The Common (and Fatal) Mistakes That Businesses Make

I cowrote a blog called The Five Friends with my friends Larry Winget, Mark Sanborn, Randy Pennington, and Scott McKain. In the blog, we talk about subjects ranging from the greatest challenges that businesses face and best practices for employers to how selling has changed and the relative importance of hiring vs. training. We cover a lot of ground, and occasionally we use the blog to just let off some steam about things that are bothering us. Recently, our blog dealt with the common (and fatal) mistakes that businesses make and, specifically, businesses that each of us have fired as a result.

It can take years to build your magnetism with customers, and it can be lost in an instant. Often we lose a customer because of simple and completely avoidable mistakes. The great danger is that we might lose our vigilance against making such mistakes and lose customers because we simply weren't paying attention.

What follows are our stories of companies we have fired and the reasons we did.

I'll begin with my own contribution to the “You're Fired!” blog with my story about six infuriating months I spent in a quagmire of off-the-charts terrible customer service at the hands of the phone company.

Joe Calloway Fired a Phone Company

A couple of years ago I fired a company that had become irrelevant to me, and the ensuing madness and incompetence was almost beyond description. I will never do business with them again. I had a telephone line for my office—a land line that I almost never used. Finally I pulled the plug, cancelled the service, and that was that. Not.

For six months I dealt with the phone company reps who threatened me with collection agency action for my unpaid bill—on a line I had cancelled months earlier. One rep would say, “Oh, you cancelled that line. Don't worry. I'll take care of it.” The next week I'd get a letter from their legal department saying, “You're delinquent on your bill—we're suing.” Back and forth, to and fro, one rep more incompetent and uncaring than the next.

I think the two big, common mistakes that this company made were (1) having a system in which one department had no idea what another was doing, and (2) hiring people who simply didn't care about the customer.

I guess if I were to boil it down even more, I'd say to this company: “Don't be incompetent. Don't be mean. Don't be stupid.”

Mark Sanborn Fired a Restaurant

How do you go from being one of a customer's favorite companies to being fired by that same customer? I'd love to tell you that it's a difficult thing to do, but the truth is that it's easy. Mark Sanborn is president of Sanborn & Associates, Inc., an idea studio for leadership development. He is an award-winning speaker and the bestselling author of books including The Fred Factor, one of the best books ever written about customer service. Here's the story from Mark Sanborn of a restaurant that went from “favorite” to “fired.”

I fired one of my favorite restaurant chains. As much as I enjoyed eating there, I reached a point where “enough was enough.” Most interestingly, it was triggered when I tried to give management some positive feedback.

I took my family to a local seafood chain restaurant to celebrate a birthday. The experience was a parody of what should have happened: slow service, wrong drink orders, wrong food orders, and more. It was exasperating and, since I was hosting relatives, a bit embarrassing.

A young manager, however, saved the day. She apologized sincerely, comped the entire meal, and provided me a $50 gift certificate to encourage me to return.

I tried to compliment her to corporate. The website feedback form was convoluted, but I filled in the required information and praised the assistant manager. The promised “response within 48 hours” never came.

I called corporate to follow up. Whoever I spoke to wasn't very helpful, so I asked for a manager to call me. She said she'd have someone call but started to hang up the phone before she got my phone number!

At least she did pass on the information to someone as the local restaurant manager called a few days later and left a message. He said he'd be out of town on a trip and would follow up when he returned. He never did.

When I tried to use the $50 certificate, I found unexpected restrictions. I expressed my frustration to my server but got not even a little empathy in return.

It was the final straw.

At the time I was writing a Five Friends blog about our favorite restaurants. One of the categories was “favorite chain restaurant.” I had planned to use this particular one, but could no longer do so in good conscience so dropped them from the list.

All customers have a threshold that, once crossed, destroys loyalty. It takes surprisingly little time or effort to acknowledge and appreciate a customer who provides positive or negative feedback. Ignoring such feedback or taking it lightly can cause a customer to fire you.

Larry Winget Fired the Garage Door Company, the Air Conditioning Company, and His Doctor

My friend Larry Winget tells it like it is. He doesn't mince words, and he says exactly what he means. Larry is known as the Pitbull of Personal Development, and he is a six-time New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, a social commentator, and appears regularly on many national television news shows.

Here's Larry's story about who he fired and why:

My motto for life and business: Do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it, the way you said you would do it. If you don't, you're a liar and we won't work together.

I wanted some new garage doors, so I contacted what was advertised to be the best company in town. They had big ads in all of the fancy home magazines and had exactly the door I was looking for, so I called and we set the appointment. When the day and time of the appointment came, the company representative didn't show up and didn't bother to call to let me know why. I called him, as I had his cell phone number from when he set the appointment, and he didn't answer his phone so I left a voice mail. When he got to my house four hours later with no apology and no explanation of why he was late, I explained to him that not showing up on time and not calling me the instant he knew he was going to be late was disrespectful of my time and that we wouldn't be doing business. He was amazed that I felt that way, saying that he got delayed on a previous job and that it had nothing to do with disrespecting me. I told him that if he couldn't keep his word about an appointment, then I couldn't trust his doors, his price quote, or his promised delivery date, and that I had already contacted another company. He left not understanding any of it.

I had a problem with my air conditioner and hired a company to come check out the problem. They worked on it and explained that I would probably need to buy a new one. I was prepared for that and told them to get me a bid. However, when I went out later to look at my air conditioner after they were long gone, I discovered food wrappers, paper cups and wire clippings all around the unit. I called and told them not to bother with a bid. These guys missed the sale of a new air conditioner all because they didn't take 15 seconds to clean up after themselves. Again, a matter of disrespect of me and my property.

I visited my doctor for a checkup. After sitting in the waiting room for nearly an hour past my appointment time, I asked the receptionist why it had been so long and when I was going to be seen. She told me that she had no idea and that I could ask the doctor when I talked to him. I told her I would be happy to ask the doctor when I talked to him and asked again when she thought that might be. The receptionist then told me to “go sit down.” I'm a grown man and don't respond well to being talked to like I am a seven-year-old, especially when I am the customer and you are clearly in the wrong. I told her that my new doctor would be contacting them for my records as I was no longer a patient there. When I wrote the doctor about my experience, I never got a response back. This is another case where a business didn't respect my time or my business and was rude.

I am an easy guy to do business with: Respect my time, respect my business, respect the fact that you can easily be replaced as few have a complete monopoly on anything. It's really so simple.

Randy Pennington Fired the Lawn Service

Randy Pennington is one of the smartest guys I know and is a brilliant business speaker, advisor, and author. Randy helps a wide range of leaders in business, government, and nonprofits deliver positive results in a world of accelerating change.

Randy's story is one that all of us can relate to as customers, but one that hopefully you will never experience in your business with your own customers. Beware of the danger of success. In Randy's story, you see how having so much business that you can't keep up with it can cause customers to leave.

We fired the service that had done all of our lawn care, landscaping, tree trimming, and holiday lights for 17 years. There wasn't one single incident that caused us to leave. It was the culmination of a number of little things over an 18-month period.

In the beginning, the owner closely supervised the crews, paid attention to quality, and was excellent in following up and communicating. Then again, his business was new and hungry.

Over the years, the service level and responsiveness diminished. E-mails and telephone messages went unanswered for up to a week. The quality of the work became inconsistent, and we could no longer count on him to follow through on requests without constant prodding.

And yet, we weren't really looking to change. He's a good guy, and we tried to understand when he told us that he had so much business that keeping up was difficult. But we fired this provider for the same reasons that many personal relationships fail: inattention. We felt ignored and taken for granted. Someone made us feel wanted by asking for our business, and we said, “What have we got to lose?”

Scott McKain Fired The Oncologist

Scott McKain is one of the most sought-after speakers anywhere on customer distinction. Scott McKain teaches how organizations and individual professionals can create distinction in their marketplace and deliver the ultimate customer experience.

Scott's story is a sobering one, because it involves something very disappointing that happened during a most challenging time in his life. This story also shows us that there is no job or profession immune from getting fired. What's so sad about this is that any person serving other people could be so insensitive and oblivious to someone's feelings.

My wife and I were sharing with her oncologist about our just-completed weekend in Napa.

The doctor said to us, “Don't spend your time doing frivolous things like Napa. Your life will be ending soon.”

I was flabbergasted—why would you not want to enjoy the time you had left?

“Sheri's situation is terminal and she will be gone soon.” The doctor was talking as if my wife wasn't sitting right there in front of her.

Standing up and looking at the doctor, I said three words to her: “You are fired.”

Her jaw dropped. “You can't fire me,” she replied, “I'm a doctor.”

“Call it whatever you want,” I said, “but you will never see us again.”

We found another oncologist—a wonderful, compassionate doctor—and Sheri had another three years of full living, enjoying each day.

Sometimes when we think about firing, we tend to think of the examples of retailers or service providers that are mentioned by my friends here.

Yet, when professionals at the highest level of social respect fail to exhibit empathy or place themselves on a pedestal that interferes with the experience of the customer, client, or patient—they, too, deserve to be fired.

It Wasn't the Lack of a “Wow” Factor

Notice something interesting about each of our stories. None of us were lured away as customers by someone else offering a “wow” factor. Nobody fired their business because it wasn't offering something “extra” or “special” or “above and beyond.”

Each of us fired the business because it failed to deliver on something absolutely fundamental that we counted on. And that's what happens far too often. We take the basics for granted and think that, after a certain point in our success, we must look further to create competitive differentiation.

No! Customers are won and lost in the battle for who performs best at those handful of things that our customers expect. I think Larry said it best: “Do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it, the way you said you would do it.” That's it. If you are the best at those three things, you are competitive. You will win.

I think that my biggest frustration in working with companies wanting to improve their performance is the constant distraction of “buzzers and bells” that they think will differentiate them. But that's not what makes you magnetic. That's not what attracts business. The lawn service that does the best job at what they said they'd do, shows up on time, has service-driven employees, and charges a fair price will win. Ditto for restaurants, telephone companies, and even medical practices.

Legendary NBA basketball great Michael Jordan warned that when you “get away from fundamentals…the bottom can fall out of your game, your schoolwork, your job…whatever you're doing.”

Famous Last Words

You may read these stories of businesses that dropped the ball, missed the mark, or otherwise blew it and be thinking to yourself, “That could never happen to us.” Those are famous last words spoken by countless businesses that lost focus and one day realized that their customers were all gone.

None of the businesses that my friends and I fired had bad intentions, not even the unfeeling doctor whom Scott and Sheri were dealing with. It's certainly not that the leaders in these businesses didn't know any better. My guess is that if you had described any of these service mishaps to them, they would have said that of course you can't do that and expect to stay in business. And yet they all did it.

There's an old saying that goes, “We don't get hurt by what we don't know. We get hurt by what we know and don't do.” All of these businesses knew better than to do what they did. But knowing what to do is light years away from actually doing it. It's in the execution that we most often fail.

My best advice is to stay vigilant. With your team you must talk about the basics that our customers require of us and talk about it all the time. Professionals practice and focus on the fundamentals until they never get them wrong. The practice and focus never stops. Once you stop, you lose your edge on those fundamentals, and that's most often where you lose your magnetism and your customers.