The 2 Percenters
Dear Professional Home Service Provider,
98% of your customers are saints! Do not forget this!
2% can be a real pain, especially with this current digital age and the ability to post a negative online review at any moment. Do not let these folks threaten your business by telling you they might write a horrible review unless you give them what they want!
I have recently heard from a number of you all that you ended up doing free work for these 2%ers because of their petty threats.
Some of you may have read my post from last week, No Problem vs My Pleasure. In this post, I mentioned to always be positive and respond to customers in a way that is not negative or cause a customer to get defensive. I think there is a way to stay positive even with the 2% of those customers who you know you just cannot please.
There is a kids song I remember when I was young from a man named Bill Harley that sang these words when someone said something negative to him (in the song that is),
“Thank you kindly have a very nice day I just like to be that way.”
You know, it really is not a bad phrase for us adults to say to these people who can really get us down at times. Learn to shrug it off and walk away.
Online reviews have been around for well over a decade. I remember when I first started seeing reviews pop up in the early 2000 period. It was rare, but when I saw a negative review hit the web for my family’s paint company, I would always freak out. I thought perhaps it was the beginning of the end. Just a few more negative reviews and we’d be out of business! You know something? I was wrong. It never came back to bite us. We still got lots of leads off of the web from reasonable consumers.
It is ok to have some negative reviews! If someone is going to threaten you that if you do not do exactly what they want, they will bury you online, walk away. Do not let these people win.
I will close with this, I work with some very professional painting and remodeling companies around the U.S. and they all take their businesses’ seriously. They all want to serve and please their customers. They work hard. They hire great people. They bend over backwards more times than not to serve their customers. Yes, they have received a few negative reviews, but you know what? Those negative reviews are from the 2%ers. They mean nothing. I have yet to see how a couple of piddly bad reviews with mostly positive reviews has hurt one of my customers.
Let us hope the unreasonable consumers read the negative reviews and do not contact you for a quote and the reasonable ones read them, shrug their shoulders and think the same thing you were thinking, “Must be an unreasonable person.”
Here’s to your 98% of fantastic customers that keep you in business. These are the folks you are in business to serve. Treat them like precious gold!
Always At Your Service,
David
About David Chism
David Chism started his business out of a passion for helping small contracting businesses grow, be more profitable and become better known to their target clients. One lifelong hobby of David is using techie gadgets. So this blog is a place where he writes about technology, marketing ideas, just for fun (humor), personal thoughts on small business and more.
