Transcript

Have you ever had a customer where every time you talk to them it makes you want to grab a fork and stab yourself in the eye? Yeah, you probably have.

Hi, I’m Carmen Sognonvi and in this video I’m going to talk to you about how to decide whether you want to keep a customer or whether you should fire them.

It’s not an easy decision especially when a lot of money is on the line and so that’s exactly what I’m going to talk about in this video.

By the way, if you’re looking for more useful information on how to run a successful local business, be sure to check out my blog at CarmenSognonvi.com

Okay, so at what point do you decide that you want to fire a customer? After all, there is a lot of annoying people in the world and to some extent sometimes you can just suck it up and kind of accept it as a cost of dealing with the public and doing business.

But there are some situations where it goes beyond just a regular irritation.

For example, if you know in your heart of hearts that by keeping this one customer you’re going to end up losing 2 or 3 other customers, then absolutely you need to let that person go.

So under what situation would that happen?

Well, if there is any kind of a group dynamic in your business, this is a really important factor to consider.

So for example, at our business, Urban Martial Arts, which is a martial arts school, we have to be very careful about the kinds of group dynamics that exist in any given class that we’re holding.

Now there has been a couple of situations in the past where we’ve had students that have been extremely disruptive in class or they’re just really dragging everyone else down by complaining about things or they’re not willing to do what’s required of them.

In those kinds of situations we’ve really had to think about, okay, how much resources should we dedicate to trying to please this student and to what extent does that overstep the bounds because we’re now taking away from the 19 other students in the class? So that’s the kind of situation you really have to weigh.

Even if there isn’t a kind of group dynamic in your business model, you can still encounter this same problem of possibly losing customers as a result of keeping one and that could be because this one problematic customer is taking up all of your time.

They’ve got so many complaints, you’re always on the phone with them, you’re always having to deal with their issues and problems and that’s taking away from the time you have to dedicate to your other customers and they’re going to feel that.

So if you are finding that you’re running the risk of losing other customers, it’s time to get rid of that one customer.

Now, another situation in which I think it’s absolutely fair to fire a customer is if you run the risk of losing a good employee by keeping that bad customer.

And this is actually something that’s happened to us in our business. We had one particular parent of a child who was training with us who was constantly extremely disrespectful to our front desk associate.

Every time our front desk person would call her about important things like deadlines that were coming up, or checking in to see if everything was OK cause they missed class or any kind of billing questions, she would just always be incredibly rude to her.

It got to the point where it was a real morale problem and it was really getting to the point where this employee was ready to quit because she was so tired of dealing with this.

I know that it’s much harder to find a good employee than it is to find a good customer. So we basically and to ask the mom to leave our school and just let her know, “Look, I’m sorry but if you’re going to be disrespectful to our staff, you’re just not going to be a good fit here.”

Now, the irony of the story is that the mother had originally brought her daughter in to take karate classes with us because she felt that the daughter needed to learn more respect.

I wonder why that would be an issue?

Now, trust is such an important thing when it comes to business. Your customer trusts you to provide them with quality product or service. You trust your customers to pay you in a timely manner. Without trust, you can’t have a successful business.

So, if you’re in a situation where you feel very clearly that there is a customer who doesn’t like, trust or respect you, then it’s time to let them go.

And the same goes the other way around. If you’ve come into a situation where you’re dealing with someone you really dislike , you don’t trust and you don’t respect, then it’s time to part ways.

Why? Because you just can’t fake that.

And if you try to fake your way through it and act as if you like them or act like you trust or respect them, it’s just not going to feel genuine and no matter what, it’s going to lead to friction down the road.

So, there are a lot of situations where that can happen that kind of lead client or customer relationships to erode.

Sometimes it’s miscommunication. Sometimes it’s genuine error on the customer’s part or the business’ part and so you really need to evaluate what’s the nature of the relationship, how healthy is it?

If it’s not healthy, does it make sense to just go our separate ways? So I would say if that’s the situation, you want to think about firing your customer.

I want to leave you with one final thought.

Remember at the beginning of this video when I talked about the kind of customer that makes you want to stab yourself in the eye every time you talked to them?

Well, if there is someone like that that just drives you insane and every time you see their number come up on caller ID you cringe inside, every time you need to call them, you delay it for as long as possible because you know it’s going to be a really painful situation….why are you hanging on to this customer?

I mean, you went into business for the freedom. You went into business because you wanted to be your own boss an live life on your own terms.

If there is someone that drives you crazy to that extent, life is too short, let them go and even if you lose money out of it, just know that by letting go of one person that is making you unhappy, you’re probably going to make room for 5 great customers that will more than make up for the lost revenue.

Now of course, if you’re in the kind of situation where this customer is responsible for bringing in 70-80% of your revenue, be smart about it.

Make sure that you set things up so that your are able to let them go.

Make sure that you bring in the extra business so that by the time you let them go, you’re not going to take such a big financial hit.

But just keep in mind sometimes we just get wrapped up in the day to day of running a business and we forget about whey we started doing this in the first place. And we started doing this because we wanted to be happy.

So if there is something that is making you desperately unhappy, just let it go and don’t look back and ever regret it.

OK, if you’ve found this video useful, I would encourage you to sign up to get email updates from me.

You’ll get more great tips on how to run a successful local business along with some occasional special offers from me.

All you have to do is go to carmensognonvi.com/newsletter and fill out the form or if you’ve already on my blog just fill out the form right below this video.

Thanks for watching and I’d love to hear from you…have you ever had to fire a customer?

If so, what happened, what were the circumstances leading up to it and how did you come to make that decision and what was the outcome?

Do you regret it, are you happy, was it the best decision you ever made?

Leave a comment below because I would love to hear your stories!!

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