SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to run your moving company virtually.

• “Running your moving company virtually has advantages and it doesn’t mean that you have to lose any momentum or be less aggressive about selling and servicing moves.”
• “Whether you have an established company with a full team of workers, or you are just coming up and looking to hire your first person, it’s no longer necessary to have a big office space where everyone can come to work every day.”
• “Since the COVID pandemic, a lot of moving businesses have transitioned to having their teams work from home. And while this new way of working helps keep your overhead low by not having to own or lease a big building for your office, it also presents some new challenges for moving company owners to maintain control over their business and people.”
• “There are advantages to running your company virtually, like having remote sales reps that don’t live in your city. Doing that can save you money on payroll and it really opens up your options for who you can hire. But, you’ve also got to know that they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. And you need to be able to feel confident and see what’s going on with your business from a distance. It’s totally possible to do that nowadays.”
• Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

1. Join the Moving CEO Challenge: Official Louis Massaro Community Facebook Group! A place for moving company owners to connect, share ideas, and inspire one another. Click here to join!
2. Latest Instagram!
   Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

RELATED POSTS

How to Build a $10 Million Moving Company from Scratch

How to Hire Movers for Your Moving Company

Recession-Proof Your Moving Company Now!

Get Freedom from Your Moving Business

COVID-19 and Your Moving Business

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
Whether you are an established company with a big office staff. You’ve got people in the building. You are coming up. Maybe you’re looking to hire your first person, but you’re like, man, where are they going to work? In order for me to hire somebody, I need to go out and get an office. Not necessarily. Right. Nowadays, it’s really important to make sure you keep that overhead low. So there’s a few things that we’re going to address today. We’re going to address, look, COVID’s a real thing, lockdowns are a real thing. We’ve got a lot of craziness going on in the world right now, but your business has to continue to thrive, right? You can’t be stuck. You can’t be fearful. You can’t be not doing the things you need to do. And when your people are at home, which they may have been forced to be at home for a while, or you may have made that decision to let everybody work from home, you want to make sure you’re still on top of them.
Right. You don’t want to lose that momentum. You don’t want to lose the aggressive approach to selling and servicing moves. And so I want to give you this layout here that I’ve been essentially helping private clients do with their business and break it down for you to show you that it doesn’t have to be where you see everything., right? So I want you to just think about how this will apply to you and your business, whether you’re like, hey, maybe I could start hiring some sales reps that aren’t in my city. Right. When you start talking about remote team, you broaden your reach on who you could have work for you. You might be in a city that… Maybe you’re in a big city and maybe the wages are really high, and maybe to find a good salesperson costs you a lot of money.
You might be able to find a rockstar in a smaller city somewhere in the country that’s not going to cost you as much. Right. Same thing with ops, or the reverse. Maybe you’re in a small town and you need someone that’s more of a fast talking salesperson to be able to do the sales. You’ll be able to find that. So, everything that you can do in your business, right. What we want to do is you just want to look at it and go, okay, how do we do the stuff that we do today in person at the office, but virtually? And the most important thing that you need, right, as the owner, is to maintain control and to feel control. When we talk about remote teams, that’s what most people, the feeling is, how am I going to control this?
How do I know that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do? Right. How am I going to be able to see what’s actually going on? And so that’s why we’re doing this today. So we’ve got sales, we’ve got ops. We’re going to talk everything from booking jobs to servicing moves with the premise of nobody is coming to the office. Okay? So, first thing we need to do is we need to set up what’s called your virtual command center. Okay? So if you think about when you’re at the office and you’re there, you have your way of sensing what’s going on. Right? You’re there, you walk around, you see some stuff on your computer. Maybe you call somebody on the Intercom on the phone and you talk to them. If somebody has a question, they come to your door. If you have a question, you go to their desk. Right?
That’s how you are running things day to day. So now we need to establish your virtual command center, right? And what you need to have basically up on your screen or up on your two screens on your computer to be able to run this. And so when we talk about the virtual command center, as the owner, you might have one version of this. As a sales manager, you might have another version. And as an operations manager, you might have another version. Okay? So I’m going to break all this down for you. But the thing to remember is, as an owner, that’s your CEO hat. Right? You have that hat. But if you’re also sales manager and you’re also operations manager, you’re wearing both hats, but you might have separate people for those teams. Right? So the way that everyone is set up is going to be a little bit different.
So let’s start by going through the tools that you’re going to need to be able to run this virtually. We’re in a whole different era here in 2020 of what we’re able to do without actually physically being at the office. And I could tell you from working remotely for the past few months, there are definitely areas where you become more efficient by not having that comfort of being able to just walk right up to somebody’s desk and say, hey, what’s going on, or come knock on my door if you need some help. So let’s talk about the tools that you’re going to need. First one is SmartMoving or whatever CRM that you use. You guys know that I’m co-founder of SmartMoving CRM software; runs your entire moving company. You need a CRM. Okay?
Doesn’t have to be SmartMoving. There’s other ones out there. Okay? This is obviously my recommendation, but you need to have that. Okay. So with sales, you’re going to be able to manage all of your leads, see what’s going on. You’re going to be able to watch all the follow up to see what’s all the… your remote sales team. Are they sending the emails? Are they making the calls? Are they sending the text messages? What are the notes in the system? How do they communicate that they need some help with this job? Once they book the move, where do they put the notes, so when it gets to operations, everybody knows what’s going on. Okay. So, we’re going to talk about how to use these tools in the different departments, but let me give you a general idea of what you’re going to need for your command center.
Second one is RingCentral or another phone system of your choice. You need something that is virtual. You need something that’s Voice over IP, so that people are able to run off of your phone system from home. You don’t want everybody at home working off their cell phones. Okay? You need to maintain control and distribution of calls from one central place. So, any phone system that could do this, great. Okay, if you don’t have, Ring… I’m not affiliated. RingCentral’s just a universal Voice over IP tool that’s pretty inexpensive, and allows you to have all the calls come into one place, and then you route them wherever you want them to go. You could have people all over the country. You could actually have people all over the world that are receiving calls, but they’re coming through and you’re able to monitor what’s going on.
Remember, this virtual command center, this is like what you as the either sales manager or operations manager has up on your screen to watch what’s going on. Okay? So what’s important here is that this is how you track what are your sales people really doing. Right. Are they making calls? Are they receiving calls? What about, can I listen to those calls and monitor those calls? You need a phone system that’s going to be able to allow you to do that with a dashboard that you could watch what’s happening in real time. Right. One of the keys to working from home is that anyone that is a inbound phone representative, meaning their role and function within the company is to receive calls. Okay? So whether it’s from customers or whether it’s to receive calls, maybe dispatch needs to receive calls from the movers. Anybody that needs to receive calls, whoever’s running the operation needs to be able to look and see what the status of each person is. Right.
In other words, if you’re working at home and you’re in sales and you need to step away for a minute, right, they need to put that phone in do not disturb. Their status needs to be do not disturb or their status needs to be available, or you’ll see they’re on the call, because that’s going to allow your phone system to distribute those calls evenly. Okay? Those of you that need help setting this up, go into your moving sales academy training in the foundation, there’s a whole lesson there on setting up your phone system on everything you need for the queues and how to route calls and what happens if nobody answers and all of that. That would take up this whole hour right here if we were to get into that. So, make sure you’ve got your CRM, you got your phone system, and then you need some kind of instant messenger tool. Okay.
I recommend slack. Okay. So Slack is basically just like a internal communication tool for in within your company. A lot of companies will replace the use of email internally and go to Slack instead. But how this works is basically anytime you need to communicate with your team, right, where normally maybe you’d look over and say, hey, what about this and what about that? Right. Or a salesperson might walk over to dispatch and say, hey, do we have availability for today? You could send a message through Slack. You could use any. You could literally use text messages if you wanted to, but with Slack, it allows you to set up different channels. Okay? So you could have a sales channel. You could have a dispatch channel. You could have a local dispatch, long distance dispatch, local sales, long distance sales, accounting.
So you could have different channels, so that there’s different communication going on between different people within the company. All right. I’ll even show you how we could use this with the movers as well, but you need some type of communication to where sales reps on the phone, they have a question for the manager. They have a question for dispatch. They’re able to send that message right away. And the reason I like Slack is there’s just a bunch of other cool add-on features that you could do automated bots that could ask your sales people automatically at the end of the day like what challenges did you have? How many jobs did you book? Are there any outstanding leads that we should follow up and do an authority takeover to get that job booked? So you could have that sent out automatically.
So it’s a cool tool. And, yeah, anything you want to use for instant messenger, I recommend Slack. Again, no affiliation. Number four is Zoom. Okay. You guys know the past couple of months, we did our livecast, we did them on Zoom. And the reason Zoom is so good, it’s just like instantly you’re face to face with somebody. And when you get used to that and you start using that tool as in the same way you would, as if you were in person with somebody. Like past couple of months, my private client groups usually come here to my office and we spend two full days together. We’ve done those calls over Zoom for two full days. Right. So, and the feeling as if it’s like you’re there with the person. So if you’re, let’s say you want to pop in on somebody at the office normally. Right?
And the normal scenario, you want to go walk into accounting and talk to them about something, you send them a Slack message. Hey, can we jump on Zoom? Sure. You jump on. You’re face to face. You’re talking, you record the call if you want to train somebody on something. Right. When you’re hiring for sales, you could do the interviews on Zoom. I had, when was it, two months ago, private client lost a couple sales people; two sales people, because when everybody went home, right, work from home, they didn’t have a good setup there. They weren’t equipped for it. Everybody was home. The kids were home. There was homeschooling, there was too much going on and they just weren’t capable of doing it. So I was like, all right, listen, let’s get you some more sales people.
Let’s hire four, okay, remotely, and train them all through Zoom. Run them through the same training that you guys have in Moving Sales Academy. Run them through that same thing. Right. And so instead of training them in person, you’re doing it over Zoom. You’re running through the same PowerPoint or keynote slides that you would normally train somebody on. And so just look at this as your face to face. Right. This is your face to face for anything you need. It doesn’t have to be a meeting that you set up in advance. You could literally send somebody a message. Hey, could we jump on Zoom real quick? And you’re on face to face. All right. Last one here is your truck GPS. Okay? So for dispatch, you’ve got to make sure that you know where your trucks are. And this is whether you’re working from home, whether you’re at the office, you want to… This is your virtual command center.
Okay. So the main areas of focus for sales are going to be SmartMoving, RingCentral, Slack. They might have Zoom just to be able to if you, as the owner, want to speak to them directly, or you’re going to do enhancement training, which we’ll talk about. They have that ability. And then dispatch will have SmartMoving, RingCentral, Slack, Zoom, and truck GPS, right? So we’re not going to get into administrative staff today, but you could totally have all your customer service bookkeepers, all of that operating from home as well. Either they’re operating based on objectives that they… and milestones that they have to hit, certain things that they have to accomplish, so you could tell if they’re actually doing the work. Or you could monitor their work and see what they’re doing and track their time. There’s tools out there. I think they’re called Harvest or Toggl. Just you could Google how to track remote employees in their work.
And you could see what they’re doing all day if you’re concerned that you’re not going to be able to monitor what’s going on. All right. So this is essentially your virtual command center. And then of course, there’s other stuff as well. Like you’ve got QuickBooks online for your bookkeeping. You might have Dropbox or Google Drive to store all your documents, so everybody has access to them, so that you don’t have to actually have files of things. So, that’s going to give you your command center. All right. So start thinking right now real quick about what other tools you would want to have up on your screen to be able to monitor what’s going on remotely.
All right, let’s talk about sales next. All right. So, mornings Zoom huddle. Okay. So, those of you that are familiar with the morning huddle, right, it’s a five to seven minute meeting every morning that the sales manager performs. And remember, you don’t have to have a dedicated sales manager, but someone’s got to wear the sales manager’s hat. So if that’s you as the owner, if that’s somebody that you maybe they’re a team leader and you have them fulfill the roles as a sales manager, someone has to wear that hat, because there’s too many moving parts in sales and too many areas for jobs to get lost. So the morning huddles, that five to seven minute meeting where you’re just like, hey guys, yesterday Chris, you had a great day. You made all your dials. You did all your follow ups.
I know you only booked four jobs, but they’re going to come back in today. Tommy, you got to step up the calls today. Yesterday your calls were low, the calls are what’s going to make you the money. Right. And you get everybody fired up for the morning, get the direction. Well, how many jobs are you going to book today? All right, good. Well, I’m working on that one big school job. I’m going to get that landed today. Great. What are you going to get done? You do that normally standing up in your office with your sales team. Get them fired up and get the direction going for the day. And the reason that you do it is because otherwise most people coming to work like [inaudible 00:15:53], I need a fourth cup of coffee. Right. And they get the coffee and they go back to their desk and they pull up SmartMoving and whatever you use.
And, right, that’s how they start the day. You’ve got to set the tone. These are your troops. They’re going out there to make you money. Somebody’s got to get them fired up. Right. And believe me, I didn’t want to do this back in the day. Right. You might say, Louis, but you seem enthusiastic. Because I realized that that’s what needs to be done to get to where we want to go. If you have people under you, people working for you, you have to lead those people. Right. So if you’re not going to be the person to do it, someone else has to do it. So the same way you would do it in the office with everybody standing up, you could do it in Zoom in the morning. You have a set time every morning. Everybody hops on Zoom. You have the communication. It’s like you’re face to face and you start the day. Okay.
Second one is monitor leads and calls. This right here is how you really start to manage the day-to-day of your sales operation remotely. The sales manager, whoever’s wearing that hat, is inside of SmartMoving and your phone system or your CRM, whatever you’re using and your phone system, and you’re watching. The same way you do now, right. The same way you go in now, and you go through all the leads and you see where people are. Are they doing their two plus one follow ups on the new leads? Right. Are they [cementing 00:17:27]? Are they calling messaging, email, texting? What about the jobs they quote? Are they following up five X follow up after the fact? What about when a job needs an authority takeover, right, on the third follow up so that they could get another voice and the sales manager could call and close that deal.
This all could be done remotely. Right. We just, what we do is we take away the comfort zone of being able to see everybody. But instead of seeing them, you’re now watching their actions. Right. Seeing them physically can be very deceiving. They might seem busy. They might seem like they’re on it, but what are their actions? Are they doing all their follow ups? Okay. Are they booking jobs? How about their calls? Are they making dials? Do they have talk time? My recommendation is that everyone makes a minimum of either 75 outbound calls per day, if they’re working a full eight hour shift. 75 outbound calls per day or four hours of talk time. Okay? And the reason for that is because if you’re working an eight hour day and your job is sales and your job is to call leads and take inbound calls. If you’re not getting four hours of talk time a day, what are you doing? What are you doing with that time, if half of your day isn’t spent doing the thing that your job is supposed to have you do? Right?
And the reason it’s either or is because some days the inbound calls aren’t coming in. Some days, the outbound calls are going out, but you can’t get anybody on the phone. Right. So if that’s the case, that’s where the more dials come in, right, because now what are they doing? They’re calling new leads. Right. Two times the first day. One more time the second day. Call, message, email, text. Plus, they’re also doing follow ups for people that they talk to. This is not an aggressive number. I know it might seem like a lot; 75 dials or four hours of talk time. If you work in a call center that’s doing outbound [cold 00:19:32] calling. It’s like a 200 call a day quota. Okay? So if that’s not where you are, start somewhere. Make it 50 calls a day, make it 30 calls a day.
The first step is to first identify what those numbers are and that’s why I recommend RingCentral, because you could get those numbers out of there. All right? So for sales, that’s how you really know, are they doing what they’re supposed to do? Because you’re monitoring their leads in SmartMoving. You’re monitoring their calls in RingCentral, you could see all the text messages they sent through here and the emails they sent through here because they go out automatically through SmartMoving. Right? So this way you make sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do without feeling that you need to hear them and stand over them. Right? Third one is manage with reports. This whole thing, even if you just did this as an exercise where maybe you’re like, Louis, I don’t want to work remote. I like going to the office. I like my people in the office.
Great. This is not me recommending that you go remote. Let me just clear that up real quick. I’m not recommending that you go remote. This is a convenience thing. It’s a cost savings thing. It’s a safety thing. And it’s a lifestyle thing. Right? I have a private client, she’s like, look, I don’t want to have an office. I want to have people working remotely and let them work from home. I want that to be my culture. Right. And let it be a benefit of working for my company. Cool, great. I’m not going to argue with that. It’s all about what you want. But even if you did this as just an exercise of, let me pretend everybody’s remote and force yourself to run it as if you can’t see them, as if you can’t walk over to them, you’ll probably tenfold the efficiency of your business, okay?
By managing with reports, it forces you to focus in on the metrics, okay, focus in on the numbers that really matter as opposed to what you hear and what you see, okay? Are they getting the talk times and dials? What is their booking percentage? How many new leads did they take, right? You might have a rep that’s taking too many leads. You need to dial that back, right? So you want to manage with reports, again, you guys have this in your moving sales academy training. I believe it’s called manage with reports. It’s a whole lesson on all the reports that you need to run. It’s in there, but just you’re dialing in everything to be able to run it, again, without those normal senses that we all feel so comfortable with. Right?
This is, when I open my first additional location to where I wasn’t there, it was a huge shock because all of a sudden, I couldn’t see what was going on. Right? So this is really helpful too, for opening additional locations. Weekly Zoom meetings. Okay? So I recommend that you do a weekly sales meeting. No more than an hour. You get everybody. This is whether you’re doing it remotely or in person. Okay. In this case you would just do it on Zoom instead of in person, right? I’m just showing you that everything you do in person, you could do remotely. So you have your weekly meeting.
You want to pick one to two topics for these meetings a week that are based upon booking more moves, right? One or two topics that you can train your team on and discuss and improve and make sure they get the perception of how you want them to see things. Or maybe there’s a new concept that you’ve learned that you want to implement, and you’ve got to have the time to set up and discuss it with your team. That’s what these weekly sales meetings are for. Okay? They’re not for like, Hey guys, tell me what’s going on. Right? You could go around and get victories from everybody as a good way to start it off. Tell me some victories you had this week. Tell me one great thing that happened.
And you could start it off that way, and you want to end it with some motivation. You want to end it with some encouragement and some inspiration to get out there and book some moves. But it’s about taking, if all of a sudden you implemented a new script or all of a sudden, you’re like, Hey, we’re going to start doing follow up, which I hope you guys are doing. Right? We’re going to start doing follow up. You need to talk to your team about it. You need to get feedback. You need that time. That’s the time you do it. In these weekly meetings, I always recommend that you try to bring your whole sales team in and do it at once. You might have to do two shifts or two separate meetings, depending on how big your team is and forward all the calls to operations, forward them to bookkeeping, forward them to accounting, forward them to your spouse. Right?
Get somebody to take the phones for that hour, once a week. So you don’t miss calls. Okay? You don’t want to miss calls and you don’t want to be in a meeting. And everybody’s like, it just won’t work. If you’ve tried it before, I’m sure you have, where you’ve had the sales meeting. You’re like, oh, phone’s ringing, Louis says their calls are gold. We got to get those calls. And somebody leaves and they go get the phone. It just disrupts the whole meeting. Okay? And enhancement training. Okay. Enhancement training is the process of taking your existing sales team and making them better. Okay? And the way that you do that is you start by listening to their calls, right, pick five random calls from each salesperson, listen to them. Right?
So now you’ve got RingCentral or another phone system that has these functionalities to where you can either monitor and listen to the calls live. While they’re on it, you could just click on the computer, listen, and now you’re listening to the call. You could actually even do what’s called a whisper feature to where, if you’re trying to train somebody, you can log in as whisper. And let’s say, they’re talking to a customer and you could go, offer them a three-man crew. Offer them a three-man crew. The rep will hear you. The customer won’t hear you. And you could guide them through the conversation. Right? So you want to listen to five calls and you could do it through recordings as well.
Recordings is usually going to be easier because you don’t have to catch them while they’re on a call. You pick five random recordings. You’ll have your calls being recorded through your phone system. You’ll listen to them. Again, most of you are in Moving Sales Academy. There’s a lesson called Enhancement Training. Go watch it. Download the Moving Consultant Evaluation guide that’s in there, all right, that’s going to give you a whole checklist of what to listen for on the calls. And then once you identify areas where they could have improvement, you bring them in, you talk to them, you discuss those areas of improvement with them because that’s what’s going to make them better.
Too many people go and try to hire a sales team. And it’s like, Hey, go ahead. Do your thing. Let me see what you got. And they send them out there to swim or sink and wonder why their sales aren’t where they want them to be. All right? When I had 70 reps on the phone, it wasn’t because they were all rock stars, it was because Enhancement Training. We were working with them. We were coaching them. We were making them better. We were showing them the areas where they could have improvement. We’d pull up the recording of the call and we’ll say, you see right there at the end where you hesitated? And you’re like, okay, well, do you want to set it up with us? Or do you want to call around? You don’t say that. Here’s what you want to say. Okay. We actually have availability on that day. Do you want me to set you up in the morning or the afternoon? Right? Or you’re all set. Do you want to put that on a Visa or MasterCard? You want to roll into the reservation and other areas as well, right?
So when you’re listening to it and you have the evaluation guide and you’re able to identify where they can improve, you take somebody that’s okay on the phones and you turn them into a rock star. And so you have the whole conversation with them. You set up a Zoom call, right, and you have the whole Zoom call right there. You could pull up the recording, listen to it together. Everything you can do in person, okay, you could do through Zoom. All right? So you’re like, okay, Louis, that’s great and everything, but what about operations? What about movers? Right.
Now, of course, operations, movers, it’s not going to be as ideal of a situation or as easy of a transition. But if you’re forced to go on some kind of work from home or you just feel that that’s what you want to do for safety. Or you feel like, Hey, you know what? This might be a nice model that I can implement into my business to where I don’t need to go get that office and commit to that rent right now. Let me run this off of a very low overhead. You could still do your operations with it as well. So first thing is crew text confirmations, okay. This is something that you do it right out of SmartMoving. If you have crews that you want to see who’s coming in tomorrow. In other words, get confirmation that they’re going to be there. Let them know, Hey, you’re needed. These are the jobs you’re doing. I need confirmation.
SmartMoving will send a text message out to them. And all they have to do is reply I believe with just a C. You guys probably know if you let me know down in the chat. I think it’s just a C, it’ll show up in your system that, Hey, this mover confirmed that they’ll be there tomorrow when you need them to be there. Right? Save so much time instead of having to text everybody or call everybody or wait until they come back and talk to them. So you’ve got that going on, right? So now your crews will be there and remember your dispatcher, whoever’s wearing that hat, again, it might be you, is setting up the jobs and setting up the crews from home, right, in your virtual command center.
You send out the text, you know they’re coming in and now we’re talking about trying to go totally virtual. Right? So you don’t have to go all the way to the extreme. You could dial it back a little bit and have some stuff virtual and some stuff in person, but assign trucks. You probably already assign trucks to drivers, meaning this is your truck when you’re here. If you’re not here and we need to use the truck, I’m going to give it to somebody else. But, I always like to assign trucks to a particular driver because then they take care of it. Right? They make sure it’s clean. They make sure they’re more accountable for what’s going on. Well now you truly assign that truck to the driver, meaning you give them two sets of keys, right, and it’s like, you could check in on them periodically to see how the truck is or have them shoot a video and send it to you. But they’re responsible for that truck. Either they are parking it where they live, or there’s a yard that you have where you keep everything.
But for the most part, they’ve got the truck, they’re responsible for it. And there’s no need to be there in the morning to assign trucks. But then you’re like, Louis, what about boxes? And what about equipment? All of that. And my take is, ideally I want them in my warehouse. Ideally, for me, I’d like to be working at the office. Okay? But we’ve got to be able to adapt to the times. Right? We’ve got to be able to be in a position where we’re not scared to do this if we need to, to where, if we go on lockdown again, you’re like, Hey, I’m on it. I’m going to make the shift. I’m going to pivot. We’re not going to slow down because of this.
Well, if you can’t have your equipment and your boxes and everything they might need locked up in the office, you could do an equipment container, okay, with camera. So this would be like a storage, I hate to use the word pod because I got to trademark on that. But basically a storage unit that you deliver to the customer’s house, right? So even if you don’t have your own, you could literally rent one, put it where your trucks are parked. Or if you park your trucks in a self-storage unit, you could even put one in there. Now you can get a camera that operates off battery. You could even do a ring, if you’ve seen the rings where basically you monitor a whole thing from your phone, somebody rings the doorbell and you could go on your phone, pull up the app, see them and have a talk with them.
I don’t know how much they are, but they’re cheap, okay, for what they are. You could put one of those in there on battery and say, Hey guys, when you get there, you put the storage unit or the container on a combination lock. When you get there, hit the ring from the inside, let me know what it is. Let me know what you’re taking. You want to make sure you’re getting truck inventory. All right? So we talked about slack before. You could have it set up in there where there’s already a template set up for truck inventory. Those of you that have my truck inventory sheet know that actually all of you should have it. It’s in the operations training under dispatch. Okay. That you need to have them every morning. How many pads? How many straps? How many two wheelers? How many four wheelers. How many 1.5s? How many 3.0s? What’s on the truck?
Well, when they go take new equipment, they’re going to need to let you know what they’re taking. You could have it all set up in a template. They could go to the app on their phone, fill out their inventory, let you know what they’re taking. Okay. They could even communicate with you right there in that very cost effective, battery operated camera that you could talk to them from your phone, wherever you are. So you’re not even stuck at your desk, and figure out what’s going on. So that’s an option there. Then electronic paperwork. You’ve got all of your… you have no need to get them paper bill of ladings. You’ve got all your bill of ladings if you do storage, all of that is electronic. You assign them a truck. You assign them a tablet. That’s all run again through SmartMoving, and all the paperwork your customer signs, is done electronically. There’s no need to have them somehow scan copies of paperwork to you, or bring paperwork to the office. It’s all electronic.
And then perfect move pictures. So in the operations training, there’s a less called the perfect move and what this is it’s, I give you a checklist in there of what the movers should do the minute they get to the job, the minute they’re ready to leave for the drop off. Right? When they’re done with the drop off, all of that. And the idea is that you create what is your ideal, perfect move and train your movers on it. Instead of like, Hey guys, go out there and do a good job for this person. No, train them on customer service, train them on as soon as they walk up to the door, you want the driver to shake hands of the customer. Maybe not right now with all this going on. But you might have different protocol.
You might have had to update your perfect move currently. You show up, maybe they got the gloves and the mask, just to show that concern. Whatever it is, you’ve got to have that outlined and in the perfect move, what I like to do in there is once you get to the house and you put down your floor runners, and you cover the rails and you protect the door jams, I like to have them take a picture of that and send it to dispatch. This way you know it’s done. So this takes away the need, I still think spot checks are really important going out and checking on your movers. But if you’re in lockdown, people are working from home or you don’t have that ability because you have the whole team working from home, they send pictures of stuff like that.
Once the truck is loaded, I want to see how the back of the truck is loaded. Take a picture, send it to dispatch. Right? Once the truck’s empty, take a picture, send it to dispatch. So this is if you’re like Louis, we’re operating remotely now. It’s been tough. Implement all this. If you’re like, look, I want to scale, but I don’t want to go get an office. This is how you could do it. If you’re like Louis, I want to continue to work in my office. Great. Pretend that you can’t see the people. Or maybe your office is set up to where you’re maintaining six feet. I’m maintaining six feet from only Chris and I in the office. Nobody else is here. So I’m maintaining the six feet. You could still use all these tools.

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to systematize your customer service in your moving company.

• “I see a lot of great moving companies out there that have integrity, they care about their customers and they really run a great business, but they get caught up because they don’t have their customer service process in place.
• “No matter how good you run your business, there will be some problems from time to time. Complaints, damage claims, unhappy customers… These are all part of the business. So, it’s important to find a way to reduce them, handle them systematically, and use those issues as opportunities to improve and make your moving company better.”
• “When a complaint does come in it can be easy to take it personal. Which is totally understandable, but the key is to get past that place and see that if you could just systematize your complaint process to where when the complaint or a claim comes in, here are the exact steps that happen, and you resolve it quickly and move forward.”
• “Learn how to get your customer service process to be steady, consistent, and ready to grow with you as you grow your business by watching Customer Service Best Practices for Moving Companies now!”

Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

1. Join the Moving CEO Challenge: Official Louis Massaro Community Facebook Group! A place for moving company owners to connect, share ideas, and inspire one another. Click here to join!
   ?
2. Latest Instagram!
   Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

RELATED POSTS

Train Your Movers In Customer Service

Increase Profits With Raving Fan Customers

Resolving Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

Preventing Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

Charge More Money for Your Moving Services

Transcription

Louis:
All right. Welcome, welcome back to the Moving CEO Scaling Series day eight. We have finally crossed that halfway point, and we are still on systematizing. Those of you that have been with me for the last seven days, you know that we’re talking about scaling your moving company, taking what’s working, bringing it to that next level, whether that’s opening additional locations, franchising your business, whether that’s taking just what you do now and lifting it up and doing more of that and becoming more systematic and more profitable with what you do. At this point, you’re probably like, “Louis, let’s start talking about scaling.”
“Let’s start getting to that place where we could talk about, how do I open those offices? How do we start franchising? What do we need to do to start growing what we have?,” and if you’ve been with me for the last seven days, you know how important it is that we first stabilize, systematize, then scale, and we don’t move into the scaling aspect when we’re not ready, and there’s just a few things that we need to tighten up, and so during this systematized section of this series, we’ve been talking about different areas of your business. We talked about your marketing, we talked about your sales, we talked about operations yesterday, and today, we’re going to talk about customer service, okay? Customer service.
What that means is, really, think about your customer’s journey with your company, from the minute they first speak to somebody at your office till that final move is done, and then possibly anything after the move that needs to be handled as well, what that experience is like. I have personally witnessed way too many companies out there that I see are doing a great job for their customers, they’ve got integrity, they care, they will only focus on getting the right crews on the jobs, they’re not looking to just book jobs at any cost and just send anybody out there to do them. They really run a great business, but they get caught up because they don’t have their customer service process in place, because no matter how good you run your business, no matter how good of a moving company you run, there will be some issues, there will be some problems, there will be some complaints, there will be some damage claims. These things are part of the business, and what we want to do is we want to find a way to reduce them, we want to find a way to handle them systematically, and we want to be able to use those complaints as opportunities for us to get better, right? We never want to let a complaint come in and go out without looking at, “What can we improve with this whole thing?”
Right? We’re going to talk about some of that, and so these companies that I see, it’s just that when a complaint does come in, they’re so caught off guard by it, and the owner and possibly managers or anybody involved will really take it deeply personal, which I totally understand and I totally get, but we want to get you past that place. We want to make you see that if we could just create a process behind this, if we could just systematize, complaint comes in, “Okay, here’s the steps that happen, and we move forward.” Right? It’ll make those situations, however few they might be, just run smoothly, and they don’t throw off everything else, right?
They don’t kind of rock the boat, so there’s a complaint or a claim or whatever the case might be, and it doesn’t throw everything else off for the day, or worse, you don’t start accumulating a bad reputation, you know? I see companies that have great ratings on Yelp, but then maybe don’t respond to BBB because they’re like, oh, “BBB is old-school,” and they’ve got an F there only because they haven’t responded to a complaint or two. If they would have just responded, they’ll go back up to wherever they were, B, possibly an A, or companies that they’re still, “BBB is everything, Yelp,” that’s going to go away. That’s just a fad, and they don’t handle any of their Yelp reviews, right? Your customer journey will dictate your company’s reputation nowadays.
It is way too easy, way too simple for them to just pick up their phone, say what they want to say, can’t do credit card chargeback, whatever it might be, right? What I’ve come to learn about complaints and customer issues is that most of the time they’re very small, manageable issues, small, manageable complaints, but if we let them go unattended, if we don’t respond to these customers, if we don’t give them the satisfaction that they’re looking for of, number one, being heard, that something’s wrong and kind of going through a process of helping to deescalate the situation, then it becomes a big, unmanageable problem, right? I want to talk to you about just systematizing your customer service, getting it to a place to where it’s steady, it’s consistent, as you grow, this will grow with it, and let’s start here today by getting into a few points, all right? The first thing that we want to do is we want to talk about your sales to service consistency. Sales to service consistency, and what this means is …
It really means that … It should really be marketing to sales to service consistency. I don’t have enough room on the card, to be honest with you. What this means is it’s like, look, when we have our marketing, when we have our postcard go out, our website, whatever marketing material we have, we’re starting to set expectations for that customer based on the images they see and the copy that they’re reading, the text that they’re reading. We’re starting to set expectations. When they call in and they speak to somebody from your company, whether they get their quote over the phone, whether you go out and do an onsite estimate, now you are starting to solidify those expectations.
You’re starting to set new expectations. You’re starting to make promises to that customer about the service that you’re going to provide, so now expectations have been set. One of the biggest areas where problems come in is when the expectations are set, but then they’re not met, right? You set them in your sales process, but you’re not meeting them in your service, and so we want to take a look at our marketing to sales to service consistency, right? The easiest way to do that is to … Again, just you guys know, I’m big into get out a piece of paper, get out a pen, right?
Get out a note-taking app on your phone or on your computer. Get out a spreadsheet, whatever works for you, some device of recording what’s in your head and get it out, and we want to say, “Okay, let me take a look at all my marketing. What am I saying in all the marketing? What are the promises that we’re going to make? We’re going to quilt pad all your furniture, on-time delivery, whatever it might be, whatever is there, whatever promises you’re making in your marketing or statements that you’re making or promises to your customer, right?
Those are expectations that are starting to be set, so then take a look at your sales. “What’s being said on every call? What’s being said on onsites? What are we insinuating? What are we promising? What are we telling customers?”
Then, take a look at what’s actually being done. Not what in theory should be getting done, but what’s actually getting done on every move. Yesterday, we talked about creating your on the move checklist, like all these 14 days tied together, and so we’ve got to look to make sure that the stuff we’re promising is the stuff that we’re delivering. It’s simple. You’re like, “Louis, yeah, I get that.”
Okay, but do this exercise, go through that and see, “Is it consistent? Is your promise on sales what is being done on service? Are your expectations that are set being met on service?” Okay? You could use this tool in reverse too, to help your sales and help your marketing, because what a lot of companies …
Let’s say you do marketing sales service to help improve customer service, and a lot of times, guys, that’s just notes in the system, taking really good notes, training your team to take absolutely fantastic notes when they speak to the customer. Customer mentions they have a little poodle named Fifi that might run out the door when the movers are there, put that in the notes. Everybody needs to know that. When the movers show up and they’re already aware of the stuff that was said to the salesperson, they feel at ease, they feel calm, right? You’re setting a good first impression.
The customer, they never want to hear your excuse of like, “Well, the salesman didn’t tell me that. The estimator didn’t tell me that.” When they’re dealing with your company, they want to be dealing with one entity. Think about like your logo. They don’t care that you have multiple departments and that you have to pass the baton from one to the next, so to do this in reverse, you basically say, “Okay, what are we doing in, this kind of will help sales and marketing now?”
“What are we doing in our service that we’re not talking about in our sales, that we’re not talking about in our marketing?” Right? You might be doing a lot of great stuff. You might be putting floor runners down, you might be putting door jams up, you might be wearing masks, you might be … Whatever steps you’re taking to provide a great service, put that in your sales, put that in your script, put that in your marketing, okay?
Just make sure that you’ve got sales to service consistency. Whatever’s being said to set expectations, you’ve got to meet those expectations, and you need everybody on the same page, right? Dispatch needs to know what sales is saying so that they could pass that message along to the movers to execute that move correctly. Sales needs to know what’s in the marketing so that they can make sure they’re saying the same thing and not contradicting what’s in the marketing, right? This will save you a lot of problems.
A lot of problems. Okay. Next one is before, during and after the move, before, during and after the move decide who is responsible for that customer. Before, during and after. The term, dropping the ball, it’s a sports analogy, but if we look at it more like a relay race where someone’s passing the baton and they’re like, “Look, here, it’s yours, you take it now, you run with it,” it’s actually a better analogy to look at this because if the call comes in, the salesperson speaks to them, then that gets passed on to operations or dispatch, and then that gets passed on to the movers, and then after the move, maybe customer service, and we’ve got to define this, because although it’s a great, noble thought to say, “Hey, we’re all in this together,” if the customer calls, I want everybody to just take care of that customer.
Yes, of course, take care of them, talk to them, hear out what they need to say, but then get them to the right person who’s responsible during that stage of where they are in the life cycle of the move. Otherwise, what happens is people are like, “Well, I thought you handled that. I thought you handled that.” Right? Let me just give you an example. For me, I think what should happen …
This is what we practice. What needs to happen is before the move, before the move gets sold, okay, it’s the salesperson’s responsibility, okay, your moving consultant. It’s their responsibility. They own that customer, right? They’ve got the ball. They’ve got the baton.
Once that job gets sold, once it gets booked, it needs to get passed on, okay, and so where does that get passed on? Does it get passed on to your dispatcher? Does it get passed on the customer service? You’ve got to decide that, because now we’ve got confirmation calls that need to be made, so you might be having customer service, or you might have dispatch make those calls, not sales. Sales, their job, they’re the fishermen. They need to go out and catch the fish.
They catch the fish, they toss the fish over to operations, operations gets that fish, fillets the fish, cleans the fish, right? Then, the movers are the one that cook the fish and serve the fish, if that makes sense. The point is we want everyone to have a job and a point of responsibility during the customer’s life cycle, and so for me, the salesperson, once you book the job, that goes to dispatch. The customer calls in after they’ve booked, even if they want to speak to the sales, we route them to dispatch, okay, because it’s now in their hands. It’s being planned.
The logistics are in motion, right? Anything that’s said, that’s the person that really needs to hear about it, okay? Then, during the move, dispatch is responsible for that. Of course, the movers as well, but in the office, dispatch is the point of contact during the move. After the move is done, it’s either going to be dispatch, or if you have a separate customer service, it’ll be customer service that handles that.
One of the worst things you could do is send a customer issue or complaint back to the salesperson to deal with it. Now, a lot of people will do it like, “You need to deal with it. It’s your customer. You own it,” but when you do that, you’re now taking them away from doing what they’re supposed to do, which is fish for more fish, get more customers, handle your leads, handle your sales process, and you’re demoralizing them. Every time you put a customer issue or a customer complaint in the hands of a salesperson, you are just chipping away at their confidence at what they’re selling, you know?
They’re going to handle a customer complaint about, “This happened. Your guys broke this,” and then hang up the phone and talk to someone else, and tell them what a great service you’re going to provide. It chips away at that. You’ve got to keep this separate. One of the best things you could do, if you have the room in your office or however you’re set up, working remotely, keep sales over here and operations and dispatch over there, okay?
They do don’t need to be crossed, working together. They could communicate by phone, communicate by chat, get up and go see one another if they need to, but they shouldn’t be in the same space, okay? Next thing is get yourself what I call an awareness board, okay? An awareness board. We had an awareness board that started off as a whiteboard with, just put the black tape on it, the black lines, okay, and any customer that was not 100% happy with their move, not a complaint, but if we knew they were not 100% happy with the move, we put them up on the awareness board.
That then turned into a spreadsheet that we kept up on a TV in the office, that then turned into software, that went up on the TV in the office. Now, people are using SmartMoving to have their awareness board up there of any open issues, any customers that are not 100% happy. Why? Because if you let them linger out there and you just say, “Out of sight, out of mind,” or if they’re not making any noise, there must not be a problem, before you know it, bad review. Before you know it, complaint, right?
We want to be aware and proactive about all the issues and we want to get on top of them before they become, again, a bad review, a complaint, a chargeback, an attorney letter, whatever it might be, okay, so you want to stay aware, and then someone needs to be actively working to resolve these issues. That’s it. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to give them back everything that they’re asking for. It just means that you need to decide what you’re going to do and move forward, which brings me to the next point, which is complaint resolution process, establishing your process for how you’re going to handle a complaint from the minute it comes in to resolved, okay? Whether it’s resolved satisfactory to the customer or whether it’s resolved unsatisfactory, or whether it’s resolved, we turn them into a raving fan, it needs to be resolved one way or the other, but you need a complaint resolution process.
What does that look like? It just looks like, “Essentially, what’s the first step when you’re notified of a customer that’s not happy? What do you do?” Right? These are the things that you need to think through, but think about, “Okay, when we first notified the complaint, what’s the first thing we do?” Right?
Well, how could you be notified? You could be notified because the mover let you know on the job that they’re unhappy, they could have called in, it could be a review, it could be a formal complaint, right? It could be an email. What’s the process that you take them through? Right?
I’m going to give you some things to think about so that you could create this process, is first, you need to gather information about what happened on this job, so based on what the customer’s saying, you’ve got to find out like, “Where could the problem be?,” because every problem in your company, it really comes from one or two places. It’s either people or process. It’s either there’s no process, therefore, things just were run the way that people wanted it to be run, that were involved, or the people aren’t following the process, or the process needs to be updated because it’s outdated, and so we need to figure out what that is. Part of this complaint resolution process is having someone that’s going to actually speak to this customer and hear them out, right? Seek to understand where they are coming from.
We’ve got to stop being so defensive, and I know it’s hard when someone’s like, “You guys did a shitty job,” but we’ve got to put ourselves in a position where we look at ourselves as like a third-party mediator, if we will, right? No emotional attachment to this situation, not getting mad at the customer for saying the things they’re saying, but just thinking about, “Okay, let me put myself in their shoes. Let me understand where they’re coming from. Maybe we did drop the ball.” Right?
“Maybe we dropped the ball.” It happens to the best of us. It happens, you know, and so we’ve got to just listen, and there’s two things that happen when you do that. First of all, you gather intel. You gather information.
You find out what the issue is, and you find out what the real issue is, because a lot of times, what they’re saying is the issue is not always the real issue. You let them talk. You let them talk. The other thing that’s happening, other than finding out what’s really going on is you’re allowing them to release their pressure valve, right? You know, when you let the air out of a tire, you press that little knob or whatever it is in the middle, and it’s like, and it’s deflating? You’ve got to be that for that person, right?
The best way to do that is to listen without defending, listen without blocking, listen in an empathetic way, but while you’re doing this, you’re taking notes so that you understand what’s going on, right? When you do this, when you allow … When I say you, it doesn’t have to be you. If you’re like, “Louis, I can’t deal with that. I don’t want to listen to all of this,” okay, good.
Hire somebody that will. Find somebody that will be good at it, that will understand it, that’s willing to listen, right? Now, you’ve allowed them to deflate, and what happens is we find out through this process … In my programs, my clients have what’s called my complaint resolution form, which is essentially a form that you fill out as you’re talking to the customer, kind of walks you through this whole thing, and what we come to find out is that what they initially called about that seemed like such a big deal started with something really, really small, but what happens is they feel a little silly sometimes for calling and complaining about something that’s so little, that they’re like, “Let me beef this up so I could get what I want. Let me make this.”
“Let me add whatever I can to this, because this little complaint that I’m giving here doesn’t sound like significant enough, so let me talk about the guy smoking outside. Let me talk about, oh, and you were late, and this, and I was promised that,” which all could be totally true, but what’s making them upset? What’s the real issue that if it didn’t happen, they wouldn’t have made an issue out of it? That’s what we’re seeking to understand, and the only way you’re going to do that is putting yourself in their shoes, listening to them, helping them release their air valve, okay, make good notes, attentive listening to what they’re saying, not just like making fun of them in the office with whoever else is there, right? I get it. I totally get it, but this is an opportunity.
You’ve got to start looking at these complaints as an opportunity to make your business better, because every time that you don’t, every time you don’t really listen and hear them out, you’re missing the most valuable information you can about real intel to how your company’s doing, the perception, the expectation that you’re setting, right? Once you do that, part of your complaint resolution process never leave the scene of a complaint without looking at, “How do we correct this internally?” Always deal with the customer. Always get it resolved, right? Then, what do we do with a customer that is just, “Hmm, okay. I’m satisfied with the resolution,” versus someone who’s like, “I’m still pissed off,” and somebody that’s like, “Oh my God, you know what?”
“You guys, you really kept your word,” and something happened. “Listen, mistakes happen. I totally get it, but you stood up. You did the right thing. What could I do for you? Where could I give you a review?”
Right? We’ve got to take people through this process. Then, every single part of this complaint resolution process ends with, “Where do we need to have process improvement or training for our people so this doesn’t continue to happen?” How else are you supposed to know where your weak links are in the business? Doesn’t mean the person’s weak.
Doesn’t mean you’re weak, right? This is a unit, right? You could have the best players on a team, but if they don’t know how to play together, if there’s no game plan, if there’s no plays that there’s somebody calling, people will drop the ball, so we’ve got to identify after each one of these and figure out what you’re going to do about it moving forward. Part of the complaint resolution process might need to be you speak to the salesperson. Somebody needs to say, “Okay.”
If the complaint stemmed from there, talk to them, get their statements, see what they said. If it came from the movers, talk to them, see what they said, get some information so that you could resolve the complaint, all right? Then, what you want to do, I know this all might sound like common sense, but what I want you to ask yourself is, “Are you doing this, and are you doing it consistently?” Not like, “Louis, I know this stuff,” but, “Are you doing it consistently?” You know?
You might know that in order to get a six-pack of abs, you’ve got to … I’m not signaling because I have a six-pack. I’m just, I’m saying if you know you want to get a six-pack of abs, you’re like, “Oh, I know I got to eat better. I know I’ve got to workout. I know I’ve got to do my core work.”
Just knowing it’s not enough. You’ve got to do it consistently, right? This right here is another core function of your business. The five fundamentals of every single moving company are lead generation, booking moves, servicing moves, customer service and accounting. Everything you do in your business falls under those five categories.
You get those five systematized, you’re ready to scale, right? You’ve got your lain, good foundation to build on. You don’t systematize this stuff, you’re going to scale on quicksand, and it’s going to be like this, and you’re going to wonder why it’s such a shaky ride, and then it becomes suffering, instead of scaling. It’s why we’re talking about systematizing, right? You’ve got your complaint resolution process. Now, you need a process for getting those five-star reviews.
We can’t just wait for these to fall on our lap. We’ve got to be proactive, we’ve got to go for them. We’ve got to get those five-star reviews, so what’s your process for this? Too many people, it becomes such a painful point when they get the bad review, but what are we doing to mitigate that with good reviews, okay, so you want to have a system. Those of you that are on my software, SmartMoving software, you have the ability …
I hope you know, you have the ability after the move is done. The customer gets a text, the customer gets an email, and it takes them through what I call the Review Fetcher process of guiding them through a quick, easy, painless, 60-second process that’ll allow them to go give you a review, but also filter out anything that will be a bad review so that it’ll come in to your awareness board so that you could go to work on your complaint resolution process to deal with it, right? Imagine sending out something to a customer and they’re like, “Hey, I’m giving you two stars.” Well, instead of guiding them to Yelp to give you a review, instead, it comes into your awareness board and says, “Hey,” to somebody that’s unhappy. Get to work and make them happy.
Figure out this problem, right? Whereas, they say, “Oh, you guys were great, five stars,” it leads them right to wherever you want them to go. You want them to go to Yelp, you want them to post that review on Google, you want them to post it on Yelp, Facebook, wherever, systematize this process. Systematize this. Have your movers get the review right there on the spot. Get the video testimonial right there on the spot.
You’ve got to build this in. Otherwise, if you don’t build this in to the day-to-day, it just doesn’t get done. It just doesn’t get done. I mean, ask yourself like, “How long …” You know this.
I mean, you guys know this. I’m not telling you something. You know that you need to get more five-star reviews. You know that, right? Give me a thumbs up. Let me know, like you know you need more five-star reviews.
This is something that you can do something about. You can’t do something about Yelp filtering them all off the first page, right? You can just keep getting more and more and more and more and more to where whatever percentage they filter off. It’s fine, but your online reputation is everything right now in 2020. I call it your Google garden.
You Google the name of your company. In that first page, it’s there. That’s your … People are like, “My online reputation.” Go Google the name of your company. Whatever’s on that first page, that’s your online reputation.
That’s what customers are seeing. Go clean that up. Go resolve those issues. Call any customers you see with low-star ratings and run them through your complaint resolution process, right? Learn from it so that you could see, “Okay, but there’s a problem here with our sales to service consistency.”
“Where did we drop the ball? Maybe we dropped it because during passing the baton, before, during and after the move, there wasn’t clear, clear, clear instruction on who’s responsible for that customer.” Right? Guys, go after these five stars. Go after the five stars and go after the one stars, right?
You’ve got to start embracing customer complaints, and look at it, instead of like, “Oh, man,” and just getting totally … I mean, I get it. I get it, I get it, I get it. I think because I do a lot of personal development work and stress relief work for myself, for my own mindset, I’ve been able to, over the years, not take it so personally, but does it feel like a stab in the chest? Of course, but then you’ve got to move past that and look at it and go, “You know what? That complaint’s there because there’s still something that is not resolved yet in the business.”
“There’s still something that if I was to go scale right now, if I was to go scale right now, I’m going to bring that problem with this model.” By systematizing your business, you’re creating a model business, right? A model. A model is something that you could take and you could duplicate. Before you take something, and if it was something, a document on your computer and you want to make several of those documents, you could just copy and paste, copy and paste, but before you copy and paste, you want to make sure that original document or whatever it is, is how you want it to be.
It’s the same thing with your business, so start looking at all these complaints that come in. Sure, they’re frustrating, but it is what it is. It is what it is. Don’t think this is an easy business. Don’t think that you could like not put focus, energy and attention on customer service and resolving issues, and run a great business and make good money and live a good life and let things run systematically, and not be putting out fires every single day.
It’s just not the way that it is, but it doesn’t mean that that’s the business and the way that it has to be. Meaning, take a little time to set this stuff up, right? Take a little time to set this stuff up. It is insane to go year after year after year after year with the same problem and just complain about it. Will you be able to put every single complaint, every single issue to rest?
I hope so, but chances are no. Chances are there’s still going to be issues. Moving’s a very stressful time, you’re walking into somebody’s house, you’re taking everything they own, you’re putting it on a truck. Strangers are coming in their house, putting it on the truck, it’s stressful, you know? There’s a lot of cheap furniture out there that breaks the minute you put a finger on it, so complaints would happen, complaints will continue to happen, but it’s how you deal with them, you know? I’m not saying you don’t care right?
When a complaint comes in and it doesn’t phase you, it’s okay if it doesn’t phase you because the reason that it doesn’t phase you is you know it’s going into your little process to handle the customer’s issue, find out what’s happening, assess how you can make it better, and put a plan in place to make it better so it doesn’t happen again. If you keep doing that cycle with every complaint that comes in, they’re going to get less, they’re going to get less, they’re going to get less, and you and your company are going to get stronger and stronger and stronger. You see how this makes sense? You care less not that you don’t care about that customer, you just feel confident and know they’re taken care of. We took the time and we set up our complaint resolution process, and because we took that time, I don’t have to get so emotionally involved in every single one that happens, right?
That’s how you truly care, not by letting it make you sick for the day that a complaint came in, losing sleep over it, having a plan to work on your marketing strategy and scale, and work on big things in your business, needle movers, and it all gets thrown off because that complaint came in and you’re just emotionally like out of it now, right? I get it, but I get it because I was there, and I get it because I made the leap from that to a better way, which is what I’m talking about, and it’s almost like you go from an insane way to a sane way of running a business. When you’re in that place, you make better decisions. When you’re in that place, you’re a better employer. When you’re in that place, you’re able to have a conversation with a customer and truly see where they’re coming from, not to get like to war, and they’re like coming at you and attacking you, right?
You seek that information. You want to know, “Why is it that they’re unhappy?,” because we need to solve that, because otherwise, my plan to open 10 offices, if I’m dealing with one complaint a week, I’m going to be dealing with 10, probably more a week, because once it’s not in your site, it’s a different story. We’ll talk about that when we get to scale. Take the time to get this stuff in order. Let me recap for those of you just joining us.
I want to make sure you don’t have to go watch this whole replay, unless you are digging these points here. Number one … They’re all out of order. Let’s see, sales to service consistency. Make sure that whatever you’re saying in sales is happening in service.
That’s number one. Number two is assign someone who’s responsible for that customer’s happiness before, during and after the move in the company, okay, and how are you going to pass that baton on. Then, any issues that you might have, they need to go on some type of an awareness board, okay? It could literally be a wall with sticky notes. It could be a whiteboard where you write everything up.
You could do it in SmartMoving. You could have it on an Excel spreadsheet. Just have a place where you’re aware so they’re not out of sight, out of mind until they end up as a bad review, right? Get yourself someplace to be aware of all the complaints and actively work to resolve them. Complaint resolution process, okay?
Create the process, from the minute you’re aware of a complaint to resolving that, and everything that happens in the middle, and then go out there and proactively get your five-star reviews. So many of you deserve these. So many of you do such a great job, but are just saying, “You know what? Let my service speak for itself. If they want to give me a review, let them give me a review.”
There’s nothing wrong with asking for it. Sometimes if you don’t ask, you don’t receive. Go get those five-star reviews.

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares 5 Processes to Systematize Your Moving Operation.

• “You can’t scale what’s not systematized. And now that we’re in scaling season it’s time to look at your Operations and get it all dialed in so that as your moving business starts to grow, you’ll be ready to easily handle more customers.”
• “Your customers don’t care about all the time and effort you put into generating leads, booking moves, setting up processes, creating raving fans, your accounting, your branding, scaling… They could care less about any of that. All they want to know is that your company is going to do a great job for them on the day of the move.”
• “Getting the crews out, the process of making sure you have enough movers to service every job that you have booked, that’s the core of your business. Yes, you need marketing so that you can have opportunities for sales. Yes, you need systems and processes in place to help things run smoother. But at the end of the day, no matter what size your moving business is, you need to make sure that your process of delivering the service that you promised to your customers is on point.”
• “It’s so important to have everything dialed in when it comes to dispatch and servicing moves because you already know that things are inevitably going to happen to make it more challenging. Movers aren’t going to show up sometimes. Trucks are going to break down sometimes. Customers might not be at the house sometimes… Those things will happen.”
• Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

1. Join the Moving CEO Challenge: Official Louis Massaro Community Facebook Group! A place for moving company owners to connect, share ideas, and inspire one another. Click here to join!
   
2. Latest Instagram!
   Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

RELATED POSTS

The Role Of A Moving Company’s Operations Manager

Increase Profits: Tighten Up Your Moving Operations

How to Achieve a Millionaire Mindset

Stabilize Your Moving Company’s People and Processes

Take Back Control of Your Moving Company