're busy, then if you go to voicemail. All right. Some people will hear a voicemail and they won't leave a message. And now if this is the first time that they're reaching out and they get an answering service, a quality answering service, I don't have any particularly that I recommend.
I answer my own phone, but if, if they, you would, you know, a person answers the phone and that you're, you're out doing weddings and things like that, and you'll take the message or you're out on events and they'll take a message for you and then you can decide when to get back to them because they'll let you know you have a message.
Okay. You have a break, you make the call, you don't, whatever. I got a text message in on a Saturday night at 7. 30 recently, and I was available. I think my wife was taking a shower or something, so I had availability. I texted back 10, it was 7. 30 in the evening. By 10. 15, with probably five or six back and forths, I was booked for sales training, sent the payment link out.
Next day, paid, right? And that was all done via text message on a Saturday night. I'm not always available on a Saturday night. I happen to be there. I travel a lot. Time zones change. You may not be in the same time zone as I am. I try to be as responsive as I can. I put my out of office on to let people know that, and I know a lot of you do as well, but I also hear from people all the time that the timeframe of somebody getting back to them.
And, doesn't seem reasonable. I'm going to do air quotes here. Reasonable because reasonable isn't the eye of the beholder. Reasonable isn't the eye of the person who's reaching out, who's expecting that response. When would it be reasonable to expect a reply? Now, the people that texted me Saturday night, they said they probably didn't expect a reply and if I got back to the Monday morning, would have been fine.
What did we do on my wife's car had a little leak. So we brought it over to the mechanic. We dropped it off. We filled out the night drop on Sunday. They were not expecting the car. So I called. I was going to leave a voicemail. And the person from the garage answered, wasn't expecting that on a Sunday.
I think she was surprised too. Maybe she thought it was her personal line, not her business line. But she answered and I said, told her who it was and we know them because we've serviced there for years. And I said, here's the thing leaving the car, was not expecting you to answer, but thanks. Just want to let you know.
So what is reasonable? for your customers to expect when they reach out to you, when you are legitimately busy, Saturday night and wedding season, or not even Saturday night, just in wedding season in general, when you are busy during the week prepping for those weddings, right? If you're catering, you're certainly doing prep work before and everybody else who's going to be there on that day is doing things.
Prior to that, if you're, if you're a dress shop, you know, all those weddings that they're picking up their dresses and they need bustling and they need all those things before this weekend, you're, you're busy. What is the plan? Virtual assistants. If you listen to the episode that I did with Ryan Angott about virtual assistants, that's another thing you can have somebody aanswering, actually handling the beginning of your sales process.
All right. And then handing it off to you when it's time for a meeting or a call or. Maybe in some cases, actually making the sale for you. All right. If that's possible as well. So just think about what's reasonable. Think about what you would expect. Think about what you would want when you were the customer.
And no matter how busy that business is. you would want somebody to be responsive to you. And that's why sometimes it's best to split the sales role from the production role so that salespeople can be selling even when the production is going on. And that makes it easier for you to have, keep those parts of your business humming along where one is not being drawn in by the other.
So the salespeople that do production, when they're doing production, they can't be doing sales. When they're doing sales, they're not doing production. Therefore. You have to be splitting their time. Hope this gives you something to think about. Look forward to your feedback. Thanks.
I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
©2024 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com
