Today on the Stephanie Kase Podcast, I’m sharing a personal experience that taught me about giving my own customers an amazing experience. Last summer, my husband and I bought a minivan for our family. Throughout that experience, which was pretty terrible, I learned and received a reminder of why providing amazing customer experience for my clients and students is so important. I’ve got three lessons to share from our car buying experience!! 

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Our Buying Experience

Last August, Michael and I bought a minivan. It’s used and we noticed right away that the middle row was missing a seat. Right away, we asked if we could have a promise that it would be replaced. We knew that was something we needed for our family. So, we were able to receive it in writing that we would get a middle seat. Now, I’ll say: we made a mistake by not putting a date in there as to when we would receive the seat. As you can guess, it took forever – we had to follow up and keep trying to coordinate when we’d be able to grab the seat from the salesperson. What was most frustrating was that no one would pick up our calls or respond to us. 

By June, almost a full year from when we bought the vehicle, I decided it was time to write a review. As a small business owner, I’m very intentional about how I write reviews because I know how helpful they can be. I try really hard not to write negative ones, but we’d been getting no responses and were so frustrated.  So, I went to their Google reviews and noticed they responded to them quickly. So, we wrote about our experience saying we would not recommend them. I kid you not, literally the next day, we had emails and calls and surprisingly a check to buy the seat ourselves. So, as you can see: it was not a good experience… but it taught me so much about what I want to offer for my own clients. Now, let’s talk about that. 

Lesson #1: When you make a promise, keep your promise

If you are breaking promises that you make to your customers, you’re going to lose brand loyalty. You’re also going to lose credibility and your reputation. Now, asking for grace or an extension is different to me. But continually not showing up or responding to your customer, you’re going to create an awful experience for your customers. I don’t recommend that. Avoid making promises that you can’t keep. For us, we’ll never recommend that car dealership. We’ll never go there again. It was such a bad experience and that really started with breaking the promise they made to us. Remember, this matters in all kinds of businesses, like only writing 8 emails if you promised 10 or taking 3 weeks to deliver something you said would be done in one week. Make sure whatever you say, you’re delivering on it for a great experience. 

Lesson #2: Have a contract, especially for a service. 

When you agree to work with someone, make sure you have a contract in place. You want very clear dates and deliverables. This is important, too, if you’re hiring someone too. A contract protects everyone involved in the work relationship. Make sure your contract is clear and ask for clarifications or dates if you need to. This helps give your customer the best experience possible and very clear that they’re getting whatever they want. Take this one step further too – include all of your details on your sales pages and checkout pages. Outline if there’s lifetime access, how to ask questions, or whatever they’re getting in the course, deliverable, or download.  

#3: Don’t wait until your customer writes you a review to take action.

As we saw with my car buying process, it took me writing a negative review to get any action from them. That shows me that they were trying to recover and not lose future sales. They weren’t actually caring about what they’d promised us. So, as a business owner, don’t wait until something bad happens to take action. Instead, be proactive about providing your customers the absolute best experience they’ve ever had. Underpromise and overdeliver with your students and clients. I encourage you to collect feedback at the end of someone’s experience with you. It helps make sure you know what’s going on. I know that gathering feedback can be scary and you’re worried about what you might hear – but that’s why it’s so important. If there was something that was negative, then you can fix it for the next person. If there’s something positive, you’ve got a testimonial for your product or service! 

I hope that sharing this journey and these lessons is helpful for you and your business! Providing great customer service is so important to me. I hope it will be for you, too! 

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