[00:00:00] James Breese: Strength Matters Media. Video. Print. Podcasts. 

[00:00:05] Josh Kennedy: Today's topic is your customer service is your marketing. And, uh, in doing the research for this, I came across Peter Drucker. Who's a management guru who these two boys have both heard of, uh, new to me, but his statement, one of his statements said, um, your job of the business is to create and keep a customer.

[00:00:23] Josh Kennedy: Obviously it's not just about getting customers, but keeping customers happy. And we're going to sort of give a few examples of various companies, including our own, uh, where there have been mistakes and not kept customers happy. We'll go on to. that in a second. But, um, in essence, this episode is all about, again, in the fitness industry, being more professional, is it not, James?

[00:00:44] James Breese: You have to repeat it, Josh, because you broke up then and I didn't hear you, so you'll have to say that again. Just, 

[00:00:48] Josh Kennedy: in essence, the episode is all about the fitness business being more 

[00:00:53] James Breese: professional. Exactly, and that's it. It starts with customer service. Sorry about that, there was a bit of a lag on this.

[00:00:58] James Breese: No, no, that's fine. They said what was going [00:01:00] on, but yeah, no, it is. I can't emphasize enough those mistakes we made a strength matters on customer service that you learn a lot from and it's far easier and cheaper to keep a customer or a client than it is to get new ones. And therefore you've got to put just as much effort into your customer service department as you do with actually trying to find new people and people don't even think about that.

[00:01:23] James Breese: So, okay, strength matters is a little bit different from most businesses. We work all over the world. We get emails coming in every single day. You now see it, Josh, because you're now on the, on the customer service system and the messages that come in. So it is really important we stay on top of it because people now expect, we're in the early 2000s, late 1990s, 2000s, we were in the customer service era.

[00:01:46] James Breese: If you had exceptional customer service, you stood out. People stood out. You literally, you know, you're way better than all the other. That's why Zappos is a great company in America that they sold to Amazon. They stood out. They had amazing customer service. They could send shoes back for [00:02:00] free and all these different things.

[00:02:01] James Breese: It was a fast, effective, um, service department. Now fast forward in 2024. It's expected. You expect instant customer service. You have WhatsApp channels on WhatsApp business. You have emails. You have all these other things that people in the Netflix generation expect to have instant responses 24 7. Now, I know that's not relevant and it's not appropriate for most of us as coaches, but people expect it now.

[00:02:28] James Breese: And the way to stand out is to have exceptional customer service. To respond in a timely manner, where I'm saying respond quickly. Like if you, if it's somebody asking for help, you need to respond to them within 15 minutes, right? You have a system for that. Or at least, in terms of issues, respond to them within 24 hours at the most.

[00:02:48] Josh Kennedy: I was going to say 24 hours, right? It would be a good time frame. Yes! Because you might, although I suppose you could respond and say, we're not, you know, we're going to look into this for you. At least you've given them some sort of response and then can get... [00:03:00] Yeah, 

[00:03:00] James Breese: exactly. Like I think the way we look at it is we look at it in terms of every, I look at every in the morning, I look at it midday and I look at it before, before we shut down for the end of the day.

[00:03:07] James Breese: So I've covered over the course of three hours, essentially. So we cover those periods. So a couple of hours wait is acceptable, but we need to be on top of it the entire time. But if you have a terrible reputation customer service, people leave reviews, they leave bad reviews. You don't want that. It's reputation management, essentially.

[00:03:27] James Breese: Yeah, 

[00:03:27] Josh Kennedy: do you want to talk a little bit about the great t shirt debacle of 2017? 

[00:03:31] James Breese: The amazing t shirt debacle of 2017. This is a great example of this. So I decided to give away a great offer to join our Inner Circle membership, with the magazine and everything, that every time you sign up for the first 30 days you get a free t shirt.

[00:03:44] James Breese: I had this amazing, what I thought, shipping, like, ship on demand t shirt printing service based in Europe. They were going to literally do it all for us, and what happened? They didn't deliver any of the t shirts. They got lost in the post. I think about [00:04:00] 15 20 percent of t shirts got lost, er, got delivered.

[00:04:03] James Breese: The other 80 percent wiped off. No one knows where they went to, and we have no idea. It was awful. People going nuts. Like mugs and t shirts, we've learnt. Like, you know, mugs as well. Simple customer service. We shipped mugs with our memberships. And the first batch of mugs were in terrible packaging. So they broke.

[00:04:24] James Breese: So when we shipped them, they were literally smashing everywhere. So people were getting broken mugs in the post. And we had to repackage them all and send them out. That's a terrible... Terrible like forward customer service and marketing and like a perception of your brand so you could be careful with it Same with like emails we had a system We had a point in 2018 19 where we got hacked by Russian hackers at some point and it was horrendous because they were like Did she?

[00:04:47] James Breese: We had our team of, like, good developers trying to fight against these hackers from Russia, and they were, like, fighting back and forth all the time. And what happened was, was, like, people's emails got lost, because their systems went down. Their emails got lost, and they [00:05:00] got, they came back and actually reviewed us badly on, I think, um, not TripAdvisor.

[00:05:04] James Breese: What's the other one? Uh, TrustPilot. So we had terrible reviews on that because we couldn't see the emails. And we now had no record of them, but we saw they sent them when we realised a month later what had happened. And it was, you know, it's, it's unbelievable. But, yeah. It is so important, and the reputation is so important, but it's also...

[00:05:22] James Breese: This idea of professionalization and professionalize your fitness business. And I think Andrew can go on to us a little bit more on that as well, but the fact that I was going 

[00:05:29] Josh Kennedy: to say, Andrew, do you want to give us another couple of examples? You don't have to, of bad customer service. You don't have to mention, you could mention names, it's up to you.

[00:05:38] Andrew Wallis: Uh, well, I, I, I can give examples from, from my own case where, you know, as a fitness professional, when you're getting Um, requests, inquiries, uh, people asking questions and that, but you're that busy, uh, dealing with the day to day, um, operations of things and training your clients that you think I'll get [00:06:00] back to that later.

[00:06:01] Andrew Wallis: And back in the day, as James says, years ago that you may have been able to fly with that if you got back to them eventually, but these days it's got to be. Um, almost instantaneous. So when we say professionalizing, um, if I'd back then, if I'd had a, a simple message that went out either quickly myself or automatically saying, I've got your message, I'll be back to you within.

[00:06:27] Andrew Wallis: a defined time frame. We mentioned 24 hours. Then that person knows that you've seen their request and you will get back to them. Of course, you need to get back to them. Um, but but that I think is in essence what we need to be doing as fitness professionals now, because There's so much more competition these days and, and first impressions counters, as James mentioned a little earlier, so that if we can set that, uh, bar, um, relatively high and then deliver, uh, initially [00:07:00] with response and then lead them down a defined customer journey so that we can showcase how our professionalism, I think that 

[00:07:08] James Breese: helps a lot.

[00:07:09] James Breese: God, as I say, a good way to think about this now is a lot of people deal with customer service via Facebook messenger, Facebook. WhatsApp, the personal private emails, whenever anybody messaged me privately, I always direct them back to the email address. So I go, hey guys, great question, make sure you send it to help at strengthmanners.

[00:07:26] James Breese: com please, so we can make sure it gets looked after and taken care of for you effectively, because otherwise it gets lost. You know, you see something on the go, you forget about it, you go, oh crap, you know, I've done this in the past, several times. So that's one of my default things now is send them, get them to send an email to help strengthmanners.

[00:07:40] James Breese: com so we can control the dialogue, control the system and make sure it doesn't get lost in the world neither basically. 

[00:07:49] Josh Kennedy: Here's a special message from 

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[00:08:17] James Breese: Ever wonder how many new clients you're losing by not being Google's number one? Don't wonder? Act now. Book your free strategy call at strengthmatters. com forward slash website today. Yeah, 

[00:08:27] Josh Kennedy: well, that was going to be my question about some practical steps that fit pros can do to help them with, uh, customer service.

[00:08:33] Josh Kennedy: Is it about, um, obviously having a dedicated email address, business email address, not, you know, josh at hotmail. com or anything like that. I have a professional email address, but also it doesn't come down to having a CRM system as well. Yeah, it does 

[00:08:49] James Breese: have a CRM system. Like for the guys who are bronze, silver, gold members with our website design service, they get the CRM system behind the scenes.

[00:08:55] James Breese: So that helps. To, to have that, but I'd say very [00:09:00] simply on minimal funds, professional email, you know, Josh at strengthmanners. com is a good example to have on your website. So you control it in an inbox, use Google Mail or Outlook or Exchange to have that in a professional service. They come through to an app, you have Outlook or a mail service system where you can control it.

[00:09:17] James Breese: That's on a budget. However, if you locate a gym or you've got more clients and you're working here, you need a system and a tool. Now we use Front, not affiliated in any way with it. Front is the best service and system that we have because we can have multiple channels and we have our, we have a concierge service.

[00:09:35] James Breese: So we have our black belt and VIP service compared to our help one. So we know we can make sure we look after those guys better. You know, everyone gets treated well, but those guys get priority over everything else we deal with in those terms. So Front is a thing, Intercom is another one, but that's really expensive.

[00:09:49] James Breese: Zendesk is another one where it's email services, but you know, they're all around the 30 to 50 mark, but it's, it's an investment well spent to look after customer service and make sure your messaging and ticketing [00:10:00] system is done correctly. So people can have, can have help when they need it most. And it sets you apart that you then become a reliable, trustworthy fitness professional, as opposed to another jack of all trades, master of none, who just plays around with his phone and WhatsApp and Facebook messenger, basically.

[00:10:16] Josh Kennedy: Andrew, anything you want to add to that? 

[00:10:17] Andrew Wallis: Um, James has covered it really, just be professional and have an, have an, um, an outline of what, of the process that you're going to deliver. Um, so that it's, and then look to streamline it as much as possible. But the key thing, make sure you do respond in that timely 

[00:10:32] Josh Kennedy: manner.

[00:10:33] Josh Kennedy: There we go. Fantastic. I hope, uh, sorry, James, I thought you were going to add something there before I signed off. No, you're all good. We're all good. So I hope that was helpful for you. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. And if you want to find out what's holding you back from growing your fitness business and get yourself a free website audit, go to strengthmatters.

[00:10:52] Josh Kennedy: com forward slash audit.