Full Transcript
Welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, we’re going to discuss some customer service insights that will allow you to stand out in the market as the number one client-centric business in your area.
Welcome to the fitness business school with Pat Rigsby, the podcast for fitness entrepreneurs who want to make more income, have greater impact, and enjoy more freedom in their ideal business. If you’d like an accelerated route to these goals, email me at [email protected] and put BGA in the subject line and I’ll get you all the details about our business growth accelerator program.
So my buddy Fred Zoller asked me to share a few tips or insights on customer service. And I thought I would use a little bit of my baseball backstory and tell you how I shaped the way that I think about customer service and have literally from probably 1995, 1996, on and I’ve got notes, right?
So the first part of customer service, at least what was founded in my baseball background was that we’re not in the the business to business realm. We’re not in the business to consumer realm. This is all human to human, right? Nobody that you interact with that is a customer of yours, a client of yours, their relationship with you doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They have all these other things going on in their life and we need to be sympathetic to any other challenges they’re facing. We need to be empathetic people overall and we need to see them as a human that is busy, that is stressed out, that has other things going on in their life, so that when we’re making the decisions we’re making, from a customer service standpoint, when we’re treating people in a certain way, we have to think about them as an important valued human being, not just a transaction, not just somebody I’ve got to check off my to-do list today. Not just something that we just have to get done, put out a fire or whatever we want to call it. No, it’s a human. I want to make their life better. I want to solve a problem for them in hopefully a mutually beneficial way, so that’s number one.
Number two, one thing that I learned from baseball a long time ago that holds true to this day is the most important recruiting you do is of the people that are already under your care. For me at the time, it was already my current players, everybody in sports always gets caught up in being excited about the new recruits. Who are those incoming superstars that are going to transform whatever team or program when the reality is the people who’ve been under your care for a while are almost all was the most valuable, the most important to the organization.
In our case, the people who’ve already decided that we’re the right person to help them, that we’re the right person to solve their problems, we want to validate that decision. We want to keep them on board. It’s certainly a lot easier to keep a person on board with you and help them continue on as a happy, successful client than it is to go find somebody new that aligns with your way of operating, your way of doing things and can check all those other boxes. We need somebody to be able to check the ability to pay being conveniently enough, live conveniently located enough that they can be consistent with it. All that stuff. We already have this person who said yes to all those other things, keep them happy, help them succeed, keep them on board. So that’s number two.
Number three, I’ve always believed that I’m happy to go as far as I can go to help anybody that’s under my care. A player, an assistant coach, a client, as long as it’s not to the detriment of the group. Right? So with baseball players that were having personal challenges, academic challenges, whatever it was, I was happy to conform and band and work with them. As long as it wasn’t going to be to the detriment of the team, it wasn’t going to take away from our culture. It wasn’t going to lower what I could ask of other people because it wasn’t going to lower our standards of expectation, but I certainly wanted to help them as an individual. I don’t believe that we have to treat everybody the same. I think we have to treat everybody fairly and fairly for each person may be a little bit different. Right? So the same thing holds true in a business setting.
I’m more than happy to move around payment dates for people if I need to help them out. I’m more than happy to maybe give somebody an extra phone call that isn’t necessarily what they paid for and are in their respective program if it’s going to help them move forward and if it’s going to help strengthen the relationship and get them the result that they’re looking for. So I think that’s a a great perspective to have because those types of decisions, those types of behaviors are things that go back to what we talked about with number two, recruiting the people we have, taking care of those people.
And then finally number four, we have to understand that when we sell somebody something, this is not a transaction, this isn’t Well, We Won! We got the sale, we got somebody into a recurring revenue program. This is a partnership and anybody that spends their time trying to see it as a kind of a zero sum game where it’s “I win, you lose!” or locking somebody into some ironclad contract where somebody is beat up with fine is missing the point of business.
We’re in this together. I’m giving you my expertise, coaching, accountability, motivation, problem, solving, another sounding board, a voice, something that’s going to help you get to where you want to go either in a way that you couldn’t on your own or faster or more efficiently, more pain-free than you would have on your own. In exchange, you’re going to give me a financial investment. And then also an investment of time and effort and commitment. And this is a two way street. This is a partnership, and in any good partnership, we’ve got to be willing to concede a little bit. We’ve got to be willing to work with somebody, not against somebody to get the outcome we want. So, four tips on improving your client service, your customer service, the experience that people have working with you that we’re offering founded in my background as a baseball coach.
Thanks for listening. I’m giving away a bundle of my bestselling books, the ideal business formula, the fitness entrepreneur handbook in the path. All you have to do is go to patrigsby.com/podgift to get it. Also, make sure to subscribe to The Fitness Business School with Pat Rigsby so you don’t miss an episode and you get yourself on the fast track to creating your ideal business.
