The Future of Feedback

Hey everyone, and welcome to come rain or shine. As always, you’re here with Dan cockerel. And today I have Adam Alfia, calling us from Dallas Fort Worth. And Adam and I connected a couple months ago. And we finally were able to connect for this podcast. And he took me through. Basically, Adam is a serial entrepreneur, and did his studies down at SMU in Dallas. And they’ve really done a lot in the hospitality and technology sector around various tools and that kind of thing. So we’re going to hear a little bit about Adams story, a little bit of his time with Maestro, the company he was with formally. And now his new product, Real Time Feedback that I’m pretty excited about because it really gets into the heart of, you know, hospitality, and real time data, which I know everyone’s digging for. So, Adam, welcome to come rain or shine. How are you today? Great. Great. Thank you for having me on, Dan. Very good. And congratulations for your son just graduated university Arkansas, Razorback alum, right. Yeah. Yeah. Very excited. And another one off the nipples, I say, there you go. Congratulations on your bonus. They have.
Yes, Adam, before we dive into it, tell us a little about your life and career progression up to today. Yeah, so I actually moved to the United States from Israel when I was seven. I’m here in Dallas, Texas, when I was going to SMU at the time I took the entrepreneurship class. And the professor at the time gave us asked us to do a business plan on a make believe company. And that night, I actually I was driving a Jaguar at the time, I had my car at an auto repair facility, here in town getting my first oil change, maintenance done. And the bill was think was like $795. And I go man, you know, I was 19 years old at the time, 20 years old, maybe. And you know, it’s a lot of money. I bought that car from a job that I had and saved up, bought the car was an x j s 1986 Jaguar XJ s and this thing was beautiful. And, you know, I want to take care of it. And I realized that it was $800 basically just an oil change. When you read all the stuff that they did, it didn’t all change and a bunch of checks on it. And I said, there has to be an alternative to go into the dealership and paying 800 bucks for an oil change. So I decided to do my business plan on an auto repair shop that gave the same type of service on import vehicles like Mercedes, Jaguar, etc. And in the interview process, my dad knew some mechanics that my dad had a Mercedes at the time that he took his cars to. And I was interviewing him and one of them who was a family friend said, Are you trying to open up an auto repair shop? I understand what all these interview questions are. I said, No, no, no, it’s for my school and goes, because if you want to open up an auto repair shop, you know, I’ve been thinking about going, you know, independent for a while I’m working for a shop now. But I’d love to open up a shop. And I had, you know, 40 or $50,000 saved up and decided to open up this auto repair shop with this guy, this mechanic where I put up the money, he repairs the cars and we’ll see if we can make some money together. I leased the space right by a private school here in Dallas, a really nice area. It was an old gas station that had shut down. So I spent every opportunity after school painting the place, cleaning it up, buying parts and I didn’t know anything about the car business at all, didn’t even how to change oil or tires or anything. And the day we’re supposed to open, the guy calls me goes okay, I’m bringing over my toolbox. I haven’t told my boss I’m leaving yet I go. Don’t you think you should have told him like two weeks before? He goes, No, no, it’s fine. I’ll tell him now. He calls me an hour later he goes, Hey, man, he just doubled my salary. I’m saying no, no, I go, What do you mean, you’re saying, I don’t know how to fix cars. So we have to go find another mechanic and I lost, for two years, lost my butt. So I graduated, I said, You know what, I’m going to give this thing about a year and a half, two years, see if I can make it work. If not, then I’ll find something else to do. And using you know what I learned in school for marketing, etc. We opened up, we really started making money. I think at the time, about three months, and I was making about $10,000 a month in profit, which is great. And then six months later, we finally had some money in the bank, the place burns down we had a faulty gas heater in the place and the entire place burns down to the ground. So I have to start all over find a place we lost 17 customers cars and the process taught me a valuable lesson about having enough insurance because I only had like $10,000 in insurance and I had to pay I think $400,000 In claims that people were suing for. So I got out of that I sold it to pay them off over four year period. It was you know all customers of mine. So I you know, worked out a deal with them. And then we slowly grew it from one location that I opened up near SMU to four locations in 2005. In which point I got approached by one of my customers who said hey, I really liked you.
Whoo. I love the car business. I want to get into it. He was a large homebuilder, you build homes here in Dallas. He bought the businesses and unbeknownst to me, was in financial crisis at the time, we had an installment payment plan where you pay me every month and then a balloon payment after four years. And then halfway through that he was always struggling, paying me my monthly fee, etc. Then ‘08 came and he since he was a homebuilder, he went bankrupt, along with all my companies, and put me in second position with the bank and the bank, the land that we were on, I owned all the land, before I sold it to him, flushed me out, and I was basically bankrupt. So after I sold them for seven and a half million dollars, and I thought, you know, I was 29 at the time, I was going to have a great start to do something else. Basically, I was bankrupt and lost everything that had worked for in the previous, you know, 15 years, I started over again, this time, I started to a company maestro, just being in the car business. I saw that GM had a product, everybody knows OnStar. But it was only for GM vehicles. So we started a call center called maestro, we branded it for the automotive space, MyStar to compete with OnStar we while we thought we were going to get sued from them from name refrigerant, never did. And then, in 2000, we had a bunch of dealerships all over the country. And basically the idea was, every time you sell a car, you gave him access to your own branded Personal System, concierge company, customers can be driving down the road call from their cell phone that dresses them by name. Hello, Dan, thanks for calling. You know Lexus of XYZ? Does Amanda How can I help you and you can ask for anything. I need dinner reservations, I need a trip to Italy, I need to get my car service, can you make me an appointment, really great white touch type of service. With you know, it’s kind of like if you ever called American Express black card concierge, that type of really high quality customer experience where you get off the phone go, wow, that was incredible. And we do anything you want. You know, if you want us to spend four hours on a project that you didn’t want to do yourself, we’d handle it, you have a dispute at a hotel, because they charge you for a meal you didn’t want to pay for, we’ll take care of anything. Well, though, in 2009, infinity called us up. And we had a bunch of their dealerships, the car manufacturer, and within a year we launched say, hey, we really liked the service you have a lot of our dealerships are taught great things about your company and what you do for the customer experience, we want to launch you at every one of our cars. So in 2010, we launched Infiniti personal system that really changed my entire life, I mean that, you know, having a platform with a brand like that, and I was you know, we were very successful, we were on a huge trajectory. And since then, now we have Subaru, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Infiniti. They’re all in any one of those vehicles, we’re now integrated in the car. So when you push a button in the vehicle, it comes to our call center, and we take care of whatever it is you want. So that’s really my you know, the last, you know, since 2005, that’s really been my focus on, you know, providing great customer experiences, everybody hears call centers before, and you can tell them the first three seconds, what kind of experience by just the attitude of the person on the other line, you can tell if they hate their job, you can tell if they’re smiling, you can tell if they’re really want to help you. And that really sets the tone of what I think about that company. So I’ve been really tuned with the customer experience and really providing really high quality type of experiences for a long time. And I’ve seen, you know, and I’ve kind of ventured off into a bunch of other types of businesses, I have a chain of restaurant of crab restaurants here in Texas called Shell shack, we actually just sold a 50% stake to a VC firm, that’s going to take it from eight locations to you know, hopefully 50 In the next few years. I’ve got a bunch of bars and nightclubs have another technology platform I started called Apollo, that’s a kind of like a Spotify for art, where you can display from hundreds of well-known artists around the world, and you can project their art on any TV in your house. So I got involved with that. But just in the various things that I’ve done, especially with the restaurants, I’m hyper focused on the customer experience in a brick and mortar environment, like why are the customers who leave one star reviews, why don’t we take care of them while they’re there? And how do we get that engagement going? And that’s really the problem. I’ve got six kids, ranging all the way from five to 28. And you know, my parents when we were growing up anytime there was an issue being Israeli, and really having no problem voicing our opinion. When we go to a restaurant, and there was any issue whatsoever. My mom would be the first hey, I want to speak to the manager and really let them know, Hey, your server sucks. The food is terrible, whatever the case was, she’d have no problem letting a manager know exactly what experience she was having. So I grew up with that.
And I imparted that to my children, hey, if you’re paying good money, and something’s wrong, don’t leave, did not say anything, call over a manager, tell them what the problem is. And 99% of the time that manager going to take care of, it’s either going to bring you a replacement meal, take it off the tab, buy your round of appetizer or something, but you got to voice your opinion. And it’s funny, because I grew up with that as well, especially my younger daughter, Alexa, she went to Israel for four years, studied abroad and university. So she really has that attitude as well. But when she’s here, she’s back now in the States, when she goes out with her friends, and she has an issue. Hey, can I speak to the manager, please? And her friends are petrified? What are you doing? Sure, I’m calling over the manager, we got to let them know that, you know, because no, no, no, just don’t make a big scene, we just won’t come back. Because nobody’s America, I’m sure he wants to know. And plus, I don’t want to pay for my meal that I’m not happy with. So the generation, you know, the 18 year old 3035 year olds, when they grew up behind cell phone screens, they grew behind texting, you call your kids and they want to answer your phone and they respond, they send you a text, Hey, what’s up? I’m calling you. A lot of people now I don’t like calling people on phones, either. You know, you. Nobody wants to sit on hold. When you’re calling a company, everybody’s going digital chat with us, email us. So being that everything is going digital, we look back, we called some of the customers that we had at Shellshock, who left negative reviews, and we even had managers stop at every single table. Hey, I’m the manager. How’s everything? Do you anything, we found that even customers that we’re having issues with smile looking straight in the face and say everything’s fine. And then go leave your one star review, we and we gave them the opportunity to say something, they just don’t want that confrontation. People do not like face to face confrontation. Right? So we call it a bunch of customers, you said, Hey, let me ask you a question. We left a one star review. What if we had a digital platform? Would you have made this complaint digitally? Would you have let her manager know, while you’re at the restaurant if there’s an issue instead of putting it on Google? Because a lot of times customers think that the way to get the business’s attention is on so on platforms like Google and Yelp, etc. How do we get that conversation privately in real time where I can really fix your issue, once you put something on Google, you’re pretty much done. No matter what I tell you, you’re probably not coming back unless I offer you something for free. But most times that nine times out of 10, you’re not taking that review down. So it’s there to stay. The average review, Google review gets over 1000 views within a year. So you know that’s there for you. If you’re like me, when I go to a restaurant, and it has, let’s say a 4.2 stars, or whatever it is, I always look at the bad reviews, I want to know what the worst case scenario is. So you know, and plus, Google loves negative reviews. So a lot of times the negative is reusable, float to the top, and they will be first in line so people can see him. Nonetheless, being that we’re a technology company, my brother and I said, you know, let’s build a platform for called feedback, we came up with a name, specifically for restaurants. Let’s see how we do and then went over like gangbusters, we put a little QR codes on all the tables. If there’s any issue whatsoever, we want to take care of it, we will handle your situation, scan this code, they scan the code, it opened up a page that’s branded to Shell shack, they put in, hey, my crab came cold, or we haven’t seen our waiter in 10 minutes. And he went directly to a manager, the manager had an app on their phone, customers never touched an app, just a manager did had an app saw the feedback, when Hey, sorry about that. It already knew which table the QR codes were smart code. So I knew which table came from comeback feedback from number table number 12. My crabs cold manager would either walk up to the table, Hey, I just got your message, what’s going on. And they were able to handle the situation or they respond to the customer not a problem, I’ll send you another fresh batch or give me a couple of minutes I’m come to the table and come back to the customer as a text message. So now we can get that initial engagement digitally, electronically, and respond to the customer. After about a year, we sat back and go, Man, this is really quite a product. I bet we can you know sell this to other businesses. So we started going after companies outside our sphere. Our first big company was American Airlines center. And they had something in place the franchise sports, NBA NHL, they require a venue where they have their sports to actually have a two way fan guest engagement for security reasons. So if you see those kind of say something, see something, say something. What does it really clunky, a company another company? About 15 years ago, I started launching all these venues. And their solution was I’m having a shortcode you’ve seen those, you know, text game 254321. And then but, you know, that was kind of a hot thing about 10 or 15 years ago. Now it’s really not people don’t like sending keywords to shortcodes but it worked and you know, they won’t want integration now. Right but it satisfied what they needed. And for you know the needs of the phone franchise sports leagues. And they’ve gotten pretty much every single stadium. So when we went to American Airlines center, they go, Look, we got this other, this other platform that we use. I go did you get people actually send stuff in? So the guy called Dan goes actually I don’t even know it goes to our guest experience manager. So you call Gino? And he goes, Hey, how many of those notifications that we got this year, and it was December of 2019. So they pretty much had a whole year. I think it was 24. So I think it was yeah, I didn’t realize nobody, you know, nobody utilizing it. Yeah, we got 20 for this entire year. I go look, put our platform in. If you don’t get what you want out of it, we’ll pull the QR codes. I’ll even come out here. I’ll put the QR codes everywhere. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. The first night we launched it was a Mavericks game, they actually bought us a suite a bunch of our employees. The first time we launched it, they had 42 feedbacks the first night. And this is just you know, putting the QR code just throughout the venue. And they’ve been with the program since 2019. On average, now they get anywhere from 80 to 100 feedbacks a night. They’ve got them in the suites. They got them on the Jumbotron, they got them in the restrooms, I mean, they’re really, really engaged with the platform, their average response time is under two minutes. So every time somebody submits something feedback about you know, broken chairs, fans, you know, yelling or cursing, spilled drinks, we even in the sweets, when you scan the QR code, you can order your food through our platform. So hey, we need another six pack. So now they’re actually increasing sales to sweets, customers are complaining about things and being handled in real time. Matter of fact, Gina Chappa, two weeks ago was awarded by the NBA got the guest experience Innovation Award for the entire year from the NBA. For our feedback platform, it was a huge.
So she sent us a text message. Hey, Adam, I just want to let you know that we have never been able to do this without you guys, thanks for everything for being awesome, a great partner and a great friend. So that was I mean, we’re really blowing that out of the water. Now, you know, getting a press release done about that. But you know, when somebody wins an award for guest experience coming out of COVID, after launching something that’s very simple to use, and just makes, it’s one of those things, when you look at it go, I can share it. Nobody’s done that yet. And they haven’t just nobody’s done it. So we’re the first really to market. We’re building a bunch of great interaction on the platform. We’re now we had a four month pilot program with Ford that started four and a half months ago, we just got approved last week to go national with them. We actually built a plan because one of the things is get is engagement, how do I get customers to engage with us. So we built this really cool platform that we call it autopilot, that as soon as a customer checks out at the dealership, whether they bought a vehicle, or they have their car service, within 15 minutes, we send them a text message that says, then this is the manager of XYZ Ford, quick question on a scale of one to 10. How would you rate your overall experience, and it sends them to a branded page on site that we own called 1thru5.com. If you give that dealers and end all it shows us five stars, if you give it a five star review, it automatically says, Thanks for the five star review, we really appreciate it. If you could take some time, leave us a Google review, we’d appreciate it. And within three seconds there would redirect it to the feed to the Google review page for that store. So we’re only sending five star reviews there. If they click on four stars, three stars, you know, two or one, it says this is the manager, I apologize, we didn’t provide a five star experience for you today, please tell me in the window below what we could have done to make it a better experience. So they typed out, Hey, I was told an hour for an oil change. I was here for two hours where my car was returned dirty. Anything that made that experience is not a survey, just most people have one or two things that, you know, irked them during the experience. Sure. So they put that in there. It goes straight to the manager. It says you know, it says what the feedback was it shows up star ratings that they left once before, and allows the manager to immediately respond to that customer, whether it’s a phone call, text, 99% of our responses want to text back, because hey, this is the managers got your feedback. If your car is dirty next time you come in, I put a note in the system free detail on us or sorry about the wait, you know, as you know, we’re struggling finding quality employees. Thanks for letting me know next time. Here’s my cell phone number text me next time you’re here and I’ll do something for you. But just if you capture that customer that has a bad experience, you go Hey, I heard you and I’m responding to you. I’ll take care of it next time. Some things you can’t fix customers gone. Cars returned dirty unless you say hey, come back. I’ll fix it. But just that just that immediate interaction and letting you know, Hey, I heard you and I care goes a long way. You’re not going to have a customer that, you know gives you their issue, you respond immediately. And then they’re not going to go on blast you because you’re listening to them. That’s really what they want. There’s actually something called the service recovery paradox that shows that if a customer is dealing with a company that has never had an issue, their loyalty levels X
And there’s another component customer that had an issue. But that company jumped, took care of it, rose to the occasion, took care of the customer in a way that the customer deemed necessary, but fair and took care of that customer that customers loyalty score is actually higher than the person’s never had an issue, because the company got a chance to show, you know, rise to the occasion take care of something. So I really were a feedback comes in, it really helps elevate that experience. Yeah, I’d say it’s, to your point, the simplicity of it is fantastic. As you and I talked, last time, we were talking about this, I think there’s two key things, if you’re listening this, I think it’s a great way to get real time feedback, because speed of your point, speed of response is key. You know, no one wants to wait, it kind of sits in their mind, they tell a few people about it. And you want to get on top of that right away, I think a few things. One is it just gives everyone another I guess you call it another channel or another voice to be able to respond. Some people to your point, I have no problem calling or doing that it’s still a pain. Because you know, when I have a problem somewhere, now I have to work to get it resolved. And that makes it worse. And your point, it’s interesting, when we used to do surveys, we do customer service surveys and Disney parks around the world. You couldn’t compare Park to park, because there was inflation in some parks. So generally, Disneyland always had the highest guest satisfaction scores. And reality is in the Hispanic culture, they have a lot of Hispanic guests. They’re very positive. They don’t want to give you negative feedback in person. That’s a cultural thing we’ve experienced. And so they’ll always tell you, it’s better than you thought Japan was always the lowest because they were excellent. I mean, they would really want a great experience. And it’s like they would never give you a perfect score. Unless I mean, everything had to be absolutely perfect. So they were that was if you could get good scores in Japan, you know, you’re doing well, because they were very stingy with that. So to your point, I think it changes culture by culture, but giving everyone an opportunity in a convenient way to speak up, I think is the key, you know, a couple things that I guess to focus on is you better have great processes to start with. Because once you turn that faucet on, it’s going to make you, you’re going to know quickly how good jar, I’m sure the day the Mavericks turn that on. It’s like, Alright, now how do we respond to these 42? We’ve had 24 and a year, how do we find 42? In one night? What are all the little things we need to tweak? How do we create a continuous improvement environment where it’s not just fixing the problem in the moment, but taking that data to go to the root cause. Okay, why? Why are the crab cakes cold? Let’s not only look at the guests, but let’s find out what’s going on in the back of the house? Or we put are we cooking stuff too long? Do we have enough servers do we have? Is the hotline working like it should? So I mean, there’s so much here you can get out of this. But the key to that is do it right the first time to your point. And if you can’t get it right, first time, fix it quickly. I guess that’s where a lot of the training has to go for the managers, what are they empowered to do for a customer? Because that recovery, that it’s really dangerous to listen and not do anything? So I’m sure there’s a lot of, I guess, preparation upfront to make sure the managers know what you’re willing to invest when something goes wrong, because that’s, you’re always looking at your bottom line. Well, what if we start giving away too much food? We’re not going to make money, it’s like, well, you’re going to make even less if you keep serving cold crabcakes. So we better fix the issue. Yeah, so in response to some of those things, as far as the Spanish population, you’re right, it’s a lot of minorities, for example, people with accents for the speaker for different languages or first language. So in the feedback platform, we made it that depending obviously, on the country you’re in, you can easily convert the feedback page to Spanish, just by clicking the button and the whole thing changes to Spanish, we found is that people who have an accent or English is not their first language are far less likely to complain in person, because they get anxiety about, you know, saying what their issue is, right? Especially under a high pressure, confrontational scenario. They don’t want to have that because they know that their English isn’t that good. So we found that people that that utilize our platform and in Spanish, really leave a lot longer feedbacks than the English speaking people. And then furthermore, just in general, people who you know, there’s a big, obviously in society right now, there’s a whole thing about, you know, marginalized people, etc. Well, this really gives your customer voice and it’s not really the voice because again, you hear voice of the customer everywhere. Now, nobody wants voice as a customer. But really, what we’re trying to put through is a conversation with the customer. We don’t want you to just hear the customer because that’s really what surveys are, we want you to have a dialogue we always look at surveys is a monologue, where a customer is taking their time, you know, some surveys take 10 or 15 minutes to fill out. So now as a customer, I’m taking my time giving you precious information that really in a lot of big companies, it just ends up as just another data point where they’re not really making operational changes in a specific store. It just you know, high level type of stuff. So I’m giving you 10 or 15 minutes of my time. Usually I don’t get anything back you know, some places will give you a 10% coupon off next time etc. However, that value exchange is really one sided with feedback tries to do is not only like, Hey, I’m gonna give you 10 or 15, 20 30 seconds of, you know, typing something out and feedback, but then allowing that business to immediately respond to you and fix an issue. I mean, I don’t know how many surveys you filled out, I’ve probably filled out 500 In the last couple of years just now in the business, I want to see what that reactions like, and I never see a change. If I walk into a store that I go to all the time, let’s say it’s a grocery store, and I fill out their survey, there is almost zero chance that within the next six months I walk in, and one of the things that I complained about will actually be changed. Feedback allows for a manager to go, one of the things that I really like about feedback is even the things that you know, when we were thinking about how we’re going to do this, that the things that we thought were going to be commonplace, you will learn things about your business that no survey will ever pick up on. Because something you know, like, for example, we have a chain of restaurants we launch here in Dallas, not mine a different one. And a customer sent in feedback that said, Hey, I come here every Sunday, and it’s a 24 hour diner. So they have a bunch of them throughout Dallas. So you know a lot of times 24 hour replaces our service sometimes you know, it’s obviously middle of the night type of stuff. It’s late night after you go out, you know, two in the morning till five in the morning, they’re packed. So the guy comes and goes, Hey, I’d like to have my Sunday morning brunch here. But I noticed every time I come here, the music’s blaring. So the night crew that you know, you got a bunch of people, I like the loud music, you know, after you go to a bar, whatever it is, you’re drinking, everybody likes the loud music, that they’re not turning it down for the morning crew. So the guy that’s coming in at 830 in the morning on a Sunday to enjoy a Sunday morning brunch breakfast still has. So these are things that you know that you wouldn’t realize. Because you know, when you work in it, when you work in a business, a long time, everything becomes in the background, you really don’t notice, you don’t notice. One guy says, Hey, your fan is caked with dust. And I’m sure every time it’s fans on, it’s blowing dust everywhere. But these are things that you don’t notice. And so when a customer goes, Hey, your fans full of dust, oh, wow, I didn’t even realize that. And it causes you to fix something. And when a customer comes in, and looks up the next time and the manager goes, Hey, thanks for letting us know, we’ll make sure it gets cleaned. I come there next Sunday, I look up the fans clean and go wow, this company really cares about their customers and making sure that they’re heard. Because that’s one of the things one of the things you also you know, that you said was you don’t want to work hard to let a business know, there’s actually a new, I don’t know how new it is. But there’s a metric now that’s being tracked called customer effort, score CES, how hard is a customer have to work in order to get in touch with that business to let them know about an issue. And that’s curious, you know how many times you walked in, I’m a huge Home Depot, nut, I go there five, six times a week. And I can’t tell you how many times I walk around, let’s say I need get some wood cut. And I’d have a little phone that you pick up. And it says wood cutting area, somebody’s giving the wood kind of year over the loudspeaker. But employees are, you know, they drown that out. Customers found that out. So I’m sitting there for 15 minutes, and I’m walking aimlessly through the thing and he gets me cut some wood. Oh, I don’t know the code. That’s what I think the guys on break, I go come on, how do I communicate with that guy? So one of the things we’re proposing is we have these things called trigger codes, you just scan the code. And as soon as you scan it, it automatically sends the person who can cut wood, a notification saying somebody is needed and what cutting area that’s way more effective than an intercom. If I’m in the bathroom, I can’t hear that intercom. Nope. So customer effort score. One of the things that we see, especially at American Airlines center is you know, they on a game night, they might have 200 250 employees, they can give walkie talkies to everybody. So now they’re using the feedback platform as essential communication for employees to alert about slip and falls, things that they see. They just go to their you know, everybody had their smartphone on them. So their device, they go to tell AAC and now we actually built a platform function where you put in hashtag EMP in somewhere in your feedback, and identifies you as an employee. Because before the customer, the employee would say, this is John The Hutcher, they’d have to do that anymore. They just put hashtag EMP. And when the feedback comes in, it automatically labels that as an employee generated feedback, like you know, you’re going to respond to a customer differently, you’re going to respond to an employee. So these are the types of things that we’re building. And it’s exciting stuff. You know, one of the things you mentioned, you know, responding to feedbacks quickly one of the things that we found, we launch a company I make sure I go look, you’re going to get feedbacks and getting them and responding is worse than not having a platform at all. So you need to make sure are you sure you really want to know and are you ready to take care of issues because if you don’t want to know You know, those companies mainly and I don’t want to use Walmart as an example. But they’re a low price leader for a reason. You know, they’re not hiring the top of the class you know, customer service people, they’re just getting warm bodies in there to do their you know, their merchandising, their inventory, etc. And when you walk into WalMart, you’re not expecting a five star you know, customer experience, you might get one but they’re you know, they know that they have issues they know that their parking lots are dirty like they know that you know their tellers are not the most refined people, you know, when it comes to customer service, but you know, there are companies that you want to have that experience
But their managers need to be on top of it. We just launched a Ford store, fortunately. And we launched them on the automated program. Over the weekend, they received six complaints. And nobody’s responded to them yet. So now two days have gone by. So I call the service manager this morning, go, Hey, you got six complaints in here? He goes, Oh, man, I know, I go well, it’s six complaints over a five day period. It’s not that hard. Just responding. It takes less than 30 seconds to respond. I go, Lee, why don’t we walk you through? He goes, No, no, I got it. I got it. And then you can see, you know, we looked at the account five minutes later, and they’re all taken care of the customers responded. Some of them goes, Hey, why’d it take three days to respond? But these are the things you got to make a commitment to care? Absolutely. That he probably cares. The commitment is getting, because you can’t, and we everything you’re saying is right on, you know, are people satisfied? Yeah, they’re satisfied. But satisfaction doesn’t keep people coming back. And if you can give them a voice, and I know a lot of people say, Well, boy, you open that door, now everyone’s going to, you know, come after us scenario, well, they’re not going to, quote unquote, come after you. But if you’re not doing what you should be doing, and yeah, you’re going to get some people that want the squeaky wheels, but then the day you’re dealing with the public, if you’re going to put your out self out there with your product or service, you’re going to have to back it up. And you’re going to have to deal with the hard cases, and the ones that are fun to fix. But this all makes sense to me. I think, to your point, I think just companies may be scared of the transparency, but they shouldn’t be because everyone else knows that they’re not doing a good job. They’re the only ones that sometimes that don’t know, and they’re the ones that have to know. Yeah, I mean, I always say, Look, you can either fix this through our feedback platform, or you can fix that same customer on Google. But would you rather keep the complaint internally in private? Or would you rather have it on Google and now you’re paying some third party social media monitoring company to go in there go, Hey, you got another one star review. Sorry, Mr. Customer does, the manager will do better next time, but it’s out there, containing Keep it inside. And not only that, now that the pandemics changed a bunch of stuff, there is a huge way of you know, from ordering your food to your groceries, everything’s gone online now. So the value of your real estate for brick and mortar locations, keeping that customer happy is more important than ever before. So when that customer you know, we all want social creatures, yeah, although it’s convenient to order stuff on Amazon, or to order your groceries on, you know, something like Instacart, or whatever it is, we like that shopping experience, we want to touch a fruit, we want to you know, go look at a TV that we want to see it in the store to BestBuy hanging on the wall, we want to play with electronics, so that that engagement force plus it’s a reason to get out of the house. So if I’m going to get in my car, drive to your business, either eat at a restaurant, or go to a ballgame, or do anything that requires me to leave my house and go and, and have an experience, make that experience positive. Because if you continue to give me a bad experience, you can buy cars now online, I never have to walk into a dealership, even if I want my car service, they’ll come pick up your car, take it to the dealership, and I never have to step in. But if I am going to show up, make it a good experience. Because eventually, I’m going to go to somewhere else that will give me a good experience because there’s Everybody’s hungry right now that customer experience and that customer itself, himself or herself is more important than ever before. And it’s up to the businesses to really give me a reason to continue to come back, get in my car. Gas prices now are astronomical. I have to spend money to get in my car and come to your business. Give me a reason to come back again. Right on. That’s great, Adam. So if anyone who’s listening wants to learn more, get a preview of this and see it with you online, where can they go to find you? RealTimeFeedback.com RealTimeFeedback.com. Easy to remember. And once again, I think this is just once again just leveraging technology to keep building the customer experience but behind the scenes you got to have the right culture and the right support. And to your point, the right commitment to follow through on this so once again, if you want to learn more about what Adams doing in pushing forward customer service RealTimeFeedback.com Well Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. Sounds like you’re on a supplement and I will tell you a lot of the most the best solutions are the simple elegant ones. The sounds is very elegant, using people’s devices. QR codes have come into vogue now. And so I think people are much more readily ready to use them. So congratulations on this and once again real time feedback.com Feel free to check out more. Thanks hope you have a great day and again to everyone out there really appreciate you and thank you to listening to come rain or shine. I always enjoy listening to Dan Cockrell interview one of his guests you know what else I like vacation and I don’t go on vacation without calling magical Vacation Planner. When you’re ready to go on your next vacation. Call magical Vacation Planner at 407-442-0257. You let them do all the planning so you can have a great time on your vacation. Tell them Dan Cockrell sent you.