Ezra McCarthy
Hello and welcome back to the lawn care blueprint today. We have a great guest with us, Joey Coleman. We’re going to be going over several things. One question I’ll start with, do you struggle to keep your customer’s employee happy beyond day one? I think we’ve all been there. And that’s why we have on here with us today, Joey Coleman. He’s a bestselling author of Never Lose a Customer Again. And another pain point that we all have, never lose an employee again.
He’s going to be here to talk about proven strategies for turning customers and team members into loyal advocates. Joey, sure glad you’re here today.
Joey Coleman
Ezra, it’s my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on the show and thanks to everybody who’s listening in. I’ve been really looking forward to our conversation.
Ezra McCarthy
You want to just tell the listener a little bit about maybe who you are, how you got started into customer experience. And I can’t help but see you’re a Seth Godin fan. You’ve got his purple cow cartoon in the background.
Joey Coleman
I do, you are correct. Absolutely. Such a fabulous mind in the world of marketing and experience. So yeah, big fan of Seth and his work. Well, the first time I mowed a lawn, no, I’m just kidding, but literally I grew up mowing the lawn at my house and now hire someone to mow my lawn. So we can speak about the client experience directly from someone who pays people to help mow the lawn. I have spent the last 20 years teaching companies around the world how to keep their customers and keep their employees.
The way I do that is through a framework I developed called the first hundred days that looks at the first hundred days of the client experience and says, what can we do to make that experience so remarkable, so incredible, so wonderful that it will keep our clients coming back for more and lead them to refer their friends and colleagues and family to join our business as well. I spend most of my time traveling around giving keynotes, leading workshops. When I’m not writing books, I enjoy spending time traveling myself and spending time with my incredible wife and two young sons. So in short, a lot of what I do is around experience, whether that’s customer experience, employee experience, or experience raising two kids.
Ezra McCarthy
That’s so interesting and I can’t even remember how I first got onto you, but I read the book Never Lose a Customer Again. It talks about customer experience along each part of it. And I wanted to throw at you, have you ever heard of the company called Wow One Day Painting?
Joey Coleman
I have heard of Wow One Day Painting, yes.
Ezra McCarthy
So this is what got me into it. Seth Godin and some of these other authors really got me into this. And something that amazed me is I think they do it on every job. Maybe they don’t. Maybe you can correct me if you know a little more than me on this. They’ll leave like flowers with a card after their job. And some of these things were basically instead of just, and this gets into the thought of maybe you could explain and expound on what is customer experience and then why does that matter?
Joey Coleman
Well, customer experience is really how customers feel about what it’s like to be in a business relationship with you, right? So customer experience includes all the things you do, all the things you say, all the touch points, the interactions you have with your customers, and what are the feelings that they’re having because of those interactions. It’s a little different than customer service, which customer service is kind of how do you deal with the challenges or the problems or respond to the issues that a customer is having? I like to think of customer experience as being a little more proactive as opposed to reactive and thinking strategically and intentionally about how you’re going to make them feel, which is why your example of leaving flowers after painting is so interesting, right? Because when somebody has their house painted or a room in their house painted, they don’t expect flowers. They expect headache.
They expect annoying people to traipse into their house and charge them more than they want to pay, but they don’t want to have to paint it themselves. So they’ll just have someone else paint it. Right. There’s a similar parallel, I think, to lawn care. Lawn care is one of the interesting businesses where the great majority of clients you serve could mow their own lawn. They absolutely could. They would have the ability to mow their lawn, have the tools, the talent, the skill to do it, but for some reason they’ve decided to hire someone else to do it.
So there’s this interesting juxtaposition in their mind between, I could do this job, but I’d rather have someone else do it for me.
Ezra McCarthy
It’s so good talking about how it makes a customer feel and it reminds me of there’s something that I hate because of the terrible customer experience, which is buying vehicles. I detest it. When I bought my last truck, every time, unfortunately the last two or three vehicles I bought, especially from dealers, you walk away feeling slimy. You agree to something with the salesman, you get the paperwork done, you’re like wait, where did this charge come from, and then you’ve got the buyer’s remorse after and you’re like, oh man, this whole experience just made me wish I didn’t need to buy it. So that kind of ties into, you mentioned it already, but the first hundred days. Why do you put such an emphasis on that? And why would you say those first hundred days are so critical for building loyalty, whether it’s a lawn landscape business, a landscaping business, or maybe another small business listening in?
Joey Coleman
So the reason the first hundred days are important is because that’s the timeframe that’s most important to your customers or your clients. The research shows, and when I was writing Never Lose a Customer Again, we looked at businesses small, medium, and large, online and offline, businesses that did product, businesses that sold service, businesses that sold product and service, businesses that operated primarily within the boundaries of one country, businesses that operated internationally. And what we found is across all of those businesses, somewhere between 20 and 70% of new customers will quit before the hundred day anniversary. These numbers were staggering. I mean, if you’re not looking at it, he’s shaking his head. That was shocking to me too, buddy, right? These numbers were unbelievable to me. But what was scarier to me than the 20 to 70% that will quit is that the typical business owner had no idea what their number was. They had no idea how many customers they were losing. They had no idea why they were losing them. And they didn’t have an appreciation for how quickly they were losing them after just having become customers.
So the research shows that the first hundred days matters. And it also shows that if on day 101 your customer’s feeling ecstatic about their relationship, they’re loving you, they’re not feeling slimy, they’re feeling like they’re getting value for their investment, they feel like you’re doing a great job, they feel like you’re going above and beyond, giving them everything you promised plus maybe a little bit more, the typical client, typical customer will stay for a minimum of five years. I’m not asking you to run forever. I’m not asking you to sprint a marathon. I’m asking you just to pay attention to laying the foundation in the first hundred days so as to reap the benefit of a long-term customer relationship for years to come.
Ezra McCarthy
So Joey, most of the people listening in are service-based business. And I’m sure you’ve dealt with this and I’m sure you’ve helped a lot of service-based businesses. How could a service-based business craft that hundred days? And sometimes in this industry, you don’t even meet the homeowner. You may call them or they may call you, right? You go to their house, they may not be there. How could they craft an absolutely wow hundred day experience in our industry?
Joey Coleman
Let me give some examples that speak to my own experience as a customer of both lawn care and landscape businesses just to kind of illustrate not only a context for this but to hopefully illustrate to the small business owners that I appreciate the challenge they’re in. I have never met the person who mows my lawn. I’ve never met them in person and yet I’m totally okay with that, and here’s why I’m totally okay with it, because they do a good job as promised consistently.
The bulk of our interactions happen via text message. So if I get a text that says, hey, we’re coming to mow the lawn, I know that the thing that I signed up for is happening. If I get a text message with a photograph of the lawn being mowed after it’s been mowed, part of my body that had an open loop about whether the task was done or not while I’m away from home, while I’m at work, while I’m not there, seeing the work actually being done allows me to go, they actually did what they said they were going to do. Do they do that for you? Not every time, it’d be awesome if they did. So here’s an example of it. And what was fascinating is the way you asked that question, do they do that for you? Look how easy that would be to do and the reaction it would create. Cause by the way, Ezra had the reaction folks, I kind of set you up a little bit, but Ezra had the reaction of like, really they do that. It would be that simple. Now some of you are saying, but Joey, you don’t understand, the owner of the business is not the one mowing the lawns.
They’ve got crews out and they’re doing it. And are we really going to send pictures from their own cell phone? Well, let me ask this question. You train them how to mow a lawn, right? Did you show them the standard? Did you show them how to operate your mowers? Did you show them how to load them onto the trailer or into the truck? You showed them all these other things.
Why not just show them how to do the message? And maybe you don’t want your folks who are actually doing the lawn care to actually do the message. Well, what if they just sent the photo to you? So let’s pretend that I’m mowing lawns for Ezra. He runs the business and Ezra says, Joey, I want you to go to Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith’s house and I want you to mow their lawn. I go, I show up, I take a picture of the lawn un-mowed. I then mow the lawn, take a picture of the lawn mowed. So we have a before and an after shot. And then I text both of those to Ezra.
Ezra then turns around and texts both of those to the client and says, hey, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, just wanted to let you know, we showed up, the lawn was looking like it needed a haircut and we gave it. Here’s the before and the after photos. We’ll see you in two weeks. Most people don’t know that the magazine Architectural Digest, one of the top architecture and design magazines in the world, every year has a single issue that is their best selling issue. It’s the same issue every year. They call it their before and after issue. They show the picture of the house before.
And then they show the picture of the house after. Why? Because the typical human being cannot envision what the future will look like, nor do they appreciate how far they’ve come when they see the progress. So why not just meet their psychology and their brain and their emotions where they’re at, show them before, show them after. And the implication is this happened because of me. This happened because my team mowed your lawn. Now we’ve got a complete conversation. We’re having a completely different interaction. And now you are proving to them that you’re doing the work that you say you’re going to do and you’re doing it in real time. So imagine being at your office working and all of a sudden your phone vibrates with a text message and you see, the people who mow the lawn are mowing the lawn. This is great. The people who plant the flowers, who water the trees, whatever your landscaping service does, they’re seeing that it’s happening in real time.
Ezra McCarthy
This is really good. Do you have any other examples? I know we mentioned the giving of flowers for the painting company. You just talked about this text example. I’m sure you worked with a lot of people. Do you have some other great examples to just get the audience’s mind kind of stirring on how they could implement customer experience in that first hundred days?
Joey Coleman
One of my favorite examples of something that every business on the planet could do, but 99.9% of businesses don’t do that costs less than $3 per customer is a handwritten thank you note. Ezra’s laughing, right? He’s like, oh, really Joey, something that simple? Yeah. But here’s the question I would ask our listeners. Think in the last year, have you received a handwritten thank you note from some business that you did business with? Not an individual, a business that you did business with.
Some people who are listening along right now are like, yeah, Joey, I received one. Let me ask this question. If you did receive one, do you still have it? Do you still have that thank you note? Ezra, have you received a handwritten thank you note in the last year? So Ezra is saying no, he hasn’t even received one in the last year. Okay. So that shows you that my statistic of 99.99% of businesses don’t do it is kind of being proven right.
Ezra’s done business with a lot of businesses over the last year and never got a thank you note. I have received some thank you notes. Maybe it’s because I write books about this stuff. Maybe they’re like, we got to play the player, not play the game. So I have received some and I will tell you, I have all of them. I’ve kept them. Why? Because they are proof in an increasingly digital era that someone was willing to take the time to create an analog interaction. They were willing to take the time to find a note card, get a pen, handwrite a note, put it in an envelope, address it to me, put a stamp on it and send it to my house or send it to my office. These are small things you can do that have a great impact. I have had my lawn mowed by dozens of different lawn companies because I’ve lived in a variety of different states over the last 20 plus years. But what’s fascinating is I’ve never received a handwritten thank you note thanking me for my business.
Ezra McCarthy
Joey, I laugh not because I think it’s a bad idea, because I think it’s a great idea and I’ve thought about it several times. I’ve never done it. I’ve done other things, but not—
Joey Coleman
Sure. And here’s the thing, we all know what a thank you note is. Almost all of us at some point wrote a thank you note, probably when our parents required us to write a thank you note for a graduation check we got or a gift we got as a kid, a birthday present, something like that. We might’ve had that, or maybe even in school, sometimes in school you’re required to write a thank you note.
But here’s the thing, as we have become more digital, as we become more, I’ll send a text or I’ll send an email, that tactic of using our hand to write a note has gone away. And the reality is, if you want to stand out in the marketplace, do things that your competitors don’t do. Your competitors don’t write handwritten thank you notes. You should. Your competitors don’t send photographs of the lawn before it was mowed and after it was mowed. You should. Your competitors think they’re in the business of mowing lawn. What I want you to know is that you are in the business of creating experiences, the canvas of which is someone’s yard.
Ezra McCarthy
That’s so good. I listened to an interview of Howard Schultz on the Acquired podcast and he was talking all about, which is for those who may not be familiar, he’s the founder of Starbucks, and his whole thing was about the experience. Now I really like Starbucks coffee. There’s a few things I don’t like about it, but their customer experience is so good. People will go in there, pay four to six dollars for the same thing, and it’s really for the experience. So that’s so good. So let’s break this hundred days down a little more. I remember something that really stuck out was you broke it down into the phases of the customer journey, whether that be from reaching out, whether that be the sales process and kind of touch points, if I’m describing it correctly, at each point to basically give them a great experience. Would you break that down a little more detail how in each part of the customer journey we can give them a great experience?
Joey Coleman
Yeah, let me give you a whirlwind overview because there are eight phases and I’ll give you an overview of what’s happening in each phase. And then we can dive deep into any phases that you want to explore deeper. The first phase, and by the way, before I get into these, all the phases start with the letter A. That’s not meant to confuse you, but rather to say that getting all of these phases right is like getting straight A’s on your report card. Your customers love you. They think you’re doing a great job. So the first phase is the assess phase.
In the assess phase, a prospective customer is considering whether or not they want to do business with you. They’re checking out your website, they’re looking at your pricing, they might be doing a sales call with you, they’re checking out your marketing materials. They are assessing whether or not you would be a good fit and they would be a good fit for you. In common parlance, we call this marketing and sales. Most businesses spend a lot of time focused on this phase.
And not much time focused on the next seven phases that we’re going to get to, okay? Phase two is the admit phase. The admit phase is when a prospect admits that they have a problem or a need that they believe you can help them with. They sign on the dotted line, they hand over their hard-earned cash, they transition from being a prospect to being a customer. Almost immediately after that happens, they come to phase three. And Ezra, you referred to this one earlier, the buyer’s remorse phase, where they begin to doubt the decision they just made. A lot of folks in the lawn care and landscaping business do the selling, do the contract signing off season. They’re doing that in the winter. They’re doing it in the spring before the lawns are growing. Sometimes you’re signing up to have your lawn taken care of weeks or months before the actual work will be done. What are you doing in that gap between the time when they sign up and when you start to deliver on the service?
That’s the affirm phase, right? That’s that phase of buyer’s remorse where we need to affirm the decision that they just made. We then come to phase four, the activate phase. The activate phase is the first real moment of truth, when you show up to take care of the lawn for the first time. In the activate phase, we want to energize the relationship. We want to let them know that this relationship is going to be unlike any business relationship they’ve ever had before. We’re going to treat them different. We’re going to surprise and delight them. We’re going to show them the type of energy and enthusiasm we have for our work together. After that first visit, we move to phase five, the acclimate phase. Now in the acclimate phase, the customer gets used to your way of doing business, the cadence of communication, the frequency of communication.
What are the interactions going to be like? And in a lawn care business, that’s the second time you mow the lawn and the third and the fourth and the fifth and the tenth and the twentieth. This may be happening every week, it may happen every other week, every third week, depending on the type of services you’re providing. The acclimate phase could last for weeks or even months as a customer gets used to your way of doing business. The secret in the acclimate phase is we’ve got to hold their hand. We’ve got to let them know what we’ve done, what we’re doing right now, and what we’re going to do next. Now, some of you are like, but Joey, I already said that in our proposal. We talked about that in the sales call. Friends, they weren’t listening. I’m sorry. They just weren’t paying as close of attention as you are. They’re comparing you to other places.
You know, I used to work with a company that was happy to mow my lawn every three weeks. And I thought that was good. Now my lawn company, they only will mow every two weeks. I can’t get them to extend to three. So in my mind, I keep forgetting which one is it, is it going to be two weeks or three weeks? That’s partially to blame on me. But it’s an opportunity for them to remind me, hey, we’ll see you in two weeks. Hey, we’ll be back in two weeks. Hey, we’ll be back on the fourth. We’ll be back on this date. When am I going to see you? What hour of the day? What time, what day of the week? These are the things we need to be doing in the acclimate phase. We then come to phase six, the accomplished phase.
Now the accomplished phase is when the customer achieves the goal they had when they originally decided to become a customer. Now here’s a pro tip for everyone in the landscaping business. You think that the goal often, many of you think that the goal the customer has is to have their lawn mowed. That’s the task I’m hiring you to do, but that’s not the goal. For me, the goal is to have my neighbors go, that’s a nice looking lawn. For me, the goal is to have the HOA not come by and say, hey, we’re going to fine you because you haven’t mowed your lawn fast enough. For me, the goal is, and see every single customer has a different goal. On a big landscaping project, the goal we often think as a landscaping business is, once everything’s in and the trees are planted and everything’s looking good, the project’s done, they’re happy, right? Well, why are they landscaping?
Are they landscaping now because they know in two years from now their kid’s going to be graduating from high school and they want to throw the graduation party in the backyard and they want to give everything a chance to settle and to look good and to look like it wasn’t put in last week? Well, they have a different goal that they’re trying to accomplish. But if we, as the business owners, as the sales team, as the marketers, as the employees who are delivering the service, if we’re not in regular conversation with the customer asking them what are our goals, what are we trying to accomplish here, we miss that opportunity to celebrate with them when they accomplish the goal. We then come to phase seven, the adopt phase. In the adopt phase, the customer becomes loyal to you and only you. They’re committed, they’re bought in. When it comes time to renew for next season, they’re renewing. They’re not even considering your competitors. They are completely adopted and loyal to you.
And last but not least, the final phase, the eighth phase, the Holy Grail, Nirvana, the advocate phase where our customers become our raving fans singing our praises far and wide. They’ll go on Google and write a review. They’ll refer the neighbors to you. So many businesses are trying to get to the advocate phase immediately after the sale. They’re skipping all the phases in between—the phase where they decide to become a customer, phase two, the admit phase, and the phase where they’re actually going to become an advocate, the eighth phase.
If we want to have advocates, we need to recognize that we need to take them through the phases in the proper sequence so that they’re willing to become an advocate because they have experienced the consistency and the reliability of our delivering on the promise we made when they originally decided to become a customer. So those are the eight phases. All of them are important. And the question I might ask is, as people are listening, which phases do you think you’re good at? And which phases do you think there’s probably an opportunity for improvement on?
Ezra McCarthy
In all reality, I think most people listening in, unless they’ve read your book, they probably have not thought about anything but the advocate. All of them say, I only work on referrals. That’s what they say, which basically means I don’t market and they don’t put any effort. Some of them now they’re listening to this, probably not. But I think it’s really good to begin to look at all of these because everyone wants those advocates, but really breaking it down each of these points, realizing, hey, how can we assess? How can we help them admit? And just walking them down is really helpful. And something you bring out is at each one of these to have touch points to basically bring them along the journey in a positive way.
Because a lot of times they’ll just start and then quit. And a really good example, I was just listening to an interview about the founder of Montana Knife Company, expensive American knife company in Montana. And he was telling about how this customer of his had their really nice knife stolen. And I don’t even know why, but they emailed the, it wasn’t their fault.
It was in their vehicle and someone stole it. They emailed Montana Knife Company and the owner saw it, didn’t say anything to the customer, but just mailed them a new knife. Now it wasn’t the company’s fault, but he was just basically trying to give great customer experience going above and beyond.
Joey Coleman
So here’s the thing. Let me dive into this, Ezra. Did you hear that story about on a podcast you mentioned, right? That is where you heard the story. Was it the customer telling the story?
Ezra McCarthy
It wasn’t, but that person was so impressed he was working for something to do with Amazon and he said I want to work for that company. And at that point there were only three team members and he was overqualified in some sense, but he ended up joining the team because of that insane customer experience.
Joey Coleman
I love it. So here’s the beautiful thing about this story. When we create remarkable customer experiences, not only do they attract new customers, not only does it create a story that our customers can tell, not only does it create a piece of our company’s legend, but it can be a recruiting tool for getting A players to want to come work for us because they’re like, that’s the kind of company I want to work for. That sounds amazing.
I’d be willing to bet, I don’t know the details of this story, but I’d be willing to bet that the positive word of mouth, the stories that have been told, the way this story has been shared on podcasts and in conversations has far exceeded the cost of the knife. And that’s the thing. So many of the experiences we can create are not about how much money did you spend. They’re not about let’s give them something free. You know, we started this conversation with flowers.
That’s great, but I can imagine that some business owners are like, Joey, you got to understand the margins with gas prices and labor prices and my maintenance on my mowers. I don’t really have the money to be putting towards flowers. Well, do you have three dollars to put towards a thank you note? Do you have three minutes to put towards a text message showing that the lawn’s been mowed? It’s not about the dollars. It’s about the thoughtfulness of the communication and the interaction you’re creating for your customers.
Ezra McCarthy
So good and I got a great story on this. So when I read your book, I think it was last year I sent it out on my email list and I said, hey, this is a great book. Well, one of my customers, he emailed back saying he loved reading and he said I’m going to put that on my reading list. Well, I went on Amazon, I shipped him your book through Amazon and it was so amazing the timing. So he emails back a couple days later and he’s like, yes I want to read that book. And I said, hey check your mailbox because I saw Amazon sent me a notification that it was delivered. And Ryan, if you’re listening, one of my customers, Ryan. And he’s like, I told him, hey, check your mailbox.
And he goes, and with Amazon, you can write a little note. And he was just blown away. He had been working with me a couple months, but he’s been with me for over a year now. That book cost me, I don’t know, 20 bucks. It doesn’t really matter. Not a whole lot. But what that does, whether that’s a thank you card, maybe send your customers your book, whatever it is, something that just shows you care, I think is just so valuable. And this ties into something that’s really beneficial. A lot of businesses are just so obsessed with new customers. And I forget the statistic, but it was some multiple of how much it costs to get a new customer than to keep an existing customer.
I’m sure you got a lot of value from that. Follow back up with us here on the next podcast for part two of Joey Coleman, a bestselling author of Never Lose a Customer Again. We sure appreciate you listening in and we’ll catch you on the next one.
