How to Turn Angry Customers into Raving Fans

Have you ever majorly messed up with a customer? Unfortunately, this is something that we all experience, and we all have to deal with. The way that we react to it is the most important piece. And so today, what I want to share with you are the five things that you can do to turn an angry customer into a raving fan.

So, if you don't know who I am, my name is Lea Horos. I'm the CEO and founder of Acquisition.com, and prior to Acquisition.com, I actually built and sold three businesses by the age of 28, which led to a net worth of $100 million. So, super interesting fact is that a lot of business owners that I speak to think that price and the product are the reason that people are churning, but really, when you're looking at the experience the customer has, there's two things; there's two ways that you can satisfy needs, which is one: there's results. What are the results that you're driving? You know, have they received the product they paid for? And the other one is experience, which is how do they feel when they use the product? How do they feel when they interact with your company? How do they feel when they receive the product and open the package? How do they feel when they're talking to somebody on your team? Which is the experience side. And the really interesting part about this is: Studies have actually shown that even over price, customer service is the main reason for customer churn. It's not the price; it's not the product; it's actually the customer service. In fact, a customer is four times more likely to go to a competitor if the problem is service-related rather than price or product-related. So a lot of people focus on the product, and they focus on the price, but you're missing the entire experience around both of those things, which paint both the price and the product in the light. Because think about it like this: if you buy a product that is very expensive, and then the customer service is—no matter how good the product is—now you start to see it in a different light. It's kind of like if you've ever met somebody who's very attractive, and then you've gotten to know them, and then suddenly they're very mean, and they're not very nice, and they're dismissive, and they're egotistical, and suddenly you start to think to yourself, "I don't actually find them attractive at all." It's the same that goes for a company.

And so what does that have to do with it? It has to do with the relationship between you and the customer. The first time that I ever had to deal with truly, truly angry customers and turning them into raving fans and seeing the power of that was when we released a software called Allen. And so what actually happened was that before we built this software for ourselves, we had this base of gym owners in our company, Gym Launch, and we had added in a supplement company called Prestige Labs, and now we're adding in a software company called Allen. And essentially, the job of Allen was to work the leads. Before we built out like a fully flushed-out product, we kind of built a beta, and that beta was built with a lot of Zapier and a lot of, you know, products that were essentially white-labeled that we tied together. When we first released it, I remember we were so excited, and we did this huge launch and this giant webinar to our community about this new product and how awesome it was going to be. And I think the price was somewhere around like $2,000. What happened next was horrifying. So everybody was so super excited; the majority of our customer base bought the product, and then it was about four days later—once most of them had been onboarded because we overstaffed so we could onboard everybody as quickly as possible—and suddenly I started reading comments in our Facebook group, and basically they were like, "Wow," I remember some of the comments saying like, "I thought Alex and Lea were awesome, but this is just so not a reflection of who I thought they were. Wow, I've really trusted this company, but I feel like that was a waste of my money." And I remember reading these comments and just feeling, honestly, sick to my stomach because the one thing that I value more than anything is that people get what they paid for, and that people, you know, feel good working with our company and feel like we're the best option out there. And so I was like, "What the heck do I do? Because I feel terrible; they're right." Like what happened was that we released an MVP product without really educating anyone on it being an MVP, and it wasn't actually doing what we said it was going to do. The software was supposed to work leads; what this version of it was doing is it was missing like 30% of the leads due to an error with an integration. So it's like 30% of your lead flow isn't getting worked, and we promised that 100% would—that's a big miss—and people just paid $2,000 and had this entire webinar where they hyped it up. I was like, "Holy crap, I don't know what to do." The only thing that I know is that in my entire life, what's always worked for me is just being completely honest and transparent. My default is always to go there, and at this point in time, I didn't have a ton of frameworks around how to handle customers and how to manage them; I just was kind of doing what felt right to me. What I did was I got on, and I went live in the Facebook group and just told—told them the truth. "I thought that this worked; we had tested it a million times; apparently it doesn't work at this scale; that is my fault; I should not have done this. If you are unhappy, please just let me know right now; I will give you a full refund; I will, when we release the next one, give you that for free." And you know, I basically just apologized my ass off and then told them what I was going to do for them to make it up for them. And I was incredibly upset, and I think that was evident. And what I saw, which was very surprising to me because I was expecting to get slaughtered in the comments, was that everybody was like, "Lea, it's okay; we trust you still; thank you so much for taking ownership; wow, thank you for taking accountability; thank you for apologizing; like, thanks for listening to us." And I was like, "Wow." I remember there were two people that are incredibly angry, trying to start almost revolts in the group, and they were like, "This video just completely turned me around; like, I—I don't actually hate you guys; you guys are awesome; thank you so much for being so vulnerable." And I think it was in that moment that I realized what it really looks like to provide good customer service, which is really approaching the customer like you have a relationship with them rather than them just being a transaction. And I think that starts with the conversations you're having with them, which leads me to my first principle.

Because after that moment, what I realized was that I needed to systemize how we do this at scale because this is going to continue to happen. It's not just me; my team's going to mess—mess up; we're going to have things that go wrong; we're going to have software pieces that break. Like this is not going to just be a one-stop shop where like this is the only time we ever anything up. And so I started to form my frameworks around, you know, "How do you take an angry customer and turn them into a raving fan?" Because I think there's a real opportunity there, and that starts with the first framework, which is making them feel heard. All complaints stem from one thing; all upsetness stems from one thing, which is: they thought one thing was going to happen, and instead something else happened, or nothing happened. And by the time they tell you about it, they're already pissed off enough to actually be motivated to reach out to you. And so when you get a customer that's upset, you have to understand what's gone on in the background by the time they've even come to you; like they've been brewing before they reach out to you; they're already pissed off. And so what I realized is like, just like sometimes if you piss your spouse off or you piss a friend off, if you just immediately go into problem-solving mode, do they really feel good about that? What I've come to realize, especially with customers, and I think just people in general, is that before they want resolution, they want to feel heard, and they want to know that you agree with them. So what you want to do to get someone into a state of mind where they will agree with the resolution you propose is you first need to agree with them. And so the way I look at it is like: we have to get on the same side of the table. If a customer is telling me all these things that have happened and that are wrong, the first thing I need to do is make them feel—feel heard and not oppose anything that they say to me. I need to accept their reality rather than reject it. Now a lot of people say, "Okay, well, the customer can't always be right." No, but is that a useful thought? If my team thinks, "Oh yeah, the customers can be wrong all the time," are they going to get better? But if my team thinks every single complaint is within their control to make sure that the customers never upset again, they're probably going to be a way better team. And so the question is not, "Is it true?" It's, "Is it useful?" In my opinion, it is useful to think that the customer is always right because that is going to be the way that we learn. And so like I said, if you want to take people who are upset and turn them into raving fans, it starts with making them feel heard and making it feel like a relationship and not a transaction. I'll give you a couple of examples. So not that long ago, I was staying at a very nice hotel, which you would probably know the name of the chain of hotels that they had, and I was having a great experience. I've always loved staying at their hotels; like everything is—their customer service is top; they're known for their customer service. And even they made a grave mistake. In the morning, I had a do not disturb sign on, and I went to the gym, and Alex was still there, and he was sleeping, and someone knocked on the door. Alex didn't wake up; this is a do not disturb sign on. And so that person knocked again, and then they decided to just come in. And so they came in; they used their key card to come in, and then they used their key card and then went into the master bedroom when the lights were off, and there was a sound machine on; there's clearly somebody in the bed, and Alex was there, naked in the bed, and some dude turns on the light and says, "Do you want housekeeping?" In that moment, when I got that call from Alex, I have never heard him so pissed off. He's like, "How invasive to come into my—what if it had been his wife, naked in bed? Right? How would you feel if a guy walked into your hotel room; you're naked in bed; you're like, 'What the hell's happening?'" I called the manager, who I had a relationship with, and I was like, "Dude, I—I'm really upset right now; like that is just not appropriate; like what if I had gotten out of the shower? What if it was me? What if we were there together? Like there's so many things that could go wrong here." And he felt so awful; the first thing he did was he was like, "You are right; this is terrible; I'm so sorry, Lea." So, you know, what did he do to make me feel heard? Not only did he listen to me on the phone; he was incredibly agreeable, but then he wrote me a letter, and he sent it with a fruit basket and chocolate, and then came by later that day in person to apologize again—for the third time—in person, and then comped the entire day, the entire night, arranged a whole dinner for us, and then came and had the guy come and apologize personally to Alex. And so what he did was he made me feel valid in the fact that I was upset. He didn't try to defend it; he didn't try to say, "Oh, this is why it happened." He didn't waste his breath on that; he just made me feel like it was okay to be upset. A lot of companies, I think, actually don't do that very well. I think that because this company—their cornerstone was customer service; he knew how to handle a situation like that. But most of my experiences, I'm guessing with a lot of yours, have actually been the opposite. So, for example, I am a huge DoorDash user, and like I will always use DoorDash. There was a day when I had a DoorDash driver; they called me; I was giving them directions; the guy told me on the phone basically like, "You're an idiot; I don't—what you're saying doesn't make any sense; I'm at this building." And I was like, "Yes, that is not my building; the address is this, which is two streets over." And the guy called me an idiot and hung up, and then I saw that the car started driving away with my food. It was like 20 minutes, and it clearly—he just said like, "It—I'm going to steal your food and get out of here." I messaged customer service, and I was like, "Wow, like this is a terrible experience; like I—I don't think this person should be a driver for you," all these things. And rather than console me on it, the first question they asked was, "Well, did you respond when they called you right away? Did you say something to initiate the conversation and make him mad?" And I lost my mind; I was like, "Are you kidding me? I just got cussed out by your driver, and he stole my food and left, and you're going to sit here and defend yourself?" And so if you look at those two interactions, in one situation I had somebody that was accepting my reality; in the other situation, I had someone who's defending their own reality and making me feel like mine was not valid.

So here's an easy framework that you can use the next time that you have an upset customer that you need to make sure feels heard, and this one is easy because the framework is called HEAR. So H, what does H stand for? Hear the customer out. Okay? Let them talk; let them vent; shut the heck up; do not talk; literally nod; "Yes; oh my gosh; crazy; so bad;" just affirm what they're saying; hear them out. A lot of the times you're going to want to word vomit back to the customer, but the first thing you need to do—let them do—is just get it out. Yes. Be their punching bag; that's what you need to do in order to move past this phase. Now the second thing you do is you empathize with them. So you empathize with them and acknowledge how awful the experience was; you agree with their thoughts and their feelings rather than defending them because until the two of you are on the same side of the table, you have zero influence over the customer; you're already right now in the doghouse. And so if you want to even have a chance of making it right, you need to get on the same side of the table, and the way that you do that is by agreeing with them, acknowledging them. And now once you've made them feel heard, you've empathized with them, then you want to go into apologizing. Apologizing on its own, before you hear them out, before you empathize, and without taking action is irrelevant; it does not matter. But people do want to hear an apology. Once you've heard them out, you've empathized with them about how horrible the experience was; they do want to hear you say, "I'm sorry." Does it make it right? No. But saying you're sorry before you go into solving mode and before you propose a resolution is important because traditionally people just like to hear it, and apologize specifically for what you did. And so a lot of the times you just say, "I'm so sorry," people like, "Okay, well, that's very generic," but say like, "I'm so sorry for taking up your time and inconveniencing you when you're a busy person; you have your own life to go on. I'm so sorry for the fact that you thought that you could rely on us, and you pay us to be reliable, and we weren't there when you needed us. I'm so sorry that you're paying top dollar for this amazing experience, and we were not able to uphold our promise." Just take complete ownership with the apology and make sure it's specific in terms of what you actually did. Once you've gone through those three steps, the last thing you do is you go into resolving the issue, and the key here is that especially in a smaller business where you have more of a relationship with a customer, you've got less customers; you're not some Fortune 500; you have a huge opportunity here to work with the customer on the resolution. And so a lot of the times that you can do to resolve is you propose your V1 of that resolution, and then you ask the customer, "What else could I do to resolve this issue for you?" You make it more of a collaboration and ensure that they actually like the resolution you're proposing rather than just shoving something down their throat that they don't like. If you look at Uber Eats, for example, anytime that they mess up something, you know what they do for me? They ask me which option I would prefer as a resolution. If somebody doesn't deliver my food, "Would you like credits to Uber Eats? Would you like a full refund on your account? Or would you like me to reorder your food for you? Which one appeals to you?" And so you want to be as specific as possible with the resolution because different people want different things. It might be that I'm like, "Listen, I just want my time back, and that's what pissed me off," versus somebody else is like, "No, I want the money back because I'm pissed that I just lost the money on the food," and somebody else is like, "I'm just hungry, so I just want you to bring the food again." Rather than assume that you know what that person wants to resolve the issue, present them with options and ask for their opinion.

Now the second framework that I have for essentially reducing churn, increasing lifetime value, and turning angry customers into raving fans is that there can only be one person in the angry boat. They say that misery loves company, and when customers are pissed off, they also love company, and you to be pissed off. A good example of this is—and if you haven't done this, try it—when you give—try it the next time you get a fight with your spouse is: if you've ever messed something up, and your spouse has had to pay for it, what I have noticed is that the more mad you get, what you see is that they actually tend to deescalate so that they can actually regulate you. So if your spouse comes in, they're like, "Oh my God, I can't believe you forgot that we had dinner with so-and-so, and you—you planned this instead," like now they're so pissed off at me, and I have to tell him that you—that we messed up the reservation. I'm not going to throw you under the bus because you did this, but I look like such a chump compared to what you just did. And you're like, "Oh my God, I'm such an idiot; I hate myself; I can't believe that I—I'm a freaking terrible wife; I can't believe that I did this to you." And all of a sudden you see the husband, he's like, "Oh, babe, no, you're not a terrible wife; geez, no, like I just—I'm frustrated because I have to go to him and tell him that we can't have plans with him, and he's going to think I'm not a reliable friend." And I'm over here, and I'm like, "Yeah, but I—I'm just so mad at myself; it's my fault; I'm so sorry; like this is not okay; it's not acceptable; and I—there's nothing I can say." And what you'll see is that anytime you have somebody who's angry, the way to deescalate it is to try and get more of it. And so it's actually ironic process theory, which is: if you try to calm somebody down who's angry, they get more angry; but if you try to rile somebody up who's angry, they will deescalate. And so the same goes for customers; if they are in the angry boat, you just jump in with them. So to give you an example of how I did this in my last company, so in Gym Launch, there was a period of time when ad costs continued to go up, and basically what we would do is we would figure out ways to generate leads for our customers, and we were always paying—we would spend $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a month on testing ads to make sure that we could give our customers the best ads that were the lowest cost. And what happened is that we did what we call the release of a bunch of ads, and there was a couple of customers, and the ads just did not perform for them; there were two specifically, and I knew why the ads weren't performing, which is because they were in terrible markets; they had like less than 50,000 people in their town; I just knew that traditionally our ads didn't perform as well there, and it just always irked me, but it was the case. We did this release, and all these people are posting all these amazing wins, and these two customers messaged me in a group on Facebook, and they were like, "This is—these ads don't work for me; why am I even paying you the money?" And I was like, "Oh, man," and this is like a hot-headed guy from New Jersey that's coming at me who's like probably 6'2", you know, 250 lbs; he's a big dude. And I was like, "I'm gonna get on the phone with him." So I got on a call with him, and I was like, "Dude, this is—we are—the fact that we release all of this and you're paying us and you're getting less than what everybody else is getting—this is ridiculous; honestly, I like—I'm just gonna say it right here: if you want to go, I'm happy to give you all your money back because like this is absurd." And he was like, "Whoa, no, I—I actually—I'm so sorry; I don't want to get my money back; I don't want to leave; I just—I just actually want to figure out is there a solution." And so what I realized in that moment was that the more extreme that I got with how much I was willing to do and how angry I was and how unfair and unjust it was, the more that he was like, "No, no, no," he starts defending why we're good, and he actually had to even me out by—I'm talking about how terrible we are, and he went in and was just like, "No, no, you guys are actually good; like I didn't mean it; I don't—I don't not want to be here." And so what it taught me is just: you have to get in the angry boat with them, and if anything, you've got to get angrier.

Now an instance where this goes the opposite way—something that I experienced—it was about two years ago, and I was working with a vendor, and that vendor was supposed to help facilitate a large event that we were having; they were in charge of a lot of the, you know, AV for the event. What happened is that while the event was occurring, everything started going wrong, and everything else around the event that I had control over was going right. And so then all of a sudden I'm looking at the vendor—vendor's there at the event—I'm like, "What's going on? Why is this not happening?" They're like, "Oh, no, no, no; everything's fine; this is not on us; this must be on you." And I was like, "How? I'm not in charge of the AV; what does that have to do with anything? Like I'm in charge of making sure people show up here, and then what we do at the event." The entire time, every little thing kept happening; I would bring it to them, and they rejected my reality. There was even a point where people in the audience couldn't hear what we were saying, and I let them know, and they said, "That's not—

Possible? We have speakers over there. Well, we had somebody walk over and go check the speakers; they didn't work. What happened is that they basically burned the bridge. I never wanted to talk to them again, and I genuinely felt like they were—you look at that—it's like all they had to do, they didn't have to completely fix the situation; they didn't even need to refund me all my money. They just need to admit that they were wrong. When we reject that we did something wrong, we're essentially lying to somebody.

Another example of this is that I went to this very fancy dinner, and it's this place in Vegas that everyone's like, "Oh, it's one of the most upscale places, very expensive, all this stuff." I get there; it's like $50 for a freaking pitcher of water, and I was like, "This is crazy," very, you know, very fancy. What happened was we were at the table, and then a table sat down next to us, and they had three babies. I was like, "That's odd," because in Vegas a lot of people don't have babies anyways, but in a very upscale restaurant, it's just very rare that you see children. Often times, they don't even allow children. And so they sat at this table right next to us, and within about 60 seconds, I was like, "Don't do it." The baby just starts wailing, and then the next baby starts wailing, and then all of a sudden there's three babies wailing, and we're at this business dinner. We've invited these people; we've been looking for this amazing intimate experience, and I was like, "This is tough." My waiter comes over; he's just whispering to us because he knows he can't—that he can't—we can't hear him because the baby's crying. And I was like, "What is happening here?" I pull him aside, and I like, "Hey," I'm like, "You're literally having to come and whisper to me because these babies are so loud. Like, can we please be moved?" He was like, "Oh, it's not that loud," and I was like, "Homeboy, you were not whispering to me five minutes ago before these babies got here. Like, they're wailing, like…" And so I, I look over, and I see there was another table that had just gotten seated on the other side of them, and they were gone. I was like, "What's going on?" I look over; they were leaving the restaurant. I was like, "Clearly, this is not just me." And so I went to the manager, and I was like, "Listen, I understand if you're going to let them be here, fine, can you please put me at a different table?" The manager's like, "I'm going to go check." He walks away. It's like, "It's not that bad, you know, it's so loud in here anyways, it's like really hard to tell." And I, in that moment, was like, "I am about to pay $2,000 for a freaking dinner, and you won't even move me when you have 16 tables available over there." And you know what happened is I was angry enough that I left. I left a review on Yelp of how poor of an experience it was for the price I was paying, and I have never gone back there again.

What happens is if you reject somebody's reality and you reject what occurred and you lie by not agreeing with them, then essentially you make them hate you. And so what happens if you don't get in the angry boat with somebody is they just continue to escalate, and then they leave bad reviews, and then they tell four to six people about their experience with you, and then they never come back. And so it's all in how you respond; it's not about what happened, it's how you respond to what happened. Now, hearing somebody out and getting in the angry boat with them, those are the first two things you've got to do. But when it comes to the resolution, that is where a lot of people go wrong, and that brings me to our third framework, which is how do you take a negative, like a negative customer, and turn them into a promoter customer? How do you take someone who's angry and turn them into a raving fan with the resolution you propose? See, often times what people do, they fix the problem enough to bring somebody from a negative to a neutral, but they don't bring them over the edge. In a lot of instances in business, overcompensating for a problem is not good; you over fix. The only place where this is appropriate is when it comes to a customer, and when you mess up. Often times, like I said, it stems from they didn't get something they expected. And so a lot of people think, "Well, great, then I will apologize and give them what they expected." That is not enough. What you've done is you take someone that was a negative, you turn them into a neutral; they're very easily tipped back over into a negative with anything that could happen next, and they're definitely not a promoter or going to be someone who stays for a long time. In fact, what's really interesting, on average, it takes 12 positive experiences to overcome one bad one. Now, on the other hand, customers who don't get their problem resolved tell, on average, between four to six people. I don't know about you guys, but like that waiter that let the babies crying, I probably told 10 or 15 people. That time when DoorDash like literally didn't care that someone stole my food, I probably told 10. Now I've told thousands of—I—whoever watches this video knows now. And so to that degree, we want to make sure that when we solve the problem, we have the opportunity, when we solve the issue, to have them spread good word of mouth.

You know, an example of this is there was a gym that I went to. Basically, the person that was there running the gym, I walked into the gym, and all of a sudden on the loudspeakers it starts playing, saying it's like music is playing, and then what starts playing is like, "Clean your equipment; you will be kicked out if you don't clean your equipment and put the weights back." And I was like, "Wow, that's pretty aggressive, but okay, it's my first time in the gym; I guess it's pretty hardcore about being clean. It is what it is." I clean up after myself anyways, and so I'm walking around, and I've got my gym bag with me, and I sat down to do squats. I'm in the middle doing squats, and, and I—midet—somebody comes up to me, and it was apparently the owner of the gym, and she's like, "No, no bags are allowed here; you got to take your bag off the floor and put it in the locker." And I'm like huffing and puffing, I've got like 200 lb on my back, and I'm like, "What the actual hell is going on?" In that moment, she was so rude, and it was such a bad experience that I literally, I was like, "I'm sorry, I'm new; it's my first day," and she was like, "Well, you got to read the rules." You know what I did? I left and probably told every single person I knew that lives in the area never to go to that gym. And so the power of like when you really disregard a customer's feelings, like that's what happens is they go and they tell people about it because they're pissed you didn't hear them out, so they need to go find people who will. And so the question is, when you do mess up, how do you take somebody from a negative to a—rand—promoter to a raving fan? And basically, the framework goes like this: Righting the wrong is not enough, but that is the first step. So, for example, very recently made a huge mistake with my business, which is essentially we had dates for different workshops we were hosting, and some of the dates were tentatively put in our CRM system, and then two months ahead of time we said, "Actually, we've switched the dates, so we've got to eliminate those ones from the system." Well, what turns out is that apparently a handful of people were actually offered those dates. And so what happened is that, you know, about—oh, I want to say—a week ago, people ended up flying in for an event that was not occurring. And so you can imagine in that moment I was like, "I hate myself," and I panicked. But you know, myself and our head of customer success knew what we needed to do, which is we cannot just write this wrong; we have to overcorrect. And so the first thing was like, obviously, refund them for the workshop. No, yes, refund them; that's easy. Next thing, they've incurred costs of travel; yes, refund their costs of travel. The next thing, what did they come here for? They came here for a workshop. Why did they attend the workshop? Because they're probably fans of Alex and Ila, and they probably watch our content, and they wanted to interact with us; they wanted to learn from us. How do we not just write the wrong, but how do we give them more than that? What if we arranged a private dinner for them, right, where they get to be with me, Alex, and part of our team? And what if we let them use our headquarters that day and use our gym and get a tour from our team and then get to meet with our subject matter experts and consult with them throughout the day? And so what ended up happening from that experience, and what I—what I knew would happen because I've done this before—is that those people that were upset when this happened—rightfully so; it was a huge—is that those same people posted about how great of an experience they had because we made a mistake and we righted the wrong and how it was a representation of our brand and of our values. And so what happened is that these people made posts, and they didn't tell four to six people about how bad of an experience it was; they made posts about how great it was, of how we fixed the mistake. And so what you have to do is be able to understand how you can go so far above and beyond and overwhelm people with positive experiences that it makes them forget the bad one. In fact, one person at the dinner that we had with them said, "Whoever made this mistake, tell them thank you."

Another example of this, of how you can write a wrong, is if you're in the hotel industry, for example. You get into your room, and the room that night you smell smoke, and what you realize is that, you know, it's 10 p.m., your neighbor has started smoking, and it's seeping into your room, and they're kind of loud, and the music's playing, and so you don't get good sleep that night. Basically, basically, in the morning you're like, "This is gross; my room smells like cigarette smoke, and I didn't get much sleep because they were playing music all night." And so you go to the front desk, and you tell them, "Man, this really sucks, like, you know, you put me next to this guy who's smoking; it's a non-smoking floor; nobody stopped him, and then the music played." And so how do you write that wrong? What a lot of hotels would do—hotels that have mediocre customer service—is they would say, "Let's just comp you for the night." What would a great hotel do? And I actually happen to know that this is protocol for a hotel that is one of the best in customer service: They don't just comp you for the night; they also give you another night that's free. Right? So they not just comp you for the night that sucked; they're going to comp you for the next night. Not just going to comp you for the next night; they're going to give you a different room, and they're going to upgrade your room. And they're not even just going to do that, but they know you're tired because you were up all night; they're going to send you coffee and energy drinks because they're like, "We know that you're not feeling great," and then they're going to have flowers delivered to your room because they know that the last room smelled so bad. That is what going above and beyond looks like, and that in itself, you know what happens most of the time when it happens to a customer? They actually take pictures of the flowers and of the coffee and are like, like, "Wow, I can't believe they did this for me," because it's so far out of the norm to get good customer service. The standard and the bar is actually pretty low.

To break this down for you, from my personal example through my mess up that I made, is if I wanted to just take a negative and turn them into a neutral, I would refund the person and offer them another date to attend a workshop. If I wanted to take a negative and turn them into a positive, I would refund them, offer them another date, pay for their travel and their hotel expenses incurred. Right, that would probably turn them into a positive; they're like, "Okay, you know, I don't hate these guys." But if I want to take a negative and turn them into a promoter, that's what I did: I refunded them, I offered them another date, I paid for the hotel, I paid for their travel, I then get my team to meet with them throughout the day, let them use our gym, let them work out of the headquarters, and then take them to dinner that night in an intimate experience. And that is what turns a negative into a promoter. And so notice, often times to take a negative and turn them into a neutral, it's one thing you do; to take a negative and positive, it's two to three things you do; take a negative into—turn—a promoter, it's five to seven things you do. The number of positive actions that you take after you've messed up will equate to if you have somebody who's going to talk about you, somebody who's going to keep buying from you, but mediocre, or somebody who's going to be a raving fan. And now the last framework that I want to share with you guys to take people who are angry customers and turn them into raving fans is that you want frameworks to use this for improvement; is that you want to use these opportunities to improve your business. Unhappy customers are truly an invaluable resource for figuring out how to improve your business. If you want to improve your business, interact with your customers more. If you want to really improve your business, figure out what people don't like about it. If you really think about it, each complaint that you get is basically like having like an undercover person doing secret shopping of your business; like that's the way that I look at it. It's like companies pay millions of dollars to have quality assurance and secret shoppers; they can know what's going on in their locations and their stores, etc. It's like you're getting that for free by customers that are complaining. Is that where there's smoke, there's usually fire? Most of the time when you're experiencing issues from customers and you're getting complaints, it's not just one. In fact, what's crazy is that for every one customer that complains, there are 26 unhappy customers that are not speaking up. Crazy, I know, right? It's just that most people don't like confrontation; they feel bad; they don't want to make you feel bad, and they just leave in silence. They'd rather just quietly quit, just like people do in the workforce. And so by attending to each complaint that you get, you can keep small problems small. Because what happens when you have a big problem? It's not that it didn't exist; it's not that it wasn't once a small problem; it's that it was a small problem once unattended to. So, for example, there's a company that we were looking at, and we were doing diligence on, and that company essentially had um a coaching model similar to Gym Launch but for a different space. And one thing that they mentioned was that they had a competitor that had come in; that competitor had introduced some new ways of doing things that were slightly better than what they were doing, and they started to get complaints about it, like, "Hey, we're paying you, but you're not giving us the best, newest stuff," right? And so, you know, I gave them the advice of like, "You probably want to be looking at what that is and staying on the cutting edge and taking the feedback and implementing it and making sure you're always innovating your product." Well, that company we didn't end up investing in, but we wanted to say, "You know what, let's check up on you three to six months later; see how you're doing." And when we checked up on them, they had literally cut their revenue in half. The reason they cut their revenue in half is because they actually ended up having a customer revolt. So what happened was that there were so many upset customers, and there was no resolution to their upsetness that they literally had their customers created a Facebook group basically to take them down, is what they said. They started like spreading campaigns, posting on social media, and it wasn't because they did something objectively wrong or harmful; it's because they neglected them; they didn't acknowledge reality; they didn't interact with the clients or ask them about it; they didn't even acknowledge the fact that it was occurring. Instead, they just continued to be mediocre, right? And then they didn't work with the clients to integrate any of the new things in. And so what it said to the clients was, "You won't make things better for us; we give you money; you don't get any better; we want to get better; therefore, you have to get better, and you're not doing it." And so they felt resentful; they had this revolt, and then about half their customer base completely left and went to this other company. And so that's an example of not keeping a small problem small. Like, very often in business, you're going to find—you're going to get complaints, and they're going to compare you to other products or services—just take those and use those as feedback so you can make yours better. But a lot of times what happens is maybe it's overwhelming; maybe it sounds like too much work; maybe—maybe you're embarrassed; maybe you feel like agreeing with somebody and acknowledging what they're saying means that you would be making your company seem worse than the other company, but that's not the reality. And the thing is is that people are smarter than you think, and they can figure things out, and they also can read between the lines. And so in order to keep small problems small, here's a few things that you could do. So in one of our portfolio companies, um, essentially what we're doing right now is we're transitioning from a service company to a SaaS company. And so what we've done is because we want to prevent what happened with my company, Allen, and getting terrible feedback, is we've put together focus groups. We've basically selected a variety of customers that are all different types of customers that would be giving us different types of feedback. We've said, "If we give you a discount, would you be willing to meet with us on a bi-weekly basis so that we can get your feedback about the product?" And what we would love if you could do is also get feedback from other people and tell us kind of like what's word on the street about the product. What they have to do to get that discount is basically to fill out every two weeks a survey, and then we review the survey data in that bi-weekly meeting. And then what we use that for is to inform us of the roadmap for the product. People like, "What do I build next? What are your customers looking for? Where are the problems?" And often times it's like solving the constraint is going to move the business forward more than trying to add some new fancy thing. I can tell you actually there was a company, and they had a software, and that software was blowing up; like they went from like zero to 100 million in a very short amount of time, and they had huge advocates of their brand and huge advocates of their software, and I was actually a huge advocate. And what happened was that about 18 months into using the software, it started to get really buggy, and it got so buggy to the point that I would myself or my team would do hours of work—work and development—and it would just completely wipe it out; it was so upsetting. And so I remember they were collecting feedback, and they asked us because we were like super users, and I said, I was like, "Dude, I don't want anything new; I just want you to fix the bugs. It's literally like I can't run my business off of this." And what started to—I would say—provoke my anger was that one, nobody acknowledged this; two, they continue to roll out new features despite the other ones being so buggy. So I didn't feel heard; I didn't feel like they cared about my feedback. I obviously was like, "Okay, clearly they have no idea what's going on." And what ended up happening was not good. So that company had been—for sure—they were the market leader in their area, and eventually what ended up happening was there was this revolt where not only did all the customers start leaving because they were like, "Nobody's listening to us; nobody hears what's going wrong," and so they picked the next best alternative, but all their employees started leaving too because they're like, "Does anybody actually care about the customers? Do we really care what people think, or we just a giant marketing and sales machine?" And honestly, I left too. I haven't used the product; it's been about four or five years now. And the reason for that was I didn't feel heard; I didn't feel hurt; I didn't feel like I got any acknowledgement of the shitty experience of how much money I had spent on the product, how I'd hired people specifically to work on the product, and then the product would just wipe out all my work, right? And then the last thing is there was no resolution to anything, right? It's like I made them completely aware; I literally spoke to upper management myself, and they did nothing—nothing—about it. In fact, they continued to go in the opposite direction, just add new things on and just continue to let the bugs fester. And so what ended up happening for that company was they were probably on track to be worth a couple of billion, and I would honestly be shocked now if they sold for a couple hundred million because at this point, no customer loyalty, really bad retention, and people just fled to better options. And so if you boil all of this down, when it comes to like how do we take angry customers and turn them into raving fans, I would end it with this: Remembering this, the more that you talk to your customers, the more you will improve your product or service, period. There's no way around that. And most companies, the reason that angry customers stay angry is because—you can cut it and slice it any way you want—they avoid talking to them; they're avoiding confrontation; they're avoiding having to take accountability; and they're avoiding the hard things they need to do to grow their business. And so by doing these four frameworks, you are immersing yourself into it, and you are leaning into the problem, which will fix it, rather than avoiding the problem, which will just continue to let it grow.