- Speaker #0
I just want to point that out, that customer service is not always fixing problems. It can also be surprising and delighting. You're watching Marketing Misfits, Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Norm Farrar, the misfit, the misfit from the great white north. Is that you?
- Speaker #1
Yep, I am the misfit, and I guess you're the cowboy misfit.
- Speaker #0
I'm the cowboy misfit, and you're the great white. Is it cold up in Canada already?
- Speaker #1
It is. Like right now, since I visited you, it's got down to 11 degrees Celsius during the day, which is crazy. So, yeah, it's not good cigar weather.
- Speaker #0
50-something.
- Speaker #1
I think that's 40, mid-40s. I think that's it.
- Speaker #0
You should double it and add 32 as the poor man's math. It's not accurate, but it gets you close. So 11 times 2 plus 32 is 54. So it's somewhere in the low 50s for us real people that still use proper Fahrenheit.
- Speaker #1
I'm fact-checking, just like the debate. Just a second.
- Speaker #0
I guess we're the only country in the world that still does that. But no, UK, they use Celsius for their... temperature but they use miles still instead of kilometers for their their roads but you know we still have the old imperial system yeah i think you're the last left you're the misfit you know that's right we tried to change it i remember a couple times it's gone up for a vote or something i remember when i was a kid and it happened not too long ago and then everybody just boasted down like no that's too complicated we we don't want to we don't want to be like them uh europeans you know what's weird and this comes back to marketing right you
- Speaker #1
because I don't think they marketed this properly. So I grew up back in the 70s in school. I was in elementary school, and they changed all this. And to this day, I have no frigging idea when they start talking about a kilogram. I kind of know it's two points, some odd pounds. Or if they're talking about your height. How many centimeters am I? How the hell am I? And, you know, everybody, like my kids, oh, yeah, it's only X, Y, Z centimeters. You're so much weight. My doctor says I weigh so much. I go, what's that? Like in real terms. I still haven't caught on, but, you know, maybe I'm a little dense.
- Speaker #0
Well, you know, yeah, sometimes I can convert it, but still it makes me stop and think, like, how many milliliters is an ounce? I think it's 100, actually.
- Speaker #1
I have no idea.
- Speaker #0
I just know that from dieting, because it's like you can have 3.3 ounces. of meat i'm like well how many millimeters is that it's like 300 milliliters i or whatever it is i'm like all right but you know the one that still gets me is the british still use stones oh you're six you're six stones and seven i'm like what the heck is six stones and seven what is that yeah or you're a fortnight you're it's a fortnight away yeah or or something like that i'm like what is a fortnight is 14 days i know that now that's too easy but 20 20 pounds or something right i think So,
- Speaker #1
okay, here's something. The stones get me too, right? All sorts of stones get me. But that stone thing throws confusion my way. But here's one that I learned recently is a writing. Do you know why there are certain lengths to writing? Like when you have an electoral, like we're having an election here in Canada shortly, you guys in the States, but you have writings. Well, back in the day. It was how far your horse could travel in a day. So that was a riding.
- Speaker #0
I haven't heard of ridings. I mean, I know when I was a kid, we wouldn't say it's 100 miles away. We'd say it's three beers or something like that. Where are we going? How far are we going to go to see these hot girls at this club? Oh, it's three beers away. We used to do that. So how many beers can you drink? How long does it take to drink three beers or whatever it may be? So sometimes we wanted those trips that were 10 beers. We're like, ah, let's go on a 10-beer trip. And then you're stopping about every hour to pee too.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, and if it was nowadays, it would be like every 10 minutes.
- Speaker #0
Oh, yeah, when you get older. Yeah, well, for you, I mean, I don't have that issue yet. I'm not getting up in the middle of the night. I was like, uh. Some people I know have to get up a few times in the night. You stayed with me. I kept hearing the floor creaking. I was like, what the heck? It's like 3 in the morning. I was like, we just went to bed. Like at 1.30, we smoked a cigar and we took a bed. I hear the floor creaking. And then around 5, 5.30, I hear one of the beeps on the little alarm things, the smoke detectors or something go off, something pass by. I was like, that ain't a cricket. That's not a grasshopper or a cricket. That's something big that caught that. That's not Zoe walking underneath it. So I'm like,
- Speaker #1
it's one big cricket.
- Speaker #0
How many times in the night? I don't know. I forget some of them. I think I sleepwalked some of them.
- Speaker #1
I can't count. Yeah, I can't count on one hand. Oh, my gosh.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, that's the joys of growing old.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, I'm there. Done it, did it, bought the T-shirt. Like I told you, I just had my birthday last week, and, you know, I got it.
- Speaker #0
Happy birthday, happy belated. I think what I tell you, see, I was talking about these things. I didn't tell you happy birthday, did I? I told you happy third repetition of your 21st birthday or something like that.
- Speaker #1
That's right.
- Speaker #0
I was trying to put it in context of what we're talking about today, not even knowing what we're going to talk about today.
- Speaker #1
See, even that I had to convert. But, you know, I just put out a message saying, hey, thanks for, you know, the birthday wishes. I wish the fire trucks would leave, but I guess they have to wait till I blow up my candles now. Funny.
- Speaker #0
And you had the little AI picture too. I guess Kelsey or something made a little AI picture of you blowing up.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
You're like, yeah, there's a lot more. It takes longer now to blow these things out.
- Speaker #1
Got to watch my beard, you know.
- Speaker #0
That was funny. Should have done a little gif where your beard caught on fire.
- Speaker #1
Hey, I don't have it. I did catch on fire once. Remember that?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Yeah.
- Speaker #1
I looked like Yosemite Sam for, you know, a year.
- Speaker #0
Well, I hear you just recently had a really cool or interesting experience. You know, you're down here in Austin smoking cigars, and this is about a year, no, it was last December, I think, so I hear it, though, and you're like, Kevin, you know, I was supplying you some cigars, so you started feeling a little guilty smoking these $100 Year of the Dragons, and you're like, this is really cool. I get to come to Kevin's house, get to stay here. I've got Coke Zeros through the, you know, they never run out. I got my gummies and got these really good cigars, but I don't want to feel like a little mooch. so I better get him a little present. So you bought this really kick-ass freaking case for yourself. It came, and you're like, this is really cool. So you decided to surprise me, and you bought one for me. It's like a $300 or $400, I don't know what it costs, but $300, $400 case. It kind of looks like a gun case, but it's for cigars, and it's got a little lock on it. And you bought this thing and gave me one, and then you had yours, and so now we carry that around when we go to events. And we have a little rule when we go to events. So we've talked about this before that smoking cigars at an event.
- Speaker #1
Ex ne, people are going to know what we are doing.
- Speaker #0
There's two different cases. And there's one case that's for certain things and another case that's for other things. So we had these cases and we're carrying around and something happened to yours. It got kind of, I don't know, jingled, jangled around in your carry on or something. kind of messed up, scratched up and damaged. And I know you've talked about this a few times, I'll let you tell the story, but what happened next was you're pretty impressed with.
- Speaker #1
Now, a quick word from our sponsor, LaVonta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it.
- Speaker #0
That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet LaVonta. Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right. It's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers and media buyers all in Levante's marketplace, which is home to over 5000 different creators that you get to choose from.
- Speaker #1
So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.lavanta.io slash misfits. That's get.lavanta, L-E-V-A-N-T-A dot I-O slash misfits. And book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Lavanta's gold plan today. That's get.lavanta.io slash misfits. So over... a couple of weeks like we were i was traveling back and forth to your place um probably twice that month and i noticed that the there was some paint that was chipping and all of a sudden you you could just take your finger and the paint would come right off and so uh this is a like you mentioned it's a very expensive cigar case it's a biometric cigar case and uh i love it So it's, it protects your expensive cigars. It's kind of cool to just people, you know, we, whenever we go anywhere, people know that we're going to have a cigar night or nights. And so this is just a case that we use. And anyways, it just started looking like crap. So I called the manufacturer, I had to go through Amazon. So I went through Amazon and the manufacturer got right back to me like within a day. and they apologized they wanted to see if i could send a picture i did um within 24 hours they said uh we got something like i didn't have to prove anything they just said look at if you're not satisfied uh we'll ship it out i told them that i was going someplace uh and it was going to your place right so i had to ship the the new cigar humidor over it's a travel humidor over to your place And I said, look, I'm not going to, they asked me to send the other one back. And I said, yes, but it might be like two weeks, a month later. They said, no problem. We just want to take care of this problem for you. So sent it out. You got it. No questions asked. The last time I was there, I picked it up and it was perfect. And they followed up and they just said, you know, just hope you got this. They gave me their phone number and their email just to make sure if there was any issues whatsoever. So I was blown away because it seems nowadays, and we've talked about this before, Kevin, but a customer service goes down the drain. And those companies that can provide exceptional customer service, I'm going to give all I can, all my support to. And this company deserves a shout out. I mean, they're called LifePods. And the company's called, I think it's Volt, but they're LifePod. And they do have... gun cases they do have the cigar cases they could be used for a lot of different things and customized but hopefully i can show a picture of it maybe when this gets edited but yeah customer service has just gone down the tube and the thing is we're sitting on our butts accepting it you know we're accepting just crap customer service nowadays? Have you experienced this?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. I mean, customer service is something that a lot of people, they don't like the expense. I see this on, we're in the Amazon world for day jobs a lot of times. And we see people like, oh, this customer just complained that XYZ was broken. What do I do? Do I make them send it back? Do I make them send me pictures and prove it? I think they're scamming me. And they don't know what to do. You should... There are going to be people that do scam you. There's no question about that. That's going to happen. But you should actually just immediately try to take care of them because an unhappy customer is going to tell. I think the rule is seven people. A happy customer tells one or two. On average, an unhappy tells seven. So if someone has a bad experience with you, they're going to tell people don't do business. I mean, how many times have we been on a phone call and someone ghosted us on a Zoom call? Or. didn't show up, we're like, that's it. We're not dealing with these people. That's not really a customer service, but people have a short fuse, but they will tell people, don't work with this company. In today's world, I just recently did a Freedom Ticket webinar with Mark DeGrasse, who's a good friend of ours. He's been on the podcast here as well. And he's talking about branding and AI, and he's talking about how now... in this competitive world of Timu and Sheen and Amazon and Target and Walmart and everybody and all this price squeezing that a lot of times you might not be able to make money on that first sale. Maybe that first sale is just getting the lead in the door and getting the customer. There's a small little margin, but you got to make the money on selling them other stuff, on building the brand and selling them other stuff. And part of that branding is customer service, how you take, I mean, look at Nordstrom's. North is famous for you can return anything at any time, no matter what. There is no 30-day window or 60. I think they've changed this recently. They have tightened it up a little bit. But for a while, there was you could buy something seven years from now and then return it. And they were getting scammed. Some people were buying stuff at a different store or buying it on sale or whatever. And so now they put, if you've ever been to a North one, they put a second sticker. So when you buy something, you buy a cologne, a nice bottle of Chanel or something. I used to do that for Max's wife and they put a second sticker on there. It's like a second, it's almost like a transparency label from Amazon that shows that this came from their store. So if you are going to return it, they know it's actually not, you know, it's not the bottle that you bought off the back of a truck somewhere for a dollar and you're returning it for a hundred bucks. But that was part, that's part of their branding and they're, they're famous for it. Land's end. I think the catalog company of Maine is, is, is the same way. And so by taking care of that customer, they may not, you may lose money on that. And what I do is I send the stuff out fast. So if someone on my Amazon says they... something is bad, I'll pay the extra to ship it one or two day, unless it's just crazy. I don't mean to do that on a refrigerator or something, but unless it's just crazy expensive, I'll spend that extra 10, 15, 20 bucks to get them happy as fast as I can, because then they're going to be just like you. And I didn't expect that. I expected this to take a couple of weeks. And by taking care of customers, you're actually... paving the way for the future and it's part of your brand it's part of your brand story it's part of your message that you care like this company this life uh company that's the life life pod company now you're going to consider buying something else from them or you're going to buy another gift for another one of your buddies for them or you're you're talking about them now you're going to tell people they're smoking cigars like oh where'd you get that oh it's life pod just let me give me instead of just saying oh it's a cool case i don't remember where i got it you're going to say oh it's life but go to life pod.com uh you know you should check it out yep
- Speaker #1
How many times have we done that? How many times have we been since that event? It was way more than seven people. We've probably talked to 20, 25 people easily that are cigar smokers about that. So yeah, that's 100% bang on.
- Speaker #0
I used to do something with, now if you want to, you talk about this from a misfits point of view. You know, one of the things I used to do with my calendar business, I don't do it anymore. I tested it. It worked well. I just, I don't know. I just, for whatever reason, I got away from it. But I shouldn't have, but I did it for several years. It's called a no dogs guarantee. So I would have people that would buy a wall calendar and these are dated. You know, these are like, they're no good to me. Once you've opened and torn the plastic off or you've written something in it, they're no good to me. And they'd buy it. And they're like, oh, I opened this up. And you know, these are, these are calendars of pretty girls. And they're like, oh. all these girls are ugly. Uh, you know, and so they would be like, even though they're all some of the best models in the world or supermodels, they, Oh, these girls are all ugly. Usually it just means they wanted some different kind of posing or something different that, you know, they, it's something they just didn't like. And so we actually implement something called a no dogs guarantee. And so for that no dogs guarantee, you could pay $3 when you placed your order and that will allow you to return anything at any time and not for a refund, but you could exchange it. And so, you know, we kind of played off it, you know, the idea of, you know, it's kind of mean in a way. And I'm not trying to be mean or derogatory. But, you know, there's no dogs, you know, no bad, no bad product. And if you pay that fee.
- Speaker #1
We just lost half our podcast audience. Thanks, Kev.
- Speaker #0
That's probably why I actually got away from it. But now I remember we did that and it works. But also I do, you know, someone says, oh, I didn't get my order. The first thing I'm like, have you checked here? Did you check at the office? Did you check? Maybe it's behind the bushes. If they come back, then all you do is reship it or give them their money back. You just factor that in. When you're doing your forecast, you're going to have a – I think the average rate – I just had this in my newsletter, billion-dollar sellers. The average retail return rate is 18% in the United States. No, it's 15%. Average online is 18%. So 18% of all things ordered online are returned. And 15% of all things that are ordered in a store are returned. And so you just got to build that in, that know that some of this is going to get returned. And you build that into your margins, and you just accept it. Instead of getting upset about it, you just accept it. And that's what I think a lot of people are not doing. And another thing in customer service is delight. Give them something. Customer service is not about just fixing problems. Customer service, you know, when something goes bad, like in your case with the LifePod, that's customer service for sure. But customer service can also be surprising and delighting. And so, like, I think I've given this example on podcasts before where I used to order VHS, not VHS, but beta tapes because we used to shoot a lot of television productions. And this was before everything was digital. So you had these big, like, cassette tapes. that you they're not vhs so they're called beta because it's a little bit better quality and and everything and so we would put these in the cameras to shoot all our stuff and i would order these out of pennsylvania because it was cheaper to go to them from this company in pennsylvania and ship them down to texas or in bulk and every time i would get in the in that box would be a couple packages of m&ms and these are like these little small halloween size packages just a couple sitting on top with a little sticker like a post-it note says thanks for your order and I remember one time I didn't get those. It's a small thing. It cost me 20 cents or something. But just the fact that when the box would come in, I'd tell my shipping guy, where's the box? I want the M&Ms. Yeah, exactly. I want those M&Ms. I want to get you to eat my M&Ms. One time, it was like in June. And there's no M&Ms. I'm like, why did I get my M&Ms? And so I messaged the company. I said, hey, I didn't get the M&Ms in the box. It's no big deal, but I really like that you guys do that. And they messaged me right back, and they said, oh, sorry, we don't sell them in the summer because the chocolate melts, and that text is 100-degree heat. I'm like, ah, okay, I appreciate that. But that's a good point, so we're going to put a little note in there from now on that says that so they actually start putting notes in future orders. But that That's delighting. That's giving somebody – if somebody orders a 10-piece set of something, you give them an extra one. It comes with – we decide to give you two more and make it 12, or whatever it may be. You don't tell them that on your listing. You don't tell them there's a bonus, but when they get it, they see this, and they're like, oh, I got two more free. How many times have you bought some cigars and you just spent you know 500 bucks uh like you did in pennsylvania or whatever buying some cigars and the guy's like oh let me give you here's let me throw these three or four more in free uh on top you're like oh thanks or i mean um you know those little things that's customer service too so i just want to point that out that customer service is not always fixing
- Speaker #1
problems it can also be uh surprising and but you know kev when you start looking at how companies now this is a little bit outside this is different rabbit hole but it really pisses me off and i'm a yeah i'm a big guy i like my food but when i go and i literally when i get a pack of oreos and i know people have talked about this i've heard it before but i know that it's half the size or when i get a package of hot dogs well there's one missing you know and now this shrinkonomics it pisses me off like why don't you just if the price has to go up a little bit keep the quality there and that's the same with anything like if you're going and you're going to go and pay for something i'd rather pay a little bit more for a high quality product then all of a sudden it's half of what you remembered um birthday my my wife got me a bunch of kit kats the kit kat bars aren't even near what they used to be you know and yeah it's a little thing but that's that's something all these little things that's happening with shrinkonomics it all comes back to bite the brand you know so i'll look for something else i'll try to find you know ice cream bars these little mini ice cream bars that don't even fit in my hand like i look like the jolly green giant eating one of these ice cream bars control that's the 100 calorie bars that's to keep you like
- Speaker #0
You get that hit of dopamine, and then you don't eat too many.
- Speaker #1
I'm talking about regular-sized fudgios or whatever they used to be, and now you get them, and it's the same fudgio. It's the same amount in the pack, but you open it up, and it's like this big instead of, yeah, Canadian sizing, I guess.
- Speaker #0
What's a fudgio?
- Speaker #1
You don't know what a fudgio is?
- Speaker #0
Is that some Canadian rat? Rat food or something? What is that? Well,
- Speaker #1
they're like fudge bars.
- Speaker #0
I never heard of fudge-io.
- Speaker #1
You never? Well, you're missing out. I'm sorry. I'll bring some down.
- Speaker #0
Down here in Texas, you know, we just have Mexican Coke. We don't have fudge-io.
- Speaker #1
Well, just you wait. Next time you're up, I'll treat you.
- Speaker #0
They don't have tomato chips either. Or ketchup chips. What do you call them?
- Speaker #1
Ketchup chips.
- Speaker #0
Potato chips.
- Speaker #1
You don't know what you're missing. Ketchup chips.
- Speaker #0
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- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #0
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- Speaker #1
Now, actually talking about all this food kind of leads me over to another subject. Actually,
- Speaker #0
before you get off the subject, on the Shrink and Knox, there's actually a company here in Texas called Blue Bill Ice Cream. They're only in the south. They're like in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, I think Alabama, maybe a couple other places. So you can't get it all over the U.S. It's my favorite ice cream. It's what you have when you – well, normally what you have. Sometimes you grab the wrong one. Yeah,
- Speaker #1
sometimes.
- Speaker #0
When you're here. Uh, and it, they actually have, you know, it still comes in the big, if you buy the big, big ones, they still, it actually says really big on there still half a gallon. Um, because all the other ones, you know, the, the briars and the, whatever the other national brands are as shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. They're actually, um, they're the big, they're big, uh, you know, buckets of ice cream are not what they used to be. And so they're actually emphasis, emphasizing that as a, as a marketing point, we're still half a gallon. The other guys, you know, Check the size, check the ounces or whatever it is. They're not nearly as much. So you can use that shrinkonomics stuff to your advantage too and emphasize it.
- Speaker #1
Absolutely. So on a different note, kind of going back to customer service, I don't know about you. I don't understand this. But you know psychology better than I do. But why do you think People settle for less than what they did before, like Uber. Okay, not Uber, Uber Eats. You know, having cold food, having your food. We ordered some food the other day. And the food I ordered, I got double of something and not the one thing that I ordered. You know, all of this crap is happening and it's cold. You know where I live in a rural town. So I got to wait 20, 25 minutes for the delivery once it leaves the store. By the time it gets here. It's cold, lukewarm, or it's mixed up. But we settle for that right now. Everybody's settling for that. Why do you think that is?
- Speaker #0
One is because a lot of people are doing it. But the other is you're settling for convenience. You're like, all right, yeah, this arrived. This arrived a little warm, but screw it. I'll just throw it in the microwave for 30 seconds, and it'll be all right. But the convenient factor, if you don't have to put on your pants and drive down. to the place and order it and come back you're like you're willing to you're willing to do those trade-offs so that's where people that the convenience is over overriding the the factor of is it going to be hot or cold now if it tasted bad or something else was wrong or the mix-up you know that's i would be complaining about that but some people just like well they screwed it up oh well it's not worth my time to complain i'm going to spend 30 minutes on the phone trying to explain then i gotta wait exactly so it's a hassle it becomes a hassle and so Companies know that. You know, that's the whole reason for like, you know, the U.S. just passed a law. I don't think it's going to affect it yet. I just heard it this week, I think, the FTC passed a law about like subscriptions. You know, it used to be back in the day, I remember 20 years ago, people were making a mint by free trial. uh it's three and they would tell you it's a three-day trial but they know that a certain number of people aren't going to cancel they're going to forget to cancel we've talked about this where you you like it you have a spreadsheet where you make a note and you tell your assistant like make sure you go in and cancel all these before the trial's up um and people don't and they take advantage of that and sometimes they'll go two three months before they're like looking at their credit card statement going oh dadgummit i forgot to cancel that subscription to remny uh let me go and cancel it um and so But the companies are banking on getting that extra two, three months of like free revenue when you're not even using the thing. And so that's that's it's kind of like the same thing with the Uber. You're just coming to accept it. It's not worth the hassle to go in and complain. And so that's, I think, why some people are starting to accept it. But on the flip side, if you go over and beyond, you know, if you got the wrong drink and you called them up and said, hey, I got a Diet Pepsi and I want a Coke Zero. Um. There's a lot of people, I'm so sorry. Here's a dollar coupon or here's a $5 off your next order, which is a good first step. But the better, and maybe a good solution, but the better answer would be, I'm so sorry, Mr. Farrar. We'll have a Coke Zero. It's on its way right now. I have a special guy coming. That's going to cost that company $30 or $20 in special delivery. And I would bring two, even though you order one, say here's a second one. Sorry for the hassle, for the trouble. And that... Those things will go a long way because then you're going to be like, all right, this company actually took responsibility. They owned up to the problem. It wasn't this guy's manager's fault. It was his driver or something got mixed up. But they fixed it. I'll order from them again because I know it's going to get fixed. That's why old people order from Amazon. They know if they have a problem, it's easy to return. It's easy to go. I mean, I just had this happen this week. I ordered some. some straps to like strap in you know on the back of your truck to hold the stuff from flying off the back of the truck you know you put these big straps and i order them from our buddy ted his company ted repics company that was on our cms trip and so i ordered them from from them and i ordered three different ones one of them came on sunday and it said the other two were delivered in a second package well that package is nowhere to be found in my mail room and so monday or tuesday i wait till tuesday because sometimes the fedex or ups guys they put them in random places or put them in the laundry freaking lockers or something. I looked everywhere and I actually acted like a driver. These drivers, we have these lockers at the bottom of my building. The driver's coming and says, UPS, enter this code. US Mail, enter this code. FedEx, enter this code. Amazon, enter this code. I acted like a driver and I was delivering something and punched in a code to my thing and said, I have a delivery for Kevin. I'm working for UPS. Punched the code in and then opens up one of the lockers. So I can go in there and there's two big lockers that are like, they're oversized. So they stack like 30 packages in there. All the others are like one package per locker. So I was like, maybe they got mixed up in there. So I'm a misfit. So I figured out how the system works. So I figured out how to actually open those lockers without a code by acting like a driver and acting like I'm delivering a package to myself. And I went through them. They're not there. So then on Tuesday, I went to the office and said, hey, I'm missing this package. She's like, oh. They went and they opened every single locker and like looking still not there. So I called, contacted Amazon. Amazon didn't show it as delivered, but they didn't have a picture of it, like sitting somewhere. Like sometimes there's a picture. So I went on Amazon. Now Amazon has an automated chat bot. You don't even have to talk to a person. A chat bot, you go through a series of questions. And within a minute of doing that, I had a full refund back to me. An option of do I want credit to my Amazon account? Do I want credit back to the credit card? And they did it right on the spot. No questions asked. That was good. And I'm sure they have an algorithm that looks like this dude's ordered 7000 times from us and he's only returned three things. So let's just trust him. You know, if I had ordered 20 times and returned 17 of them, they might be like, well, hold on. Let's let's do it. Send this to a person, have someone talk to him. I'm not sure what the back end system was, but that's good customer service or I didn't. Yeah, it's in it. Could have been something that was my fault, but Amazon owned up to it and they take the hit. Probably the actual seller is going to take the hit. Amazon is not going to take the hit, really. The seller is going to take the hit. But that's just part of it. And that's good customer service. And that's why people will go and keep ordering from Amazon because of that. Just like in your Uber example with this delivery, they mess it up. If they would have made it right, you would keep ordering from them. Now, the next time you order, you're going to hesitate. Right. Well, I don't know. Let's try something else. I don't know. Are they using Postmates or Uber Eats or Dash or whatever? I don't know what's in Canada. Find a company that uses one of these other services.
- Speaker #1
You know, Kevin, I'm one of those guys that... Okay, it came. I got two hamburgers instead of one hamburger and a chicken burger. I'll eat it. My wife, my wife is like a dog on a bone. She'll call the store. The store doesn't do anything. She'll call head office. She wants to get something for whatever inconvenience it is. And she gets it, by the way. So, you know, just two different things. But even when we call the store. So she calls the store. A lot of the times, again, it's 25 minutes away to the closest restaurant, and she'll have to put up with a hassle in that restaurant. Okay, well, next time when you come in, we'll give you an extra whatever, burrito. It doesn't work. And what you just said is 100%. Just get a driver, drive the frigging thing out to this. person and it's a whole different ball game. Instead of what am I going to get this time, especially if it happens twice, twice in a row from the same restaurant. Another one that we settle for is deliveries from all the major carriers, Amazon, UPS, FedEx. It's just drop it on the porch. If nobody steals it, it's good. I told you about the time I had bought my wife some chocolates. The one company has it in a styrofoam box so it doesn't melt. This other company, it was Amazon just, I guess, took these, put it in a box, sat on the porch for two or three hours. And when I got them, it was like one infused fusion of chocolate and flavors. You know? And that's okay. But these things we settle for. And I have to say, I have a love-hate relationship with Amazon. There's things that they do as a seller I hate. There's things that I do like the delivery system I hate. But the time I was staying over at your place, I ordered a bunch of buffalo jeans. You remember that? Yeah. They came in, and the one pair was too big. So it was around Christmas time, so I was taking that, and I went over to my parents' house. I called Amazon, and I said, you know, this one pair, it's too long. Or, no, the waist was too big. And they just said, okay, we'll send you out a new pair. Just keep those. You know, give them away. And I thought, wow, that was really great.
- Speaker #0
It's actually cheaper to do that than actually the return because the returns cost money. I mean, it costs money to process them. check them to repackage them to get rid of them and auction off not most returns do not get resold so it's a bad it's a big problem right now if you look at a lot of logistics companies they're they're talking about this return issue as e-commerce is exploding and it you know it's it's huge i mean the ups stores i read something like 80 of their business in the united states is dealing with amazon returns because now ups stores in the u.s is where you can go take your returns and you take a little barcode in there they scan it and some of them now have automated machines where you just scan the barcode and drop it in the box uh and and they're they're bundling all that stuff it's to save money because they're bundling a lot of little things and putting them in one big box to save money and to help the environment i guess is what they say and they send them back to a lot of that stuff goes to las vegas and that's one of their biggest processing centers and it's just like a big dump yard if you've ever seen videos of this thing and They go through and see what they can salvage, and then they create liquidation things, and the rust, and liquidate that stuff out. And people buy that stuff just like they did, you know, the TV show Storage Wars. I don't know if you saw that show when it was a hot show on reality. It's a reality show where someone didn't pay their rent for one of these storage lockers. And people would go, and they'd do auctions, and you'd bid on it. So they'd open up the door. You never saw the show. They'd open up the door of one of these like 10 by 10 public storage lockers. And you couldn't go inside, but you could peek from the outside and like look over, you know, sometimes these things were full to the top of just crap. Sometimes you could see like, oh, whoa, there's a really cool power tool back there. There's a really cool something. And then they would hold an auction right there standing in front of it. Someone would win it, you know, and maybe pay 700 bucks. And then they get the keys to the place. And then they have whatever it is, 24 hours to go through it, empty it out. And so they started pulling all the junk out and just some of it's going in the trash bin. Some of it's like, Ooh, this is something we can sell. And that's what happens now with a lot of these returns is that people are They're going on liquidation pallets and people are buying these pallets for 30, 40, 50, 100 bucks and then bringing them into their warehouse and then seeing what kind of decent stuff they can salvage out there. And sometimes they can, it's not much, sometimes they can turn that thing into $5,000 or $10,000. That's a whole nother business model that's emerged because of all these returns. It's just a fact. It's just a, you just got to build that in and then accept. Don't get mad. I used to get mad when a customer would email me like. I didn't get my calendar or these these girls are ugly or something I'm like you freaking idiot no they're not these are some of the prettiest girls out there like you just and I would get but you can't do that you guys stay removed and objective like everybody's got a different opinion everybody has different standards and tastes and the thing is if you want this guy to buy again and sometimes you may not you don't care about the guy you're like you're just a pain in the ass because just the people always say the customer is always right that's a famous slogan And I say, no, don't go by that slogan. The customer is not always right. And there's times where you should actually fire customers. You should actually tell people, sorry, we're not doing business with you again. Go away. But for the most part, you want to take care of people because you never know. It may be next week or it may be two years from now. They're going to refer you. They're going to buy something again. And most money in today's world is made off of repeat purchases, not off of that initial sale. And so many people, especially in e-commerce, are constantly focused on the initial sale. How do I get more sales? How do I rank better on Amazon? Or how do I sell more on TikTok? And they pay no attention to the back end. And that's a whole nother discussion about getting email addresses and names and addresses and knowing who your customers are so you can remarket to them. Very few people do that. But that's where the money's at. I mean, you look at my calendar business. My calendar business is 25, 30 years, maybe 30 years old now. And that business is repeat customers every year. They're repeat customers. So if a guy has a problem with the calendar, it didn't get delivered, or he says he got torn up in the mail or something got ran over by a truck, I replace it because that guy's going to order another $100 worth next year, another $100 next year, and that cost that replacement was next to nothing compared to the value of that customer. And I can use that to relaunch products every single year without doing advertising. And that's what a lot of people are missing, and the customer service is a big part of that. And answering quickly is something else that a lot of people, you should, that, you know, Amazon has that rule of 24 hours, seven days a week, pretty much. And you should, you need to answer people quickly. You can answer within the hour when they're hottest and calm them down. That's when you're going to get the best results and the best long-term positive goodwill. And don't, don't take a long time to fix the problem right away. And don't ask too many questions. I mean, sometimes you want to know, like in the case of the LifePod, maybe they wanted that back so that they could. they could examine it and see what the heck went wrong here. So they could reverse engineer and try to fix problems. But they paid to have to ship that back to you. They gave you a prepaid label.
- Speaker #1
So one of the things I want to get to, cause we're, we've got a pretty much end the podcast in a, in a minute or two, but you mentioned something about firing your customers or clients. And I think we have to be careful when we say that. Because it almost sounds contradictory to what we're just telling about customer service. So I know, like for me, when I've had to fire a client, you had to use a bit of psychology on it. And when you're talking with them, these are pain in the ass clients that would just... drive you crazy so what we had to do is you know we we'd switch it around and we'd say look uh you know what uh we're probably not the best fit right now but we have somebody that would be and we would just mention one or two people and then we could terminate them without them feeling really pissed off or anything
- Speaker #0
Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?
- Speaker #1
Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not going to know what I say.
- Speaker #1
I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. And we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another.
- Speaker #0
Yes.
- Speaker #1
But. That being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.
- Speaker #0
Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. Oh,
- Speaker #1
and I think that's something that... everybody has to do you're going to have those jerks or the people that just don't fit your personality of your your brand or your business and you got to get rid of them and you you can just sleep better at night night i don't know if you want to add we got about a minute here kev um
- Speaker #0
yeah um yeah like like you i mean you just said it all right there i mean sometimes you you do it they're either costing you too much money in the end of the day or they're they're causing too much pain for you or your employees or causing stress and sometimes you know it's it's not always about bending over backwards uh every single time sometimes you got a divorce uh you know you can only do so much so don't always think you got to do everything but but give them the benefit of the doubts initially until proven otherwise and Just build it into your numbers. I mean, build in, I'm expecting a 3% return rate, or if you're selling shoes, a 30% return rate, and then build into your plan. What are you going to do with returns? Are you going to ask them to return it? Or are you going to tell them it's not worth the hassle? I'm just going to throw it away anyway. So don't make them jump through hoops to go package it back up and ship it to you just because you want it back. And just because you want to prove that they're not ripping you off and trying to get a second one for free. Just let them keep it, depending on the price. point of it. It's not worth the hassle. Just understand there are going to be some people that take advantage. That's just part of it. Just like there's people that are going to, some people are going to issue a charge back when they don't recognize the charge, even though it's a legitimate charge and you got to fight it. And sometimes it's just not worth the extra effort to, you know, like you said, your wife, get on the phone and go through all that. It'd have to be an expensive item for me to do that. Or I have to be on some sort of principle where I'm just like, I'm going to prove something to them. But sometimes I look at my time. It's like I'm not going to sit on hold for 30 minutes and deal with this if I don't have to. But now, like back on that FTC rule that I was saying earlier, now the FTC in the U.S. has passed things where there has to be an unsubscribe link. There has to be – you can't force people to call if you're going to cancel your cable bill anymore. There has to be a link online to be able to do it with one click. because the calls were actually meant to deter it and so that they could upsell you or downsell you onto something else and so all those things are going away that people are trying to use psychological things to actually get out of doing returns and actually minimize those returns when they should have actually been doing the opposite and just taking care of the people and and putting that into projections and if you're having to give away that many refunds or that may you got a problem that you need to fix and so you need to i mean if it gets to the point where you're trying to deter them rather than fix the problem, that's a different issue, an underlying issue of something else that you need to fix.
- Speaker #1
All right, buddy. That should wrap it up. Why don't you close us out?
- Speaker #0
We're already done? That was fun. It's always fun shooting the chap with you. Shooting the chap?
- Speaker #1
What the? What is the chap?
- Speaker #0
I don't know. I just made that up.
- Speaker #1
I know what you wanted to say, but...
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Yeah, I can't say shooting the... Well, I could say. It's our podcast. I can say shooting the shit. What the hell? The kids are listening. I'm sorry. Shooting the chap. Yeah. Yeah, so, no, it's always good. So, you know, we enjoy doing this. Every Tuesday, we've got a new podcast. Sometimes it's just Norm and I, just like today, just bantering back and forth and talking about what is on mind. Nothing's scripted here. We didn't know what we're going to talk about before we got into this. We just started going down. So that's just what we enjoy doing, talking marketing, talking businesses. If you know someone that you think would actually be good to come on and let us pick their brain about marketing your business, feel free to reach out at marketingmisfits.co. It's .co, right, Norm? It's .co?
- Speaker #1
It's .co, Kev. Just to be clear here, it's not .com.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Marketing. Oh, you can message us and say, Hey, this would be a great guest. Or maybe it's you, maybe you're listening and you're like, I'd like to be on this show and shoot the, shoot the chap with, uh, Norman and Kevin. Uh, that, that, that could be you. Uh, if you like this episode, uh, there's a few more in the hopper, so you can go back and listen to the past ones. but we'll be back again next Tuesday with another one. And if you like it, forward it on to a friend, uh, forward it on somebody and let them know that, Hey, Smarts and Misfits is kind of cool. You should listen to it. Be like Chad. That's right. I said, be like Chad. That's my chef who every time one comes out, he messaged me and said, hey, that was a really cool episode. I really liked that banter you and Norm had or that guest. That was really cool. So, Norm, I guess that's it, right? You want to say something? Yeah, I've been talking here for like
- Speaker #1
– You know what? I'm just saying what you said.
- Speaker #0
I'm just going to point that way. You say ditto? What he said. You just say ditto?
- Speaker #1
Yep, that's it. That's it. Yep, and when you see the captions going across, it's just ditto. That's it for this week. See you next Tuesday, and we're out of here. Ciao. See you.
