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231: Making Price Irrelevant · Customer Service Revolution | Customer Experience & Employee Experience for Business Leaders

0:58
Hello, revolutionaries.
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Welcome back to another episode of the Customer Service Revolution Podcast.
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I am here today with John DiJulius and we are talking about one of your favorite subjects today, John.
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making price irrelevant.
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Love that.
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John you always say making price irrelevant isn't simply about raising your prices or discounting less.
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It's about the experience that you consistently deliver.
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So can you talk about what that really means, making price irrelevant?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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I think if we think about the best brands in the world, they've made price irrelevant.
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Apple, like we pay, you know, $1,200 to $1,500 for an iPhone, that we can get mobile phones a lot less expensive.
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You know, at competitors, the Ritz-Carlton, Lululemon, I mean, you know, we pay absorbent amount of
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money for workout clothes that dicks or anywhere else we can get for a third of the price.
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So making price irrelevant doesn't mean you double your fees or raise them 30 % and not lose potential or existing customers.
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What it means is based on the experience your brand consistently delivers, your customer should have no idea what your competition charges.
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So there's a lot to unpack there.
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based on the experience your brand consistently delivers.
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There's a lot there that can't be dependent on if I deal with Denise, but if I deal with someone else, I'm going to get a different experience.
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if I walk in and so I just went one of our local banks here, they're so good at customer service.
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When we drive through and you go through to tell her they use your name,
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They ask you if there's anything else they can do for And they just do all the things that we teach.
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I made a comment, I go, you guys have great training here.
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And they said, yeah, just don't call our contact center.
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It's a completely different experience, right?
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And so that's kind of what that's unpacking.
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It can't be dependent on one thing and one thing only.
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So.
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And I'm price sensitive.
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I don't know about you, but I've driven three extra miles to save 50 cents on something, not realizing I just lost in that exchange.
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We did a podcast recently about that, the price myth busters.
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And so many organizations still treat pricing like it's the problem when often it's the experience behind it.
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What's missing?
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Well, it's everything.
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It's the entire experience.
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It's like when you talk about increasing referrals, how do you do that?
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It's just not having a referral incentive and asking every customer you come in contact with, you know, if they know anyone, the experience has to be flawless.
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This experience has to be unbelievable.
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So, you know, I have, you know, a few businesses I do deal with.
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personally as a homeowner or professionally as an entrepreneur that have made me so loyal with the consistency.
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You know, they do what they say.
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They show up when they say they're going to show up.
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The relationship they've built, the peace of mind that they give me and the brilliant comeback they've made when they have dropped the ball.
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When you do, when you work with a company long enough, they're going to drop the ball.
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but all those things have made me so loyal that I don't even know how they compare to their competitors, because I'm not out price shopping them.
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I'm not seeing if they're someone cheaper, because I also know the cheaper you go, the more it could cost you.
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But that's only a few businesses.
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The majority of the businesses I work with, I'm price shopping them because they haven't made me loyal in the consistency they deliver and the peace of mind and all those things.
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and the relationship they've built.
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Yeah, consistency is huge.
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You did a blog article about the four key themes that lead to price becoming irrelevant.
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And I know consistency was one of them.
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Let's talk about that a little bit.
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You noted that when the experience is so consistent, customers don't even know what competitors charge.
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How do you build that kind of consistency and emotional equity with customers?
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Yeah, so you gotta be brilliant at the basics.
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You have to remove employee roulette, department roulette or location roulette.
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And employee roulette is when the level of your client's experience is depending on which employee they get, which department they deal with, or which location they go to.
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Every business suffers from that to a certain degree.
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And so that's why you gotta have unbelievable obsession with the experience.
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And that's why the first thing, you know, great companies do is, is, create a day in the life of a customer.
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you understand what the customer is going through.
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have more compassion and empathy.
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You're more present and you realize the domino effect of your expertise, what it can do for that customer and what they're trying to accomplish maybe with their customers.
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and then the next thing is that the, the,
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customer experience action statement.
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That's that North Star.
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That's a clear call to what every employee should intentionally be trying to do.
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It's not fluff.
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It's not warm and fuzzy.
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It's a burden.
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It's what you should do every time you interact with another human being, whether it's 30 seconds or 30 minutes.
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And so then it's the non-negotiables, it's the never's and always, it's the journey mapping.
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All those things affect
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the consistency and you can't use as a crutch, well, you're dealing with, know, Claudia, well, Claudia's new.
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Well, I don't care unless you're going to give me a discount.
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I expect the same level of experience if you expect the same price that you're going to charge me.
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So we can't use new employees as a crutch for employee roulette.
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We have to make sure they're up to speed and can deliver that the experience our clients are used to getting with us.
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So.
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Yeah, the consistency is so important.
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You brought up journey mapping and I know
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So our live streams featured that workshop.
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Do you want to explain that workshop a little bit?
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Yeah, so we call it creating your signature experience and that is, you know, every world-class brand, Starbucks, Apple, the Ritz-Carlton, Nordstrom, they have a signature
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experience that you know is theirs.
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like, you know, Apple, it's not as unique anymore, but...
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They don't have a place where you check out.
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You don't go to a cashier and ring out and wait in line.
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They can ring you out right there on the spot.
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You ask for something, they get it, they ring you out and you're gone.
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That's a signature experience.
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Nordstrom's doesn't hand you the bag across the counter.
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They walk around and hand you your bag and shake your hand.
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That's a signature experience.
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So you wanna have that at every touch point that no one else is doing.
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you know, on the phone, check in, check out whatever your business model is.
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And so, and then you got to make sure that it's across the board.
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So our live stream experience revolution that we have quarterly will hit on those different components.
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One of them was, you know, creating your signature experience for your customer.
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One of them was creating your signature experience for your team members, things that they can't get elsewhere.
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Great.
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And for those of you listening, I'll have information in the show notes about our Experience Revolution membership and how you can sign up for that.
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There is a new workshop coming up on December 1st.
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I believe that's onboarding, John.
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The next one, yeah, it's a team member onboarding orientation the first 90 days.
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I think that's the first week of December.
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It's coming up.
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Monday, 1st.
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All right, let's get on to number two.
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You write that competing in the price wars is a losing strategy.
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Instead, you say you should compete in the experience wars.
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What does that shift look like in practice, especially for a company that's used to discounting or bidding on price?
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Yeah, you know, when we opened our first business, John Roberts Spa in 1993, we had the three no's.
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No employees, no customers and no money.
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And you could throw a rock in any direction and hit, you know, several competing salons like any city would have, you know, on a busy road.
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And so we could not spend, I would advertise outbuild
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our competitors, but what we could was, was, create an experience that no one else was delivering.
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And we didn't want to be the best experience in the salon industry because that's kind of irrelevant.
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and for most businesses, if, if, if, if a customer's buying from you, that means they're probably not buying from your competitor.
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I mean, unless you're a fast food restaurant where I'm probably eating different places every day, every meal, but, but, but.
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you know, at least for, for, you know, the salon, if you came in and got your haircut today, you didn't go to a competitor down the street to compare.
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So we wanted to be the best experience in our customer's day.
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If they went to the doctor's office, so they went to shopping, if they met their friends for lunch, we wanted any experience to pale in comparison.
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so, you know, price wars, a lot of people do that and it's just a race to the bottom.
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And there's always someone that can, you know,
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do it crappier and sell it for less.
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We want it to be the highest price.
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There's a lure, but you've got to justify the highest price.
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you have to constantly...
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There's a lot less people competing in experience wars, so there's less players, less competitions.
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But it's a game you have to constantly be raising the bar and losing sleep at night and focusing on what's in the best interest of our customers.
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What's best for them, not us.
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What's easiest for them to do, not us.
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Right.
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The next one, zero risk.
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I love companies that are zero risk to do business with.
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They make things so easy.
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You mentioned one of the keys to being zero risk to your customers, that when things go wrong, you fix them so that people are still loyal.
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How does delivering zero risk mindset contribute to price being irrelevant?
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Well, so to me, there's two parts of zero risk.
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One is that we have systems, customer journey mapping and all that in place that we drop the ball less than our competitors.
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So there's a trust factor that we're going to deliver consistently.
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It doesn't mean we never drop the ball.
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It doesn't mean Amazon doesn't get an order wrong or Apple doesn't
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you know, sell you a product that needs to be replaced, but they do it a lot less than their competition.
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The second piece to be in zero risk is when the ball is dropped, they pick it up and make it right.
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And sometimes, a lot of times you're more loyal than had they not dropped the ball at all.
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And so that's called the service recovery paradox is that people are more loyal when a company is over correct.
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So that zero risk mindset is just, again, you're not gonna be perfect.
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You're gonna get it right more often than anyone else, but when you do drop the ball, you pick it up.
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And so when there's a consistency, we call it brands you can't live without.
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Who are some brands you couldn't live without?
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If I took away from you that you can never do business with again, you'd be really, really disappointed.
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well, Amazon.
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I'm guilty of being a frequent Amazon user.
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Yeah, the UPS drivers know your house or the Amazon drivers.
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it easy.
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If you have to return something, I can run up to Whole Foods and return it there.
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I don't even need the box that it came in.
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Yeah, Amazon is the easiest company in the world to do business with.
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And what they say they sell is time.
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They say the average Amazon customer, and I don't know where you fall with average, But save 75 hours a year.
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Think about that.
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That's three days you got back.
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because you're not, you're not thinking about all the errands you have to run today and you have to stop at, you know, the drug store and you have to stop at Home Depot and you
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have to stop at Walgreens or Walmart or whatever.
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No, you don't.
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You just place an order and it might be here by the end of the day or tomorrow morning.
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You know, shopping, driving in traffic, looking for parking, trying to find an employee that'll point you to aisle 27.
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All those things got eliminated.
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But
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I don't know if most people realize Amazon's not the cheapest anymore, but they're just a default mechanism and they're great and they're consistent and they are in the certainty
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business because you know the moment your order got placed, you got the moment the order got shipped, the moment the order arrived on your doorstep, they communicate with you.
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So that's zero risk to do business with in multiple ways.
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I've had a great experience.
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I did something a few years ago where I needed a digital photo frame.
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I don't know why I needed it, but then I thought I ordered a couple extra.
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This was like in the summer.
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I ordered a couple extra for the holidays, just give grandma Joyce or whoever.
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The problem was I didn't open those extra ones until December.
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because I didn't need them.
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And so I wanted to load the pictures.
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So then we wrap it up and give it to them.
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Well, when I opened this four or five months after I ordered it, it wouldn't turn out.
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And so I'm like, I'm screwed because it's been four months since I bought it on Amazon.
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They're not going to, you know, you know, the warranty is gone.
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I'm sure.
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I'm sure you have 30 days, maybe 90 days.
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And I was way past both.
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And so I reached out.
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And Amazon said I had to deal with the seller directly.
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And I'm like, now I'm really screwed.
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Well, the seller, I explained the situation and, you know, and they told me, keep it, we're going to send you a new one at no charge.
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And maybe you can go to a radio shack or some electronics and maybe it's the cord and see.
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And like, I was so impressed.
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They didn't charge me.
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They didn't give me a hassle, but
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It's also what Amazon does with their vendors and partners.
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That if you want to be a partner and sell on Amazon, you have to have high ratings.
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And if your ratings go below a certain score, they'll stop allowing you to be an Amazon seller.
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So that's all zero risk.
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anything I buy from Amazon, I know it's zero risk.
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If it doesn't work, I'm gonna get my money back, or they're gonna replace it, or they're do something.
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So all those, to me, that's zero risk.
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Yeah, love them to do business with.
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All right, finally, last one, employee mindset.
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You point out that often customer-facing employees don't fully understand the value of what the company delivers.
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So when price objections come up, they default to discounts.
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Can you tell me how do you equip employees to articulate values so price objections fade away?
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Yeah, this is really important because I know every one of our customer-facing employees in all our businesses right now are probably being asked how much you charge for whatever
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you sell.
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then they give them the quote and then they, they, whoa, you know, I can get that cheaper somewhere else.
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I can get that 20 % cheaper.
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And it's what we say next, which is critical.
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And if your employees aren't trained, then they shrink.
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And they'll say, well, we'll throw in free shipping or we'll throw in this or your first 90 days, you won't have to pay for support or all those things.
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And that's shrinking and that's shrinking to the lowest price, if you will, versus saying, that's a great price, but let's talk apples to apples what you get with us.
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so let's talk about the DiJulius Group.
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think Claudia is really good.
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does sales, business development.
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But if someone calls up and says, heard John's a good speaker on customer service, or I've seen John, I would like to hire John, how much does he charge?
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And Claudia may say, $25,000 for a keynote.
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And they might be like, whoa, the other speakers we're looking at are between 10 and 15,000.
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Well, that's a great price.
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You know, let me ask you about your event.
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Tell me about your event.
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Well, then the person will say the event is where we bring all our managers, all our franchisees in for an annual conference every January.
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that's, you know, so you bring them in and how important is the speakers to, you know, the event?
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Well, it's everything, you know, I mean, you know, and then, you know,
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Next year, you know, or this year's attendance, how much is that driven on last year's speakers?
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Well, that's everything.
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If we had a really good event last year, attendance goes up.
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Well, let me ask you, if you bring in a speaker and they don't nail it, they don't crush it, can you have another event a month later?
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no, you don't understand.
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We only do this once a year.
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We can't afford to bring everyone in and they can't afford to leave their businesses.
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so this event, you know, this has to last for a year.
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Yes.
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So as she's explaining or asking questions, you're bringing up kind of the doubt factor of if we only spend 10,000 or 15,000, how much that's going to cost us because you're married
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to that event for the next 12 months.
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I'm trying to get people to come the following year.
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if you had a bad speaker or bad lineup is gonna be harder.
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So the cheaper you go, the more it costs you.
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Without disparaging your competitors or anyone else, you're justifying everything that goes in when you work with us.
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Here's the guarantees, here's what you get, here's the education training, all the things that go into what we provide.
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And you wanna get to apples to apples.
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So insightful.
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And I think it's something that...
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Not a lot of companies probably prepare scripts for their people on that.
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And I think it's important, right, to have, give them the tools to be armed with when somebody says this is too much.
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you know, instead of just saying, sorry, or, you know, that's what our price is, or let me give you $5 off.
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What, how do they explain the value?
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Right, justify the price.
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Let's go to the salon.
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We're sometimes hundreds percent higher than our competition.
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So someone calls and hears that we might charge $150 for a haircut, and they're used to paying 50 or 75.
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But then you explain, all our...
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designers go through a year, year and a half of training before they're even allowed to start taking a clientele.
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And then they have to continue to get educated.
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And our designers are, know, level one through level 10.
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And every level is based on their years of education, experience, training, know, demand, all those things.
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And so now you're justified and
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like any haircut, you can't take your hair off if it's a bad haircut and put it in the closet for the next two months.
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you know, when it gets explained, particularly, now you might not want to go to the cheaper one because of what you're getting with the more expensive one.
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That scripting, is that something that our members will find in a past workshop or an upcoming one?
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I don't know.
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Yeah, that's a good question.
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I don't know if we have any coming up or if we've written about it.
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I know we've written about it.
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Maybe in this blog, we might have gave an example, but I don't know anything off the top of my head.
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Yeah, that would be something good to add into the workshop.
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So our listeners, you are not a member, just to let you know, our members have a library of workshops that they can go to view and play, and work on, not just scripting for
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different things, but the journey mapping that John talked about earlier is zero risk.
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There's a zero risk workshop in there.
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And it's not just the past ones.
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you have an opportunity to work with John on the live stream one.
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So like we talked about the one coming up on December 1st, where you can actually ask John and Dave, our VP of consulting questions live as you work through your workshop.
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All right, to wrap up this episode, John, if a CEO or customer experience executive walked away from this episode and acted on one thing,
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What would you have them commit to this week to start making price irrelevant?
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Well, I think it's the point you factored in is how are we answering the customer's questions?
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Why are your prices higher than, you know, other people in your industry?
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And I think that has to be articulated, written out, trained, role played, and a mandatory part of new employee and ongoing employee training, because what we say is so key there.
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into just, I don't know, the owner needs a new car or something very articulate that justifies why people want to...
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The most expensive is usually the most sought after, but there has to be reasons why.
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So I think articulating that and training your employees on how to answer price objections.
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Great.
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And listeners, if you want to dive in deeper to any of John's work, the books, consulting, the Experience Revolution membership, the Academy, visit our website, thedjuliusgroup.com,
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or you can contact Claudia at tdg.click forward slash Claudia, schedule a call, and she'll be happy to answer any of your questions.
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Anything else you have for us today, John?
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No, that was it.
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Thank you.
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All right, thanks listeners.
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We'll see you next time on the Customer Service Revolution podcast.