The Importance of Customer Service and How it Impacts Your Bottom Line and the Value of Your Business

Jake shares his insights and study of Customer Service and the approach he and the team at Johnson Consulting take to improve customer service internally and how they help funeral businesses do the same. He then explains the financial impact that an increasing or decreasing level of customer service has on a firm's profitability and eventual valuation. For more information about the Johnson Consulting Group, check out the website or contact Jake at [e-mail] or at 1-888-250-7747. For more information about J3Tech Solutions' Performance Tracker, book a demonstration with Lori Salberg in her calendar that is convenient for you: https://meetings.hubspot.com/lori123 See the complete transcript here: Rob Heppell: Welcome back to the Funeral X podcast. I am Rob Heppell and I am joined with my funeral results, marketing business partner, Jake Johnson. Hey there, Jake. Jake Johnson: Hey Rob. How's it going? Rob Heppell: Pretty good. Things are good and joy. Some good feedback from our previous episodes of the podcast. I think people are getting to hear us and ask questions and things like that. One thing that we should talk about is customer service. I know that Johnson Consulting and Performance Tracker, that's a big focus of what you do in the overall part of the success pillars that you promote there at Johnson Consulting. I thought maybe you could dive into that a little bit more and let the folks know how that could help their funeral operation. Jake Johnson: Absolutely. Whether it's the Funeral Results Marketing or Johnson Consulting or a funeral business themselves, the way the world is going, as we all know, people expect to understand what's the price and be very transparent what they get so they can compare, look online, all these things that are going on. Customer service really ends up being to me, that frontier that people can't take away from you. If you're good at it, especially in a funeral business, they'll come back. They're going to come back and we know as funeral businesses, they don't come back too often. We don't want them not coming back the second time in their life to the funeral business and how are we going to do that? Through everything that... It's interesting. I'm going to pause and just talk about what suffers with everything that's going on in the world, where everybody wants to automate things and they want answers quick and they don't want to pay a lot of money for it. They want all the transparency and they want to be able to compare it and they want to look online. To me, the thing that suffers, if you're going to offer all that, 100% is the customer service stats being an issue. Because to me, it's funny, I'm oversimplifying it when I say this, but my brother's restaurant I said, "Wow!" We were talking about a restaurant that really just had bad customer service. I said, "What is that a product of?" He said, "Well, there's just not enough help." "Well, that can’t be that hard." And he said, "No, there's just not enough help." I know it's a little more complex at a funeral business, but we all know how hard it is to find people and how busy we are. Rob Heppell: I think too, Jake, especially with the pandemic and having funeral directors in a lot higher demand, when a funeral home is short-staffed and still has the same or higher call volume, that customer service is what gives away. I've heard folks saying that now, sometimes they're dealing with less star ratings because they are short-staffed. Jake Johnson: Right. Well, as a business owner, don't be the one that says, "Well, we just do a better job." How does that resonate with the consumer who assumes that any business that's in business does a good job. And so how are you truly differentiating yourself? There are ways with customer service training that's out there. We do it at Johnson Consulting, but there are others that do it.