Treat your customers like royalty to be paid like a king

Pull your head out of your ass.

Start treating your customers like royalty and make them your company’s biggest fans. 

Sorry, was that too aggressive? The companies that reach the billion and even trillion-dollar threshold live by that statement.

In this blog, I’m going to tell you not only who is successful but also how it can increase customer retention and build bigger profits. If you do it right, build an entirely new area where you can get new customers.

I wish I was kidding but treating your customers like royalty and turning them into raving fans has helped bring my company the biggest accounts to date and has helped my course grow month in and month out.

It has increased revenue ten times from what it used to be and even when stuff goes wrong, they are more likely to look past it because the other 99.99% of the time, things are beyond good. Let’s look briefly at some super successful people and companies because this term made them billions.

When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, there was one thing in almost every interview he was concerned about. That was simply the customer experience. 

There is a reason he is the richest man in the world and I firmly believe it comes down to his level of commitment to all of his customers. You don’t see many interviews with him online and even when the company first started, he always focused on the customers. 

Before we go any deeper, we have to address a couple of things. These are fake nonexistent things that come into play when talking about business. It’s important to understand these so you can make better business decisions.

1. Price

It’s a fictitious number that we all try to justify when it comes to trying to sell something. At the end of the day, a price is a number, and it’s something we are comfortable telling people what we can charge for it.

If you think price matters, remember a Rolex tells time and it costs over $9,000. An Invicta that looks just like it costs about $50. You can get a digital watch that’s more accurate for $10. 

Price is just a number.

2. Value

Value is perceived. It’s not measurable and it’s based on a person to person basis. 

There is a reason most people get a salary. That’s the value of that position to a company. 

If you were irreplaceable, they would pay you well above anything else and make sure you were taken care of so you wouldn’t go anywhere. This is the same as a Rolex. 

It’s what we perceive the value of it to be.

3. Goods or services sold

Yep, you read that right. What you sell in your business doesn’t matter. 

If I told you a bookstore could be a trillion-dollar business, would you believe me? Probably not. 

Amazon started selling books and is now one of the largest companies in the world. Your products or services do matter but what you sell doesn’t. 

I know it sounds super confusing but amazon could have started with a wide variety of goods to sell in the beginning. It didn’t have to be books.

Now that we have covered some of the three biggest myths I hear in business, I want to show you how the most successful people became who they are.

Back in the day when Costco started, if you told someone Costco would charge $50 to $100 just to walk into the store, most people would laugh. The founders James Sinegal and Jeffery Brotman made it happen and transformed the way we shop. 

Today Costco sells more products than Amazon does and their most significant revenue generator is their membership. It’s mainly profit and they don’t provide anything you can’t already get at a local Walmart or convenience store.

Costco’s focus, strangely enough, was the customer experience. It was about providing a unique way to shop and get the number of goods you wanted at an affordable price. 

Along with that, they haven’t raised the price of a hot dog and soda in over 30 years. They want their shoppers to feel like family when they shop and they are a part of a special club. 

That’s what you get when you become a customer. You’re in a special club where people want to be and even if you don’t buy anything, you still need to be a member to walk in.

Walmart‘s founder, Sam Walton, was obsessed with learning from the competition. There are stories after stories that talk about how Sam would walk into competitor’s stores and spend hours trying to figure out what they were doing differently. 

Everything from the height of the shelves to the layout, the colors, and how it was run. His main goal was to bring what he learned back to Walmart to provide the best experience for customers.

If you do a bit of research online, it’s not hard to tell it was his obsession when it came to the customer. It didn’t matter what area of the business it was. 

It was all about making sure that you, as a customer, had an incredible experience.

The thing that no one ever tells you in business is if your customers don’t love their interactions with you, they won’t come back. Ever got to a restaurant where the service sucks but the food was good? 

How often do you go back? Almost never?

But.

If the service is awesome but the food takes a bit longer to come out, are you ok with it?

The large majority of people would say absolutely.

A prime example of this is Chick-fil-A. There are far faster food chains in the world but no one has better customer service than Chick-fil-A.

Because of that, they have grown at an incredibly fast rate, and people love to come back.

You might be thinking, “But they don’t treat anyone like royalty.” Why does this matter? They just sell a good or product.

I would say you’re wrong and here’s why.

If you go shopping at Costco, you are treated like family. It’s an exclusive club that you have to pay to get into. 

The store is very clean, they sell products they stand behind, and they make sure you are never waiting in line for too long regardless of the season. Even when everyone was a little crazy during the COVID-19 pandemic and people were stockpiling toilet paper like they were suffering from IBS, the lines still moved quickly, and they did their absolute best to make sure you have a great customer experience.

Walmart says, “Save money. Live better.” Their slogan says it all. 

They want you to live a better life by shopping there. They are building it into your brain if you shop there, you are going to live a better life. 

If that doesn’t sit in your brain to make you think you’re a better person for shopping there, I don’t know what is. Everything about the store is geared towards the best experience possible.

Lastly, Amazon has to take the throne in allowing customers to feel like royalty. In large cities, you can get same-day delivery on a variety of products, and in the majority of the country, you can get two-day shipping. 

The customer experience is so good that it’s almost hard not to buy from them. Who can’t wait two days for what they need? 

Almost no one. Along with that, if you have a consumable product, you subscribe to it, and every month without thought it arrives at your door. 

Don’t like what you bought? Put it back in the box, print out a new label and return it at no cost to you.

But Harrison, how does this relate to my business. This is all great but I don’t own these companies, so I’m not exactly sure what you are trying to convey with this message.

Your business is your business but at some point or another, you have to sit back and think, does your customer feel like royalty when they shop or buy from you? Is there something that you could be doing to make them think not only are they going to like being a customer but even something that’s going to make them want to be a part of your tribe.

Building a tribe or a group of raving fans for your business is the easiest way to get new customers and keep existing customers. Statistically, referrals to your business stay with you about 17% longer than customers who found you without a referral. 

Let’s do some simple math. If a customer stays with you for two years and they spend $50,000 with you a year, that means that customer is worth $117,000 as opposed to $100,000. 

Who wouldn’t want an extra $17,000 dollars?

I am not going to lie. There is no secret sauce to make customers stick around longer and there is no way to make them love your service. 

What I can tell you is customer experience is the key.

But there is a secret.

What I can tell you is the secret for your business is probably under your nose and you probably can’t see it.

Why?

Because no one ever told you about it.

I know this because none of my companies that I run has anyone ever come up and given me the secret.

Along with that, I see business owners all the time neglect to get the secret from others.

Before I tell you exactly what you have to do, I need to tell you how I came to this conclusion.

The roundhouse kick to the chest came to me the day I lost my first client. I was helping him on LinkedIn and training him to become a master content creator on the platform.

In as little as three months, I had helped him triple his revenue and he quickly became the top earner in his company. We overcame plenty of challenges mainly with his personality but we worked hard, and we got it done.

Why did he fire me if I helped him make all this money?

My communication sucked and I never let him know what I was working on. If we didn’t have an in-person meeting, I would almost never email him. 

Sometimes we would go over two weeks without speaking.

I am not going to lie. I was busy. 

It was my first business and I just started it. I got a couple of clients and like many of you reading this, I was trying to grow it as fast as I can and figure out how to make it better.

He fired me at 11:50 p.m. at night over a text.

It hit me so hard I could tell you where I was, what I was doing, and the people I was with.

Why?

He had asked for a video to be edited and submitted to a dropbox that was shared between us.

I did the work and submitted it that night but he still fired me.

Why? Because I forgot to let him know it was there and that was the final straw for my lack of communication with him.

Why would he look for something that may or may not be there? It was my job to let him know it was uploaded and ready for review.

This particular video was also time-sensitive as it needed to go out the next day and his morning was packed with stuff.

Forget the thousands of dollars I made him. Forget the hundreds of connections I helped him make online and disregard the content flow we created.

To him, knowing what we were working on and a level of expectations were set that things were done in a timely manner. I didn’t treat him like royalty.

He took his hard-earned money out of his pocket and paid me for a service and even though I always over-delivered, I never told him when stuff was done and left him in the dark.

I didn’t treat him like royalty and he never became the raving fan I was hoping for.

It was my fault.

Since then, I have done a lot for my business. Changed my model, started new companies, and built a plan. 

Now I run a successful digital marketing company. I have an online coaching program to help business owners and recently started an online cigar and bourbon blog

I have spent a significant amount of time working on automating processes and building my “cookbook” full of processes and procedures to help my companies grow. There is one thing I try to do differently regardless of what business I am working on. 

I try to make them feel like royalty.

I try to look at it from a customer’s point of view and have peers regularly go through my content to make sure the experience is as good as I possibly can get it. I want to be the cheerleader on the side of the field.

I want them to succeed. Lastly, I want to help them achieve their goals. 

I can do all of this while I’m providing the best customer experience I possibly can.

There was a reason I started doing this, it’s because I could provide a far better customer experience and I could remove a lot of the workload from my plate.

A key takeaway is customer experiences can be automated.

Remember, when you buy from any of the companies I listed above, the CEO’s don’t speak to you. It’s just an easy process as a customer to get what you want.

I don’t want you to be like me and lose a client. That is not the best feeling, especially for me, because it was my first client.

It hurts a lot.

If you read carefully, you can see where I went wrong. I want you to learn from my mistakes.

It’s also pretty obvious what I could have done right. Especially now looking back on what I did in the past.

If you guessed, let your client know what you are doing for them. You’re really really wrong.

This is the secret no one tells you. The key to the whole problem is I failed to ask what I could have done better.

In sales, we use temperature gauges to see where clients are at. This can be carried out even after a client is signed up with you.

I should have realized he was getting cold and simply asked him. “What can I do better?”

It would have taken me all of 1 minute to get an answer that would have kept a client around a lot longer than I originally hoped.

I don’t want you to take my word for it. Why would you trust a guy writing a blog on the internet who provided you value? 

Look at most software out there, asking you questions. Verizon, when you hang up the phone, BestBuy when you complete a purchase, and Amazon after you get your package are just some examples of big companies constantly trying to do a better job.

The question I have for you is, “Are you asking your clients what you could improve on for your customer experience?”

If I were a betting man, I would say yes, there probably is. Simply ask your customers what you could be doing. The key to this whole process is asking but more importantly, listening. 

If you ask and don’t fix the problem, you’re going to have even more irritated customers. Ask for feedback, then listen and implement those changes. That is going to help you reach a new level of success in your business. 

You will turn your customers from customers to raving fans.

Ever since I started obsessing over my customer’s experience when working with any of my companies, I immediately started to have larger upsells, longer client relations, and it helped me structure deals for new clients going forward. 

This tip has had a major impact for my business in a positive way. Obsessing over customer experience is what the richest man in the world does, so why shouldn’t you?

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Harrison Baron

Harrison Baron is a millennial entrepreneur who has helped countless businesses become more profitable and create longer-lasting relationships with their customers. Currently, he owns several companies and maintains an active blog on his personal website. When he isn't working he is enjoying his podcast called the Brutally Honest Podcast and is an active volunteer firefighter in his community.