Unreliable people are the worst

I want to paint you a picture… it’s 11pm and, exhausted from a full 10 hour day of work and travel, you finally arrive at your destination for the evening. To the west you can hear waves crashing on the sand. Somewhere on the east is your B&B for the evening and… you can’t find it. Parking on the street is restricted, you can’t tell when you pull up if meters are 24/7 or day only. The buildings are not clearly marked and many house numbers are obscured in the dark of night. Winding pathways leading up to doors are hidden, overgrown with plants and can’t be navigated easily.

Worst of all, your host is MIA. In 72 hours since confirming the reservation there has been no communication or direction on locating and accessing your rented room. Calls go unanswered. Texts go unresponded to. Emails are ignored.

Desperate, you reach out to the booking service, get an agent and find out… that if another 2 hours pass (taking today into tomorrow) and the host has still not responded, the agency will then help you find a hotel and refund your money.

And so, at nearly midnight, frustrated, tired, loathe to sleep in the rental car parked illegally or in a parking lot, you send out a tweet:

Yes, that was my Sunday night folks. And writing this in the wee hours of Monday morning I have just 2 goals: 1) to treat my awesome friend (who is loaning me her couch for the night so I didn’t have to go hotel to hotel looking for a $300/night room at 1am) out to dinner and 2) to show you exactly why this behavior is not just infuriating but will ruin your business.

The customer always feels right

Notice I didn’t say the customer is always right. Nope, sometimes the customer is irrational, crazy, or stupid.

Not me of course.

But that’s the point; no one feels like they’re in the wrong in a situation like this. So while guidelines and policies and rules are good, they must also be fair to both parties. If you set up a situation where the customer can never be right, then you’ll be dealing with a lot of angry people.

Another example was when I decided to cancel a massage membership a few years back. Fine, they said, but you didn’t give 30 days notice so next month’s charge will still process. Oh-kay, I replied, just cancel it. Well, it has to be in writing. Fine, I drove 15 minutes to cancel in person in a major storm. A short time later I went in to redeem my final massage and was told it had expired (after the massage was delivered mind you) and I had to pay 120% on top of the amount I’d already paid for the massage. Oh, and the cancellation, now they tell me I could have just emailed them notification.

Do you see how at every step of that process the client is set up to jump through impossible or unknown hoops and then penalized? Years later it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth!

If you can’t make exceptions, then you’re not human

Listen, I love automation. But if a machine could do 100% of your job, 100% of the time it would. The reason there’s a human sitting behind that desk is that you need to apply intelligence to decision making.

Unhappy customers make a bigger impact

To some extent we just expect the world around us to work. We want doctors in the ER when someone is bleeding and don’t care about your staffing problems. When we go to a restaurant we expect that you’ll have ingredients for items on the menu, no matter what your supplier concerns are. And when we book a service or coaching package or pay for something, we expect to get it. As ordered. On time. No excuses.

Some situations are more serious than others – picking up my rental car I saw a young man walk out when they told him that, being late for his pickup time, they now only had a larger size car available and he’d need to pay an extra $230 over the cost of the booked car, plus more for gasoline. His legitimate and justifiable reason that “I was on a plane that was delayed and could not call from 30,000 feet” was ignored.

We’re less forgiving when we’re away from home, when it’s a large investment or when our alternatives are limited. And when the client is unhappy, shit happens. Sometimes it’s cruel and pointless, to shame a business into doing the right thing. In other cases it’s a legitimate desire to warn others to stay away. Would I want my friends stranded in a strange town at midnight contemplating a makeshift homeless shelter? No! Do I want my colleagues to spend twice as much as they budgeted for a room because a reservation was not redeemed? No!

Your reputation is your life blood

Your reputation can’t be bought or manufactured or spun. It can swing both ways and fluctuate in a moment. Keeping you on your toes and accountable to your word should bring out the best in your business. It’s a “go for it” or a “stay away” and it’s fairly created from your own actions.

Build a reputation for doing what’s right, making amends when something goes wrong, creating systems so things don’t get left up to chance and a team that cares about your clients.

Unreliable people are the worst because they create stress, fear, unhappy situations, frustration and cast down on everything you’ve claimed or promised to do. And no one wants to do business with those people.