Managing Unhappy Customers in Your Painting Business

Jon Bryant: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Price Sell Paint podcast. Today, Michael and I are talking about what happens when you have an angry customer, what to do, how to handle it, and all the fun things that come along with it. Michael, welcome again to the podcast. You've probably never had an unhappy customer in your life, right? You guys are pretty amazing over there.

Michael Murray: I didn't know what that phrase meant. I was taken aback when it's an unhappy customer.

Jon Bryant: You guys have 100% success rates for happiness, don't you?

Michael Murray: That is our goal. Yes.

Jon Bryant: What do you think you achieved? Like how many customers are actually mad at you?

Michael Murray: We use net promoter score. I haven't looked at it in the last little bit here, but we're pretty high, to be honest with you, like in the seventies. I think most—I think it's like 70 or something. Which is important because if you're familiar with that system, somebody—a lot of most of our customers are just neutral, which is going to bring that number down. There's—we're not perfect. And I think most people aren't a big fan. Like I think it's a really good internal metric.

Jon Bryant: So when you say net promoter score, it's like how many people actually say that they liked you, they were happy, 70% is what you're saying.

Michael Murray: Do you want me to explain net promoter score real quick? I think for everyone listening it might be helpful. I think I know what it is but...

So I think net promoter score is a really good internal metric. I think it's a really bad external metric because one company is probably doing it slightly different than the other and that makes it difficult. Anyways, with that being said, it's a relatively simple system. On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a family, friend, neighbor, however you might want to word that.

Nine and a 10 is considered a promoter. A seven and eight is considered neutral and six and below is considered a detractor. I'm going off memory, so I think I got that right. And so what we don't want are detractors—people that are going to go out of their way to leave us bad reviews, tell their neighborhood that was an awful experience. We certainly want those promoters. Those are those nines and tens. Those are the people that will go out of their way to refer somebody.

And then you're going to end up with a good chunk of neutrals where it's like, yeah, it was good. It was a good experience. Yeah, I'd probably have them back, but probably not going to go out of my way to recommend people. And so that is just a simple percentage. What percentage of the total are the promoters minus the percentage that are detractors? And so that neutral score affects the total number, but it doesn't factor into the second half of that.

Jon Bryant: So there's going to be some unhappy people. 70% of people are promoting you. Okay. I mean, that's a great metric. For those of you who are not using it, definitely look that up because I think it's a great way to see how you're doing in this area. Do your customers like you? Are they happy? Are they promoting you? We use it as well. It's a great metric. I think it gives awesome feedback.

Michael Murray: I'll add just one more piece of context actually. I think there's a lot of companies in our industry, especially maybe a little bit more sophisticated, that if you're not already, should really consider using net promoter score at the estimate as opposed to after the work is completed. But do a net promoter score survey just after an estimate. Just try to get an idea of how likely would somebody be to recommend to their neighbor to get a quote from your company just based on that sales experience with that sales rep.

They might not book with you—the price was higher than I expected or all the things that we all know about. But I had a really good estimate experience. I felt like I was taken seriously and treated with respect. It wasn't a waste of my time. I was heard, all the things that a customer would want in an estimate, even if they didn't necessarily book. That's a pretty sophisticated way to use Net Promoter Score and drill into different segments of the business to get data on how to improve things. Anyways.

Jon Bryant: For sure.

Jon Bryant: Now that we've gotten on a slight tangent, let's get back to it. This last week I had a couple of situations where I was asked my opinion on some unhappy customers. And this is from a sales rep's point of view. They had sold the job. The customer in this particular case was a set of cabinets. Sold the job. They wanted to change their hardware. And what the rep didn't know was that the hardware was actually screwed in and there was a piece of wood glued in after, so you could not unscrew the hardware.

And when it came time to actually tell the customer, or the crew showed up on site and then the customer was told, "Hey, this is going to be additional work that we weren't expecting because we have to—in order to change this, which you decided after we did the estimate—we have to drill into every single door and undo the screw."

And this customer was furious, really mad, and took it out on our sales rep who should have known better, in quotations. And sometimes there's things you just don't know. You have no idea. Another situation was additional work that had to be done—a third coat, the paint didn't cover. These things happen. And it's all in our contract that this stuff is all upfront. Nobody reads contracts. Let's be honest. It's a lot. Maybe 5% of our customers—I have no idea what's going on.

Michael Murray: I don't.

Jon Bryant: And so then you point at the contract, you're like, "Hey, you signed this," and they're not happy. And so we're looking—we're trying to go after that net promoter score, make people happy. That's our goal. And some people just aren't happy. And so we have to have these discussions with customers when expectations are different. A lot of times it has to do with money. I think that's a core issue.

I've often said money solves everything. It's like, as soon as you say "We're not going to charge you for that," all of a sudden they're like, "We're good. Everything's happy." But I think as a sales rep, we deal with these things. We've got to make those calls. And I think it's important that we have a standard procedure that we go over in order to make sure that we are in the right head space, that we have the right things at our fingertips, because inevitably we get emotional. We forget what the process should be. And we lose track of what's important. We feel like everyone's different, but it's not.

And here's the funny thing—before the call, you and I, before this podcast, we were talking about how you don't actually have sales reps deal with those problems.

Michael Murray: Yeah, as much as we can, for sure, especially directly with the customer. So I think one of the things that I think is really important—let's be real, right? We do get unhappy customers because of schedule delays or maybe just we missed a spot, got paint where it wasn't supposed to be, those types of things. Or we have to charge them for something different than what was originally expected.

You're going with some dramatic color change like you talked about, or there's just some crazy, unforeseen circumstance here. And as much as we can, I want to avoid sales reps being involved in that because their confidence is so important. I need them to be confident that when they sell a job, it's going to go really well. And if they—I think as business owners, this is why I think business owners doing sales is great until it isn't kind of a thing, because the number one person who's going to get the call as the business owner is you, right, when you sold that project. They're coming to you no matter how hard you try.

And if you're seeing a lot of problems, even a couple problems, it just manifests itself as "This is a lot of problems." You're less confident. You're less excited to go out and sell more jobs because I'm just going to end up with more problems to deal with. And I think this happens to a lot of business owners in our industry where they maybe intentionally are like, "I don't even want to grow this business anymore because as I sell more and I grow and I hire employees, I just end up with more problems to have to deal with and more customers that are pissed off because I send these painters out, they don't do what they're supposed to do or whatever."

And so I really want to avoid sales reps from experiencing any of those types of emotions, if you will.

Jon Bryant: So walk me through the process because we do it differently and everything you've said resonates with me. Confidence is so important and I saw that over these last situations where that person became a shell of themselves as a sales rep because they were focused on these problems. And it wasn't productive. They had gone and had an incredible month. And then they all of a sudden were dealing with two or three of these things in a week. And everything grinded to a halt. So yeah, they've lost the confidence in the company. What happens in a situation where there's—like if there's a third coat required, who's making that call?

Michael Murray: Crew leader or team leader, field manager, and operations director, right? We're moving right up the operations team. But in that situation, I think that's a really good example. Let's just pretend we're painting a bedroom and we've got to charge a customer for a third coat. Is that a fair scenario?

Jon Bryant: It's so common. Yeah.

Michael Murray: How much does it cost? 200 bucks? A couple hundred bucks, something. It's not nothing. And we don't want to get in this habit of getting taken advantage of by customers. Don't get me wrong. 200 bucks is a lot of money. And it starts to add up and all the things. The challenge I have though is sales reps are inherently, I believe, not equipped to deal with these types of things because they're busy. They're out doing estimates and having to task switch to go take care of this is a challenge.

They're also generally—maybe their personality doesn't fit right here where maybe they have less empathy and experience with dealing with this type of scenario and they might not handle it as well. But the most important part is the opportunity cost. If they're out taking care of this issue so that they can get the $200, what are they not doing?

I would make the argument that they're probably not selling as well as they could. You just mentioned your scenario, which is more than 200 bucks worth of effort, I feel. But that sales rep you said was a shell of him or herself for maybe that day, maybe that week, maybe whatever. And there's a residual effect to that that is more than the cost that it would have been to just give that customer the free—having to figure out how to take these things off. It sounds like it was probably a $500 or plus upcharge. Or not even upcharge, just like, okay.

Jon Bryant: This, in this case it was 400 bucks.

Michael Murray: For that, my argument would be, if I'm the sales rep, I get that we don't want necessarily sales reps to be wimpy in this way, but it's just like, "I'll give you 400 bucks. I'm not dealing with this. I'm going to go sell more projects. How about I go sell a $10,000 project and you take out of that 10,000, 400 bucks and give it to that first customer that we're dealing with here?"

It's like I would always—it's like, the sales rep is like "On the next quote, I'll just add 400 bucks to it. I'll sell it. And then we'll just call it even." And it's like, that's kind of the mentality that I want the sales rep to have in a way. And again, I realize that's kind of flippant in a way because I don't want them purposefully putting our team in a situation to have to deal with upset customers.

If this becomes—this is a repeat offender, you are over-promising customers a bunch of stuff that we're not going to be able to deliver on, or you're going so fast through the estimate that you're not even opening the cabinet doors to double check that we can actually do these things—that's a problem. I still want to address that. Don't get me wrong. But I'm going to address it for the future ones, not necessarily say, "Hey, this is your fault, you go deal with it."

Jon Bryant: Right? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of value there. I'm thinking a lot about our process and what that looks like. And honestly, the sales reps deal with a lot and the more we can help with that, the better because honestly, everything starts with the sale. If we don't start with sales, we're doing other things. It's a problem. So yeah, that's a really interesting point. And in this case, I think probably those issues totaled a thousand dollars. It wasn't crazy.

The thing that we find is that usually the customer—the first call they make, so what'll happen is the crew will show up on site, the crew will look at it and say, "This isn't quite what we were expecting or what's written down here." And so they're making a call to the sales rep saying, "What's up on this thing?" And they're saying, "That's not there." And then the crew is like, "Okay, this is not normal. So we have to do an additional charge." And then that person immediately is calling the sales rep. "What did you sell me? Why did you miss this? This is inappropriate. I'm not paying this."

And how do you avoid that process? And for those who are listening, we are going to get into the steps here of how to deal with upset customers, but this is interesting.

Michael Murray: Well, I think it's how to deal with it is one part. Who should deal with it is kind of where we're at right now. And so it's like, let's first kind of identify that part and then maybe how do we deal with it? But I would say, yeah, we see this a lot, right? Where it's like the he said, she said.

Jon Bryant: Mm-hmm.

Michael Murray: You know, customer—the third coat example is a really common one. That's so simple to understand. And it's like, you have a tan color on your wall. You want it to go neon blue, it's going to take probably at least three coats. When I come out to do the estimate, if I don't know what color you've picked—you're like, "Yeah, I don't know. We're probably going to go with some shade of blue in here." It's like, "Okay. If it's like a blue gray, it's probably going to cover pretty well in two coats. We're going to be fine."

They pick out neon blue. And it—even maybe like Paint Scout blue or whatever. And it's just like, "Okay, probably going to need a third coat." Estimator didn't know that. Sales rep didn't know that at the estimate. I think the hope there would be that when that color is submitted to the admin or production team or however that gets submitted, that there is some sort of double check so that this happens before we get onsite.

So I think once we're onsite, customers feel like they're hostage at that point. They're like, "You're already here. You're already set up. You've already painted half the room. Now you're telling me it's going to cost more. So what are my choices? Throw you out of my house in a fit of anger and get stuck with this half finished paint job and go through this big fight or pay it even though I don't want to?" Like this sucks. These choices suck.

Jon Bryant: And they're already coming from a place of distrust as it is. Like the second that comes up, they're like, "You're just a typical contractor, charging me more money." And that is a problem for sure. So I think what you're talking about earlier was helpful.

Michael Murray: Yeah, we try to—it's certainly in our terms and conditions on our contract. To your point, nobody reads them. We actually moved that up to be part of the main body of the contract at the top where it's like, "This is what we're painting. This is the type of paint we're going to use," the stuff that we talk about on the presentation, if you will. And it clearly states that this quote includes two coats. If you are doing a significant color change, there's a good possibility you might need a third coat, which would be an additional charge.

Yeah. I mean, I think the important—we can get lost in what is the true value of a customer. Is $400 a lot? If we have to give a customer a free 400 bucks, is that worth it?

I would make the argument that it probably is. The lifetime value of that customer can be tens of thousands of dollars if done well. And if we keep in touch with these people and all the things. But we have to do it well early so that we're not just trying to avoid a one-star review. Because that's not a lifetime customer anymore. At this point it's over. They don't trust us. They hate us and they just want this to be over with and we're screaming at each other and whatever.

It's like, "Fine. You win. I'm not going to charge you. I'm just going to paint the stupid thing so I can get out of here and just pay me the original bill." That's—we've all been there. Hopefully we can avoid that. It's just like right at the beginning, crew walks in and they're like, "This is going to cost a hundred bucks or 200 bucks." I think the immediate thought is, is it even worth it? Or should we just don't even bring it up. Just do it. Just do it for the customer. And then if anything, maybe bring it up at the end. "Hey, just so you know. It took an extra coat, but we took care of it. We're not even going to charge you for it. We just want to make sure that you're happy."

It's like, "Oh, OK, interesting." If we think about how much money we spend on marketing to bring in customers, for $100 or $200 to have a customer become a repeat or referral customer is probably less than we spend per lead to bring in a cold customer who might not even necessarily book with us.

Jon Bryant: Right? Is that how you guys approach things right now?

Michael Murray: What's that, give it away for free?

Jon Bryant: Yeah, how do you manage that?

Michael Murray: I think it depends on circumstances. And it depends on how we got here and what was communicated and when. There's a lot of nuance to that. But no, we will definitely charge people for additional coats when needed. One of our core values is to build lifelong relationships with customers. But I always tell everybody that relationships go both ways. We don't want to be in an abusive relationship from a customer who is knowingly trying to take advantage of something that was not made clear at the estimate. There was no way that we could have known about it. And now they're saying we should have. I'm not going to go work for that person again anyway.

I think the biggest thing that was—I don't want my sales reps involved here as very little as possible.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Jon Bryant: So yeah, I mean, definitely, I see a lot of value in that. And I think either way, someone's making this call to the person they're upset. So maybe let's run through these eight different points here, just for whether it's a sales rep—whether you are a sales rep listening and you find yourself in these situations or you're on the production side or you're an owner that's getting these calls. Because sometimes it gets escalated to that level. Actually a lot of times, in our world, it's like one or 2% of customers are just really hard to deal with. And you might be getting a call.

So these are eight points that we've identified as being really important. And ultimately, we're trying to take these situations and deescalate them, understand the customer and recover trust. So, Michael, you want to start with number one when you're on this call, what are you doing?

Michael Murray: Yeah. So we put together this prep list, some kind of—we did some research on exactly what the best way to do this. First thing I think is just to stay calm. We want to just take a breath, take a beat, things like that. I always tell—I'll just share a quick note here. Personally, for me, as an owner, I'm a people pleaser. I want everybody to be happy. I'm not great at sales because I care a little bit too much about what other people think about me. Just deep down in my—whenever I do personality assessments and things like that.

And so when I hear about unhappy customers, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this is a major thing. I need to go create all these new systems. I got to figure out all this stuff." And it gets me down in these huge rabbit holes that's like, "Wait, this is just—we just have a difficult customer here."

So one of the ways that I deal with that is if I'm going to have a customer who's going to be upset, I have to hear about it from our team. I never want to hear about it from a customer because that gives me time to process it. If I get a call from a customer, I don't have any time. It's just like, "Hello. Yeah, what's going on? Wait, what? You're screaming at me?" And I'm not in an emotional state to just take a breath. How am I going to handle this? What are the possible solutions here?

Maybe do some investigation to figure out how did we get here? So I've made it very clear—if I have to be involved, which I really don't want to be, we have a handful of people that can handle this stuff. But I will. I just want to know about it from our team so I can prepare. And then I will call that customer or go out to their house or whatever is needed, but with some "Here's what we're going to do for you. I've looked into it. I'm in a very calm state now and I didn't just—this didn't just hit me for the first time."

Jon Bryant: Yeah, yeah. I think with that, my strategy has always been to not get surprised. Like if I see a number I don't recognize, I don't answer. It's just my policy. And that helps me. If someone's yelling on a voicemail, at least I have a chance to choose my emotional response.

Michael Murray: Decide who to forward the voicemail to.

Jon Bryant: Exactly, exactly. Or when I was actually making those calls, it was, "Okay, well, we're dealing with someone who's very upset." So at least I have some context. And the one thing I always struggled with is that staying calm and professional is so important. And for the most part, I'm really good at that, but I'm also someone that likes to find solutions really quickly. And in some cases, I wasn't doing all these other steps. I was just like, "Okay, fine. Let's just do this." And the person wasn't being—I was trying to take control of the situation versus just taking a breath and just being there was really key.

Jon Bryant: I think that leads us into number two, which is just acknowledging that emotion. You're staying calm, professional, this isn't personal. And I think, like you said, if you care too much, which a lot of us do, it's not odd. And so you can take it really personally. It's like, "Oh my goodness, I did this to you." And then you realize it's like, "Well, this is a lot of different things. Who knows?"

Michael Murray: Yeah, they might be having problems outside of this paint job that they're going through.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, that's very common. It's like, "Why did this job go so poorly?" The person's just been served divorce papers. Yikes. Didn't even see that coming. You're just the whipping boy at this point.

So yeah, sitting there, acknowledging the emotions—"We're frustrated. Okay, I get it." You're staying calm and professional. It's not personal. And saying something like, "I can hear how frustrating this has been. I'd be the same if I was in your shoes." A little bit of empathy goes a long ways and that starts to get you into a state where you can work together. And I think that's what we're going for.

Michael Murray: Yeah. And I think sometimes in that situation, to your point, if you just rush to a solution, that might not be what they want. They might just want to be heard and for somebody else to feel upset about this. They don't want—too often, we're busy and we just want to be like, "Yeah, what's the quickest way to be done with this? Because I've got other quotes and other things and whatever."

And they don't care about the $200. They're just upset. And they want somebody else to acknowledge that this isn't fair and it sucks and all of the emotions that they're going through. And so sometimes it's just better to just accept—go out. I like to meet in person as much as we can when we have to deal with these things and spend the amount of time that's going to take to get everything calm back down. And now that we've gotten through this—you feel heard—now let's start to think about some solutions here.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. And that is—that's funny. You mentioned that that's step three, listen without interrupting. Wild. We must've worked on this together. That's crazy.

Michael Murray: Segue. Professionals.

Jon Bryant: I mean, those moments when I've had to walk up to a house and I know the person's upset—these three things are just so important to me because that first moment it's like you've encountered a predator in the wilderness and you're just like, "How's this going to go?"

Michael Murray: Scary.

Jon Bryant: And it's a little scary. And so you've got to use these three things. Staying calm, professional, not taking it personally, acknowledging the emotion. "Hey, I understand you're upset. I can understand." And tell me about it. Explain to me the situation so I fully understand it because that's step four, which is really clarifying the issue. And I think a lot of us, once we've done these things, sometimes we jump—like I said, I jumped to conclusions. I'm like, "I know exactly why this happened. I know exactly what your problem is." But how many times have you talked to a customer who's been upset and you found out the issue is something different than what you thought?

Michael Murray: Well, yeah. And I think too, it's like sometimes they realize that it's like, "Okay, well, it's not that big of a deal." But as they—as you try to get them to clarify the issue and it's like, "So we just need to put an extra coat on the front door and it's like gonna cost an extra 50 bucks or whatever." It's just like, "So just making sure that's really what we're talking about here." It's like, "Well, yeah, I guess. Yeah. Okay. Okay."

Jon Bryant: Sometimes when you say it back to someone, it's like they can understand, they actually hear their own crazy, which is wild. Sometimes it's like, "So just to be clear, the $50 is where the problem is. Okay, just wanted to make sure."

Michael Murray: Yeah. Yeah. And I think what they want, and this is as we move on, but it's just they want that ownership. They want somebody to acknowledge the fact that they screwed up and it wasn't that homeowner's fault, even if it was. And it's like, just take it, just own that, don't blame shift.

One of the biggest—I use that blame shift phrasing here at Textbook that our team hears it all the time, which I think is important because I do believe that even when the customer changes the color or whatever, some obvious example where it's like, this is pretty much the customer's fault here. It's like, what could we have done? Did we get the customer to sign off on colors? Did we bring down samples to make sure they were happy before we bought all the paint? What could we have done to improve that color selection process? I know you guys are kind of experts in that spot there.

But it's like, there's always something we could have done better, even if the majority of the air quote fault is in the customer's hands here. And just blaming the customer doesn't help—it doesn't help us to get better for the future. And it's probably definitely not going to help this situation get resolved.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. So our point number five, which is—this is crazy, it's just flowing so nicely—but point five is just taking responsibility where you can. And I think that also from what you're saying is understanding that in every conflict, both parties have some responsibility. Usually. There's the odd case where you're like, "Well, this is—you had a tough day yesterday and you just need to take it out on me."

But in a lot of cases, there's things we could have done better. I think acknowledging that never hurts. Anytime I've seen a conflict goes nowhere is where both parties think they're right. And when you have that, it's just a total impasse. It's a standstill. And for us as somebody who's been engaged, I guess, as a service for people, if we can lead that process and say, "Here's where I think we might've gone wrong," I think sometimes that tells the customer "These are reasonable people. We can actually have a reasonable conversation about a solution because there's been some acknowledgement of the issue at hand."

I've heard a lot of times, friends who have hired contractors and the contractor comes in and just tells them they're dumb. Essentially the customer's dumb. "I'm right. I know what I'm doing." And for one, that guy's never getting the business ever again. But two, it just creates so much animosity towards "I know more than you. How dare you question me."

So I think there's healthy ways to do this. I like the fact that your team—you're talking about as a team—the blame shifting and avoiding that because the fact is, at any point, any person within our organization can deal with a conflict with the customer. We all have to have this in our back pocket.

Michael Murray: Yeah, let's use the example you brought up. It's like, should the sales rep—my understanding is sales rep—that cabinet painting example you gave with the piece of wood behind the screws or whatever. So they went out to the house, gave a quote. There was no mention of changing the hardware. Okay, fine. After they maybe booked the project or not, but then they brought up, "Hey, we're thinking actually we might want to change the hardware. Could you put that on the quote for us or whatever?" "Sure. No problem."

Jon Bryant: Mm-hmm.

Michael Murray: Probably not that much money. And now the crew shows up and they're like, "This is not the normal changing of hardware that we thought it was. This is way more difficult." And the estimator was like, "I didn't know that because when they brought it up to me, I wasn't there to even double check it." That's kind of up to speed. And it's just like, okay, so what—so obviously it's like, is it the estimator's fault? No, I'm not upset with the estimator here. Is it the crew leader's fault? Nope.

Jon Bryant: No.

Michael Murray: Doesn't sound like they did anything wrong. Office's fault. Nope. Customer's fault. Yeah, sure. Maybe a little bit, but they don't really feel like they did anything wrong either. They didn't know that this isn't how everybody's kitchen is. They don't do this every day. And it's just like, it's really nobody's fault. But we've got to move forward here.

And that blame shift mentality is just like, if we just say it's the customer's fault, this is gonna happen again or something similar, versus maybe there is a new policy where it's like, "Mr. Customer, I'd love to give you a quote to do the handles for you. All I need from you is a picture of the inside and the outside of your door so I can just verify exactly how the hardware is currently installed so I can give you that accurate quote."

It's like 99% of the time it's on the same way, but now that we've learned that it's not always, maybe that's our new policy. Maybe that's overkill. I don't know, but it's like, that's how I would want to handle that internally so that when we can debate, "Do we need to make that change? Maybe that's too much effort. It's not worth it. It happens one out of every 10 years. It doesn't really matter."

Or maybe it's like, "Actually, yeah, now that we're talking about it, this has happened two or three other times where it was kind of a similar situation. Or if we would have gotten those pictures, that would have really saved our butts." And it's like, "Okay, maybe that's going to be our new policy. If anybody needs an adjustment to a quote and we're not perfectly clear as to what that's going to be, we got to get pictures or send somebody out." I don't know. That's how I would want us to think through that situation.

Jon Bryant: So there's things we can do. There's things we could have done better. And now we're here. We've obviously had this conflict and it's not your fault. It's not our fault. Point six we have here is just offering a clear path forward. And I think, I said it earlier, money solves everything, which is weird in our world, but that's not a hundred percent true. But oftentimes customers are most emotional about the additional charge.

And in that case, we've acknowledged we could have done better. If the customer is reasonable, oftentimes they'll meet you in the middle. "Yeah, I understand that. I didn't know that either. That makes sense. What if we split it?" But sometimes we have to offer the path forward. And so whether we say, "Why don't we split it" or "We'll take on the cost" or essentially "Here's how we're going to fix this for you today" is the statement that we need to be making for our interaction to make sense and for the customer to know that we are looking for solutions.

Does that resonate with you, Michael?

Michael Murray: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think I mentioned it before, but it's just we first have to go through this—let the customer be heard, kind of get all that anger out, acknowledge the empathy, be a good listener. Now we're kind of like, there's this clear transition period of, "I think, have we identified the root problem here and all the other subsequent problems and the emotions?" And, "You feel like misled and you don't trust us or what are all the things?"

And it's like, "I get it. We have screwed up here. We've taken ownership. I'm really sorry. Let's now talk about how do we go forward? What are—what would you like us to do about it?" And I think this is, I mentioned this before, which is why I don't want to get surprised. It's like, I like to have a list of "Here's the ways I think we could solve this. Does any of this resonate with you?"

At the end of the day, customers are looking for a solution here.

Jon Bryant: I like the statement, "Is that a next step that makes sense? Is this the next step that makes—are you happy with this next step?" And see if you can get the customer, the other person to buy into that solution and just know that you have a resolution that everyone is—is amicable and it seems like it's gonna be workable.

Michael Murray: Yeah, because typically these things are coming up in the middle of a project. We're still going to have a crew at their house for a day, a couple of days, a week, whatever that is. And it's just like, we need this relationship to—we'd love to keep this customer as a lifelong customer, promoters, all this stuff. But at the very least, we'd like this to be a professional working environment so that we're not sending our painters into this unhappy customer who's just screaming and yelling and pissed off at everything all day.

It's like, let's get back to baseline. We might not get all the way back to happy. Let's get back to neutral here. If we do X, Y, and Z, are we going to be OK? Can we move forward here? Kind of a thought process.

Jon Bryant: For sure. Now, step seven, follow through fast. This one's one that I've just—I've had so many situations like this. It's hilarious. We've had some very tricky situations over the years with just things going wrong on some projects and ones that could have ended really poorly. And we did all of these steps. We did every single one up to number six. Customer was happy. And then it took us a month to get the solution figured out and boom, nobody's paying that bill.

And funny enough, we've had people who are just so good at one through six and could never do number seven. And it just destroyed any chance of anything good happening from that. So yeah, I can't stress this enough. Actions speak louder than empathy. Do what you said. And then let's confirm it's resolved. And if you miss this part of the process, the customer, the person is going be extremely upset. If you get this part right, it can solve the whole thing.

The confirmation that it's resolved—if you call, whether it's a sales rep or your production team, "I just want to make sure that happened. And that step we talked about is finished"—that 30 second phone call, you might now have somebody who's going to refer you for life. I think.

Michael Murray: Well, yeah, I think at the end of the day, where that all comes from is the customer wants to know that you care. Do you give a shit and do you care about them and their project? Or are you just every other contractor air quote, where it's just you don't and you're doing other projects and you're too busy to care about me. And that's where it's like, my money should buy you caring about my project is a pretty fair expectation for a customer.

And they're already upset. So their likelihood of getting more upset is pretty high. It's like, this needs to be priority number one—let's get this result taken care of ASAP.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. Yeah.

Michael Murray: Which I would make the argument, which is why I don't want my sales reps involved, which is partially because they're usually not the solution. Where it's like, "Okay great, got it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have the crew leader and the field manager and the carpenter and the painters and whoever actually do all the things that we just talked about. They're gonna put the extra coat on. They're gonna paint out the hardware. They're gonna fix the broken window. Whatever it is, they're gonna get the paint off the driveway."

Again, whatever the problem is—and we could talk for hours about all of the stories, but we've dealt with them all. And it's just like, at the end of the day, the sales rep's like, "Cool. So I'm not doing any of those things. I got stuff to do. I'm going to go sell more work so that hopefully we don't have to deal with this nonsense again if you guys could kind of do those things."

Jon Bryant: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think there's a lot of value there. I'm thinking hard about some of the situations saying, I think we could have handled that differently, or it could have been handled differently.

Michael Murray: What I do think though is, one, if the sales rep got the call—the customer called the sales rep—okay, it's unavoidable. It's going to happen. What I think should happen is sales rep is like, hopefully they get the voicemail. They just send it to the production manager or field manager. "Hey, this person's really upset. I trust that you got this." That person tells sales rep, "I got you. Don't worry about it. Don't spend any brain energy on this. You need to go sell." And then actually do it.

But then great. That's how that should happen. Then the sales rep though can follow up and say, "Hey, when that's resolved, let me know." The sales rep can now proactively call that customer and say, "Hey, I just wanted to follow up. I spoke to Jon Bryant, our production manager. He said he met with you, you walked through the problem here. And he told me that everything got resolved. It seems like everything's going well. I just want to give you a call, make sure that we're still in a good spot. Is there anything else that maybe we didn't quite resolve?"

That's where I think the sales rep can come back to—they do have that original good relationship, which is how this whole project got sold. And they can—they were never part of that negative emotion space—they can then come back and still be that customer advocate, just checking in. "Is there anything else that you need me to relay to that production team?" And also I think can help the sales rep's mental state to hear that, "Yeah, like they did take care of it. I know I was pretty upset, but I really do appreciate them going out of their way to get that resolved. That production manager guy was awesome. He was so understanding and I really appreciated him."

And now the sales rep's like, "Okay. I can go sell some more projects now. We're going to make mistakes, but these are going to get handled. I feel confident that what I'm selling is actually good."

8. Reflect and Learn

Jon Bryant: Yeah, totally. So yeah, no, Point eight, you mentioned this earlier, reflect and learn. I think that whole process you talked about earlier with your team, trying to figure out where you can actually—where the points are to do better. Could we have done different things to not have this happen? Are there just things we should be putting into our systems to change that result?

I think at the end of day, that's really important that we understand how to not have this happen again.

Michael Murray: Yeah. Can I share a quick story? So I'm going to explain where this whole mindset came from for me on why I don't want sales reps involved. And I think it's fun to hear about my misery and pain, so we'll go there.

So I take you back. I'm a college student running my painting business and I think my third summer of doing it. And so at this point, I had kind of figured some stuff out. I learned that you could charge for more than $3,000, which I talk about a lot. And so we're painting this big old Victorian house. Let's say it's got three colors, lots of detail trim. I don't know, hundred, hundred fifty year old home. And I'm gonna say I charged them roughly like $6,500. This is 2005 for context. Inflation has been a lot in those 20 years.

But today that's probably a $40 to $50,000 paint job, not because of inflation, but because I didn't know what the hell I was doing when I was pricing jobs. Alright. So I'm doing this $6,500 paint job, old Victorian, three colors. We're in the middle of it. The customer says, "Hey guys, I think it would look great if we add a little bit more trim detail. We've got all these extra little boards on this old Victorian. And I think it would be great if we had five colors."

I said, "Okay, no problem. We can do that for you, Mr. Customer. It is gonna cost a little bit more. You can imagine we gotta do all the details and trim it all out." And they're like, "Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Sure, yeah, just let us know at the end."

"Okay, gotcha." And you can already tell where the story's going. And so we get to the end, calculated it all out. We said, "Hey, customer, it turns out we're about $9,000. That's about where we're at here. So that's gonna be—you paid a deposit plus, don't know, whatever that was. Let's call it $1,500 bucks or whatever—the $5,000 you originally did plus this additional $3,000 or $2,500," I forget what I just said.

And the customer says, "No, I never signed for that."

Jon Bryant: Mm-hmm.

Michael Murray: "So here's the final check for the $5,000 bucks." I was like, "Wait, no, what do you mean? You told me that you would pay us that amount." And they said, "Well, I'll tell you, let me—I'll talk to my spouse and come back in a couple of days and we'll see what we can do."

And so then I went back at the time they told me to come back. I could tell they were home. They wouldn't answer the door. And I was pissed. I'm a college kid. If I remember correctly, it was three or $4,000 that they owed me, legit. They knew it. They were right. I didn't have them sign. I was stupid. I didn't know what I was doing. And I legitimately was losing sleep. This is a ton of money to me. This is going to be all of the profit I'm going to have for the whole summer, or half of it probably, or whatever. And I'm just beside myself. This is insane. I'm so pissed. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to handle this. I don't know what my options are other than just basically begging them.

And I did that for two weeks. I was calling them. I was leaving them voicemails, probably text messaging, although that was a long time ago, but probably text messaging them and knocking on their door and all the things. I realized, and then eventually after honestly two weeks of just losing sleep, I realized that it wasn't going to happen. And that the only thing I was going be able to do was just put it behind me and just needed to move on and go actually just go sell some more jobs and try to make money on those jobs.

But I wasn't selling anything during those two weeks. All I was doing was chasing that $3,500 instead of going out and trying to run my business and sell more projects and do those things. As a college student, I was trying to do something that I thought was pretty significant. And I think that's where my mindset comes from for our sales reps—there is a significant weight of dealing with these types of customers that we all deal with in this industry.

I think it can crush business owners just mentally and emotionally having to deal with stuff that just feels unfair. And it sucks in these situations. We can't sue the customer. It's never worth it. You can put a lien on their house. It doesn't get you anywhere. You can take them to small claims court. You're not going to win. And if you do, they're not going to pay you. And then you probably had to pay the lawyer more than you would have gotten anyway. And it's just the whole thing kind of stinks.

But what I've learned is just that if you don't take it personally, we just chalk it up to, yeah, every once in a while, we're just going to run into that customer who's just going to kind of stiff us out of 500 bucks or a thousand bucks or 4,000 bucks. Yeah, that stinks. It really does. But most people aren't that way. And I can go run a business based on those most people that is successful and profitable. And I'm just going to focus on how do I take care of those people better.

Jon Bryant: Hmm. Yeah, that's very impactful. I'm sure that's—it always does. Man, there's so many—figuring out how to—it's so easy to say. I'm like, "That sounds so great." And then you actually get there and you're like, "I'm losing sleep again."

Michael Murray: Dude, it sucked.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Michael Murray: As we were going through this episode, I'm just really living these stories that are so buried down in this 23 years of doing this stuff or whatever it is. And it's just like, this is where this came from. This is why I don't want our people having to deal with this stuff. But yeah—give a lot of credit to our production team who do have to talk to people like this.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Michael Murray: Well, this is a great episode for them then. Here's what you can do to make this better.

Jon Bryant: Totally, totally.

Jon Bryant: Well, it's probably a good spot to end. And guys, thanks again for tuning in to the Price Sell Paint podcast. If you like this content, feel free to give it a like and subscribe. We are more than happy to keep doing this if people appreciate it. And yeah, Michael, great chat, man. Appreciate your time.

Michael Murray: Good stuff, Jon Bryant. Thanks.

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