← Small Business Quick WINS w/ Jay Schwedelson l Presented By Thryv
Small Business Quick WINS w/ Jay Schwedelson l Presented By Thryv
BUILDING STRONG CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS! Christina Garnett on Advocacy, Feedback & Scaling
00:19:30
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- [00:00]
Jay Schwedelson
Just want to jump in here real quick and let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Thrive. Thrive is an amazing tool that small businesses, thousands of small businesses leverage to run their business in so many ways. And they have this incredible thing called Marketing Center. Now, if you're not familiar with Marketing center from Thrive, great news. For the start of the year, they're doing a special offer right here of a 25% off discount of their Thrive Marketing Center. This thing allows you to run all your ads, boost your online presence, understand all of your customer interactions, and if you want to check this out and get this discount, it is super easy. All you got to do is go to thrive.com that's t h r y v dot com wins, that's thrive th r y v dot com slash wins. And I'm telling you, your marketing is at the center of your business. It what, it's what drives your business. So check out Marketing center from Thrive today@thrive.com wins. Welcome to Small Business Quick Wins, presented by Thrive. This podcast is exclusively designed for small business leaders like you. Prepare to get invaluable insights from every episode, equipped with actionable tips made for immediate implementation in your business. Tune in as we feature firsthand lessons from fellow small business owners and thought leaders. I'm your host, Jay Schwedelson. Over the last 25 years, I've grown multiple small businesses that have generated over $300 million in revenue. Along the way, I've learned pitfalls to avoid and quick wins that can transform your business immediately. I'm excited to share it all. So if you're ready to win on Main street, let's dig into this episode. We are back for Small Business Quick Wins, presented by Thrive. And we have an amazing human being here. Who is here? We have Christina Garnett. Now, Christina is a really interesting person. She has an incredible background. I know her for a long time. She's a big deal in marketing and in business, but she wears like 12 different hats. She is the chief customer and communications officer for a company called New Motion, but she's also a fractional chief customer and communications officer for a lot of brands. And we're going to get into, first of all, what does that even mean? And second of all, why does every small business need to think about their customers in certain ways? And Christina is going to help us to understand how to focus on them and not screw it up. Christina, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:45]
Christina Garnett
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat.
- [02:48]
Jay Schwedelson
Excellent. All right, before we get into how small business owners and people that are running small businesses need to kind of rethink their relationships with their customers. What is it? What is. What happened? How did Christina become Christina? What do you do?
- [03:04]
Christina Garnett
So I love the Steve Jobs quote that says, like, you can only connect the dots backwards, are looking backwards. And so if you look at, like everything that I've done in my career, even as a teacher, it really comes down to the idea of making people feel seen, making people feel heard, appreciated, giving them what they need so that they can get it and that they can kind of hit their final form. And so whether it be as a math teacher or doing advocacy at HubSpot, to now being a chief customer officer, all of that's really come together to, to help me be a voice for the customer, be an advocate for them. How can we make their experience better? How can I work with teams so that they. They're not overthinking it. They're actually, they're actually being really thoughtful and customer centric and making sure that they're building those brand and customer relationships.
- [03:52]
Jay Schwedelson
So let me try to wrap my mind around a chief customer officer, because this is a relatively new term to me. And if I'm out there, I'm a small business owner. I own my H Vac company or my accounting firm, whatever. Like, what is that? I don't have a chief customer officer. So in a small business, what. Who would have this role? Because they likely don't have somebody with that title, but who would be acting in this kind of role? In a small business, it's usually the.
- [04:19]
Christina Garnett
Founder, it's usually the owner. It's the kind of the textbook thing for small businesses is that there's. There's that sign. I think, like, everyone saw it on like a sandwich board and then it went viral. Is like, if you, if you support a small business, you're having their kids go to ballet class or things like that. Small businesses do customer centricity pretty well because they, if they have regulars, they know the regulars. They come in. Maybe the founder is actually the one behind the counter at the register who wants to talk to you, make sure that you had a great experience. And so usually the owner is the chief customer officer because they are so invested in the business that they're building that they understand that the customer needs to be happy. They know what happens when customers aren't. There's bad reviews. People are defer, like, deterred, don't want to go there anymore. Maybe they could lose a business. They understand that their customers are at the heart of what makes them successful. So I would say the founder or owner of the small businesses tends to wear that hat, even if they don't realize it.
- [05:20]
Jay Schwedelson
So along those lines, I think one of the hardest things for a small business owner is they're running at breakneck speed because they're trying to do a lot. No matter what they do, they just are doing a lot. And it's almost like even trying to wear the hat of a chief customer officer is hard because you're trying to get new business, you're trying to get your billing done, you're trying to do whatever. So how, what are some of the biggest pitfalls in terms of small business, especially small business owner, when they stop kind of keeping their eye on the customer? I mean, do you see that often, like you go into an organization, you're like, okay, well, you guys are barely paying attention to your customers. Like, is that, is that what happens when you go into an org?
- [06:02]
Christina Garnett
Yes, usually what I'm seeing, and I'm seeing this across the board with, with, with agencies and brands of all stages, what you wind up seeing is that they wind up looking at a lagging indicator as this end all, be all data point without looking at all the things that lead to that. So, for example, let's say that you have a small business and your revenue has dropped significantly. You are going to go into crisis mode. You're going to be like going like 10 times speed on how can we get sales? Maybe we need to do more advertising, all of these things without looking prescriptively at, well, what's causing that revenue to dip? Because if you keep doing the same things to get sales, but you didn't diagnose why the revenue dropped, then it isn't necessarily going to fix it and you're going to start seeing those customers as revenue points instead of humans, and you're going to lose the empathy for them in that time period. So, for example, let's say that the economy is struggling and so your revenue has dropped not because you've done anything wrong, but just because it's just economically not feasible for your customers to patron. Be a patron of yours. Okay, great. Doing Facebook ads isn't going to magically fix that. You know, like, it's not fixing the problem. So what I see a lot of businesses do, either they want to scale or they're trying to like, fix whatever the revenue problem is, but they look at it from this number of I have to fix this number, I have to double this number. I have to like, Magically make this number look like the number I want it to be without trying to figure out why it doesn't look right. So they go into like solving mode. Like, well, I can do this or I can do that or I can do this instead of actually taking a breath and saying, I gotta figure out why that number isn't looking the way that I want. And then I.
- [07:56]
Jay Schwedelson
Retention play, is that a problem? Like, you're losing people and you have to find out why are people bailing us? And you want to go and talk to all your customers and say, why don't you like us anymore?
- [08:06]
Christina Garnett
Yes. But also look at like the other. Look for red flags. So a lot of customers will. They'll give you hints, they'll give you. There'll be smoke before the fire hits. You'll be able to see, well, that person used to come in once a month and now they're coming in like once every two to three months. Or they used to show up every time we did a sale. I never see them anymore. Like, there's a lot of unspoken behaviors that wind up actually showing you that someone's just not as engaged or they don't like you as much anymore. Or maybe they used to do surveys and now they dropped off. Or now they never answer your. Or open your emails. And so figuring out what those customer behaviors can be before you actually just start calling everybody, like, hey, I never see you. What happened? Because even that can be a bit aggressive if you don't have a relationship with them. But knowing what to look for and what kind of cues to keep an eye out for. So that when you start seeing those, like if they're not answering your emails, maybe they have a spam filter, maybe they're not getting it. Maybe you're sending too many emails. Well, if you know that that person used to always open that email, they used to be hyper engaged, maybe that's an opportunity for you as an owner to personally email them to do something that doesn't feel automated, that doesn't feel generic, something that feels very personal and see if they open that. But like little things like that to really kind of get into the heart of why people are behaving the way that they are. That's really important. And from a retention play, I see a lot of companies, especially big companies, struggle with retention because they usually worry about retention when their sales numbers aren't good either. Like they're focused on sales and not retention while retention's good. And then as soon as retention goes down, that's when they pay attention. That's like only showing up when something's halfway burned down. Like it's. The damage is already being created. So you should always be having maneuvers and behaviors that are going to take care of your current customers while you're still trying to navigate and create new awareness and new customers. One of the biggest things that I see, I see companies struggle with, and small businesses, too, is they alienate their current customer base to get a new one. And then what happens is they may or may not be able to be attractive to the new customer base, but that old customer base feels ignored. They feel alienated. Like, I've been here the whole time. I've been paying your bills this whole time. And now because I'm not in this specific demographic, you. You act like I don't exist. And so you should always be thinking about two specific campaigns or two specific actions. How can I make our current customers feel appreciated and seen and loved? And then how can I use that as a conduit for new customers? Because you could tell new customers how great you are. They're going to believe your current customers more than you. They're going to believe them more than an ad, more than an email campaign. They want to see themselves in your current customers. And. And so by working with your current customers and answering them and really making them feel like a collaborative part of this journey, how can you make it easy for them to love you? And how can you make it easy for them to share their love of you? How do they do reviews? What reviews would be the most important? Is there a certain, like, let's say that you have a restaurant. What are the restaurant review sites you want them to do for you? Like, is Yelp even popular in your area or is it something else? Maybe it should be an open table review. Just things like that. How can you make it easy for them to love you? And then how can they make you make it easy for them to love you? Loudly. Very loudly.
- [11:48]
Jay Schwedelson
You know when you said, it's almost like you have to raise your awareness a little bit because I find in my own business, I'll hear a customer say something like, oh, this isn't good, or they'll complain about maybe somebody on our team or whatever. And I'll hear it, but I won't do anything with that information or I'll be defensive.
- [12:10]
Christina Garnett
Yeah.
- [12:10]
Jay Schwedelson
And in my mind I'm like, well, they're wrong. They don't know what they're talking about. But even for myself, I'm sure for people listening, it's like, you need to have your antenna up them. Like, you know, you hear a field sales rep, you know, a couple, their name come up a couple times. That good or bad, you know, that's something. You got to do something with that information or something's broken, somebody tells you about, you got to do something. Like, you can't just be receiving information, not reacting. Right. Is that something that, like, is common? That, like, we're just not even aware of the information we're being given?
- [12:39]
Christina Garnett
Yes. And we've, we've kind of trained ourselves through social media to believe that anything negative is a troll when that's simply not true. Like, granted, trolls are very real and we can disagree on the Internet, but being. Having a negative sentiment around something does not necessarily mean that you are trolling them or you're trying to be hateful or mean. You need to see it. Especially if someone's been a customer for a very long time and they start giving you negative feedback. You need to see that as a symptom of them caring and then believing that you will do something about it. Because if there's plenty of people, I, I hear the same sort of thing, and I use the word relationships a lot. But if you look at, like, TikToks or reels and they'll talk about, like, marriages and they'll say, as long as your wife or your husband is, like, communicating with you about what's wrong, you're fine. It's when they go quiet that it's over. Same thing with customers. There's tons of customers who are not happy with you, but they are not vocalizing that, that, that those feelings. Because either they don't care enough or they don't think that it would do anything. And there's plenty of customers who were very angry and left tons of comments. And you're like, they stopped complaining. Everything must be fixed. No, they just don't believe you're going to do anything about it. And they think they're wasting their breath by complaining. So they've stopped complaining.
- [13:55]
Jay Schwedelson
Oh, my goodness. That stresses me out.
- [13:57]
Christina Garnett
Sorry.
- [13:58]
Jay Schwedelson
No, now to think about anything that I'm hearing, and you're 100% right. But let's flip the script for a second. Let's say now your business is actually doing well and you're the small business owner and you're running around, and now you're like, I'm going to scale this thing up. But, you know, let's go back to being that H Vac company and the owner of the H Vac company, they Know all their accounts, they know them by name, they know them by first name and. But now they're trying to grow. How do you grow and still maintain that really deep connection with your customers?
- [14:29]
Christina Garnett
As a small business, you have to set boundaries. So if you're growing, there's no way that you're going to be able to give the same amount of time and energy and resources to those individual customers like you had before. Like, you can't, you can't add time to the 24 hours. You can't. But what you can do is say, well, we pride ourselves on responding within 24 hours of a complaint or we will call you back or we will. If there's a problem, we have this sort of policy. You need to figure out and draw the line of as you grow, what will you not jeopardize? What will you not sacrifice in terms of the customer and communicate that with them? Hey, we're in this really big time. We have so many new customers and we know that as we grow we're going to have even more customers. And we don't want you to feel like you've been left behind. We're so happy, happy that you're a customer of ours. We are able to grow because of your patronage for however, however long. So we want to commit to you that moving forward, these are the things that you can still expect from us. So you need to set those expectations. It needs to be expectations that you know, you can actually stay true to though, like don't promise the moon and then you give them nothing. But really think about as we grow, what do we want to guarantee? What are the customer centric initiatives that we are going to stand by as we continue to grow? Maybe we had an SLA of like an hour before and we know we can't do that. Well, maybe the SLA needs to be six hours now, but whatever it is, you need to let them have psychological safety that there is something that they can depend on as you grow so they don't feel like they're being left behind.
- [16:14]
Jay Schwedelson
Yeah, and I couldn't agree more. I think in all aspects of life, management of expectations is like everything, everything, right? If you don't, you're just really screwing yourself down the road because you're going to disappoint people. It could be in your personal life, it could be in your work. It's just you have to be real with yourself first and then with the people that you're interacting with and then that's really how you scale to your point. So These are amazing tips. All right, before we wrap up here, I want to know something. You got a book?
- [16:43]
Christina Garnett
Yeah.
- [16:44]
Jay Schwedelson
What is going on? I could barely read. Tell us about the book. What are you doing?
- [16:50]
Christina Garnett
So last year I had a book deal with Kogan Page, which is a publisher of business and nonfiction books. And I've really had this book inside my head for quite a while and really wanted to look at customer brand relationships and how to basically a lot of what we're talking about here. How can you have those really human relationships with your customers, whether you be a small business or like a Fortune 100 brand? What does that look like? And so a lot of books that I've read, when it comes to customer experience, they really focus on customer success. But there's so many things that touch the customer that influence whether that customer experience is bad, good, or great. And so a lot of the chapters really kind of facilitate a holistic view of how to take care of the customer. So there's a chapter on social listening. There's a chapter on game theory and psychological, like behavioral science. There's a chapter on all the different steps to build a community. How does AI impact relationships, good and bad? What role does social media play? What role does psychological safety and working with your teams and collaboration and how can you get rid of silos? And so I hope that the book will be a really helpful just guide for people who really want to work through and make the customer experience better but have no idea how to get started or know that it touches all these things but doesn't know how they all work together. I hope that this will be what they need to get them through it.
- [18:18]
Jay Schwedelson
I love it. This is amazing. All right, so here's what's going to happen. We're going to put the links to the pre order of the book in the show notes. And Christina, where can everybody find you on LinkedIn? Where's your jam? How do we find you?
- [18:30]
Christina Garnett
I'm on Twitter still. I'm going to go down with the ship. I'm the cute little Titanic band and then LinkedIn. Those are my places. I'm other places too, but those are the two that I tend to stick to. So feel free to follow me there.
- [18:45]
Jay Schwedelson
Oh, excellent. We're gonna put all in the show notes, everybody. Check out everything Christina Garnett is doing. She's amazing. Thanks for being here for small business Quick wins presented by Thrive.
- [18:54]
Christina Garnett
Thanks for having me.
- [18:57]
Jay Schwedelson
Well, that was fun and great news. You got way more where that came from. Subscribe. Make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips from today's top small business leaders. And hook us up with a five star review if you've got at least one new idea you may consider using. Lastly, if you want to ensure you never miss a message from your customers Again, check out Thrive.comWin to get your free account with Command center today.