Episode 71: Lessons In Customer Service With Liana Sanders

As pet sitting business owners, difficult clients are inevitable. However, the way you as a business owner chooses to react to the situation is what truly defines you and your business. Liana Sanders of Wet Noses Pet Sitting in Fort Collins, Colorado, expertly handled a major customer service issue in her business, so I decided to bring her on the show to discuss how she remedied the problem. Listen in as Liana tells her tale and offers up some expert advice on handling difficult clients and providing top notch customer service. Some of Liana's tips and topics include: The importance of using phrases such as "This is my understanding of what happened" & "I'm sorry about the stress this situation has caused." Why business owners MUST have good phone and email followup as well as offering to appear in person to talk through the problem. The reason why business owners should make their employees feel like they have their backs by 'shielding' them. Why pet sitting business owners should not offer any resolutions or remedies until they fully understand the situation How businesses thrive when they utilize a 'separation of power' as well as giving situations TIME! You can learn more about Liana on her website and on her blog. Subscribe To The Show: Transcript: This is episode 71 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready—Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. This is Bella Vasta with Jump Consulting, and today I have one of our own with us. Liana Sanders is here with us from Wet Nose Pet Sitting and Dog Walking. I am so excited to have her on because she is in one of my Facebook groups and we had a debacle. Now you guys have got to understand that I have a lot of people in my Facebook groups and unfortunately sometimes people just come in there to vent or complain. I was really impressed with the situation that Liana had and how she handled it. I wanted to put her on a pedestal—I know this is probably embarrassing—but I wanted other people to hear about this scenario because we all have these kinds of situations in our businesses. I wanted them to hear about the steps that she took, not only for her own sanity but also to de-escalate the problem, back up her team, and still make the client become a raving fan. This is stuff we learn but hardly ever see implemented. So without further ado, welcome to the show. Thank you. For those of the listeners who might not know you, can you tell us where you are, the background of your company, how many people are working for you, just kind of an understanding of where you're at? Sure. I have a pet sitting and dog walking company in Fort Collins, Colorado, which is about an hour north of Denver for anybody who knows Colorado. We’ve been in business for about seven years now. I have a full-time manager and staff that runs anywhere between about eight sitters to fifteen at any given time, depending on how many are full-time and how many are part-time. Our business is mostly pet sitting. Dog walking isn’t as big here in our area, so we do a little bit of everything and we really specialize in high-needs houses and high-needs pets—a lot of very ill animals and a lot of households where the humans have health problems. We do a very high-end service for people that have really high needs. Which must make it interesting as the business owner. I do. I have a whole other business. My pet sitting manager actually handles the majority of our normal stuff for our pet sitting company. She handles most of the training, day-to-day operations, and scheduling with our clients. I give kudos to our manager—she’s fantastic. She’s been with us for many years, first as a pet sitter and now as the manager. I pretty much step in and handle the end of hiring, management of any situations that go wrong, or any major problems with sitters. I do the marketing and things like that. I have another business that takes the majority of my time. That’s incredible. I want our listeners to know that it’s not like you’re sitting around doing nothing. A lot of people are in that midst right now where they’re trying to hire office managers and it’s daunting. Kudos to you for finding an incredible office manager that can literally help you manage the company so you can manage another company. You are the true definition of delegation and scaling, so congratulations on that. Let’s take us back to this client we’re going to talk about today. Was this a new client or an existing client? This was an existing client. He’d been with us for about a year now. We were actually brought on because his wife was having some severe health problems. We were brought on when they were traveling for healthcare. The situation was always uptight and stressful because they were traveling for personal issues, not fun vacations. He had been using us pretty consistently off and on for the last year. My sitters were very familiar with him, and he’d used multiple sitters—both because sitters moved out of the area and because he was such a high-demand client that he had multiple sitters assigned to him. That’s interesting. He was a high-maintenance client, but you and your staff or your office manager were able to set the proper expectations that you couldn’t give him the same person every time. Oh yeah, there’s just no way. This guy literally uses two visits a day plus overnights, and there’s just no way that a single sitter can manage that every time he goes out of town. Sometimes we don’t often try to share visits or individual trips, but sometimes with that kind of client, it’s just needed—especially when they’re gone for two or three weeks at a time. Also as backstory, tell our listeners about job sharing since that’s common in your area. Absolutely. Our area is very relaxed. There are a lot of things we do with our company that I wouldn’t prefer to do but are common here. Dog doors are left open during the day, which we don’t love but it’s common. We also do job share, which is, of course, not optimal. We try to get other people’s information. Again, the area is so lax that people balk at not being able to job share. It’s a very dog-friendly area. Our city is built around the second-largest vet school in the nation. We allow job sharing even though it’s not ideal, and it hasn’t caused a lot of problems in the past. Got it. So this client has been booking for a long time. What did he book this time? It was about three weeks, a little bit off and on of overnights and a couple of visits during the day—twelve-hour overnights and a visit during the day. We did the first week and a half, then friends took over for a few days, then we took over again, then another gap, then a few days. What happened? My office manager called me in a panic on a Sunday night around nine o’clock, which is totally out of character for her. She said, “We’ve got this customer who’s super angry. He says we neglected the animals and he wants a refund.” I told her to take a break and that we’d connect with him the next day. He wanted a call back that night, but I said to tell him we’re looking into it and will connect the next day. I reminded her to breathe. I’m always hesitant to jump to conclusions when I don’t know the whole story. All I’m hearing is an angry story about who knows what. That’s good because you were able to be objective. Exactly. It really helps to have multiple levels of communication—sitters, manager, and me. I tell them to blame anything on me if needed. It gives them a nice layer of separation. The next morning we sat down to meet before responding to the client. I needed to hear from the sitter what had happened. The client claimed we neglected the dogs, so I pieced together all the information and sent him a quick email: “This is my understanding of what you believe happened. Is this correct?” I introduced myself politely without admitting fault. He’d been home for about four days, had told the sitter everything was fine, and then suddenly claimed the dogs were neglected because a friend came by and said there were over twenty accidents in the house. He assumed no one had been there. When we sat down with the sitter and manager, we went through the details. This sitter had watched my own pets before—she’s thorough and professional. We had GPS check-ins, photos, and messages proving the visits happened. The manager had also done visits herself. None of it lined up with his story. I tried to call him but only got email replies. He was upset and started posting negative reviews online. I stayed calm. Whenever I get an email that triggers emotion, I walk away for ten minutes before replying. Eventually he admitted his wife’s health prevented him from meeting in person, so I laid out everything clearly in one long email: what we knew, what questions we had, possible theories, and proof. After some back-and-forth, he finally admitted guilt. He had left a day-and-a-half gap between our last visit and when his friend took over. The dogs were locked inside during that time. He felt awful and apologized profusely. He even offered to give the sitter $100 and donate $100 to a charity of her choice. We haven’t worked with him much since then—they were dealing with serious health issues—but he did ask if we’d stay on as his pet sitters. My sitter and manager agreed, but we decided we won’t job share with him anymore. The way you handled this was exemplary—staying calm, seeking facts, involving your team, and offering resolution without jumping to conclusions. Thank you. Remember to like and subscribe on iTunes and Stitcher—and always keep jumping. For more information, free articles, and coaching sessions, go to jumpconsulting.net.