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Customer experience is not only how a customer perceives your business, but is also a big factor in weather a customer will return to your business again.   A positive customer experience is crucial to the success of your business, as a happy customer will likely become a loyal customer.  There are many factors that go into the customer experience from employees personal brand, communication with customers (tone of voice, and the words you say), how employees dress, showing customers you care and so much more.  We meet with Lisa Shorr who developed a six course online curriculum which polishes your personal brand, improves your team-morale, enhances client relationships and increases profits for the business.  Watch and learn how you can grow your business through Customer Experiences. 

Video Transcription

Harry Brelsford 

Hey nation nation back with a longtime friend of the family and member of SMB Nation, Lisa Shorr out of Providence, Rhode Island. How you doing, Lisa?

Lisa Shorr 

Hey, they’re so good. Thanks for having me today.

Harry Brelsford 

All right, well, hey, out of respect, because I know we’re gonna talk about this. You’re all about dress for success, amongst other things. So I actually put a collared shirt on and buttoned up the first button.

Lisa Shorr 

Well, I appreciate that. I’m glad that you know you I invoke that interview. And it’s, it’s a professionalism, right? I mean, anything with a collar, FYI? On the side note of the class, but it’s anything with a collar as professionalism. So, yep.

Harry Brelsford 

yep.Well, hey, you’ve created a system, a six course online curriculum. Go talk to us what’s going on?

Lisa Shorr 

So this course came about because my MSP Secure Future Tech Solutions was struggling, Harry, and you’ve known us for a very long time, we’re going to be celebrating in 2020 to 30 years. Wow. And we last 30 years, can you imagine I’m only 31. So you know, I was I was very smart when I started. So we went through a period Harry of, of just despair, we were losing clients and didn’t understand why we had the worst part is we had very low profitability. And we couldn’t grow it. And we were stuck for five years. And I don’t want other MSPs to wait five more years to be stuck. And what we realized is that we weren’t paying attention to our internal culture. We weren’t paying attention to the way that we were being perceived by others. Yep. We’ve always been tech savvy. But when a client fires you, and the icing on the cake was, every time I call, you act as if you have no idea who I am. That was so painful. And such a wake up call for us that I was like, Oh, my gosh, we’ve been so focused on the tech skills for so many years, that we didn’t even realize, and I am a marketer, so but my marketing was always, let’s get a press release done. Let’s

Harry Brelsford 

  1. Let’s do I went to your site. Yeah. And your good one.

Lisa Shorr 

Well, thank you so much. I appreciate that, as a marketer, and so but what I realized is, I needed to take a step back and look at the way that each member of our team’s personal brand was being perceived. I had to look at how we communicated with each other. So things like our tone of voice, and the words that we were saying, how could we make people feel that we cared, we were lacking, and we thought we had it, but we were really lacking an emphasis on empathy. We always were reactionary. So you know, we, we customer, service wise, we’ve always we, and we resolve tickets, we answer the phones. But what we really needed to talk about was that client experience. Yeah, so that’s when we really we had a script, and we started working on a procedure for our phone skills. We made sure we had a dress code all the time in our office, we talked about things like, Well, what should your voice sound like, when you need to show someone that you you hear them and you care that they’re getting that, you know, they can’t open a particular app, and they’re frustrated? Well, they don’t want to hear a happy voice. They want to hear, okay, let me get that ticket in the system. And let me call you, I’ll have an engineer call you within an hour. I know how frustrated you feel. That’s a whole shift in the way that we say things. Once I did all of that, and I started implementing all these changes in my, my own MSP, I realized there’s a lot of other MSPs out there in the same boat. So I took what I my all of the years of trials and tribulations and put it into a it’s a six week online class, but it’s really because it’s now on demand online, as well. It’s a six module class. And yep, and so I have I’ve taken everything. So module one starts with mindset. And it’s the way that we think it’s having that attitude of, I know I need more than tech skills to survive. I know No, I need to think about, okay, I have to have a difficult conversation with an employee. Let me have it right now. Let me not brush it under the rug, let’s talk about what I should how I should say it, our demeanor, talk that I talked about, I put together what’s called my brand, method. So it’s an acronym for so Week two is BS for behavior. And I hone in on emotional intelligence. And that’s our ability to connect with others, but really, to manage our emotions when we respond. So it’s a really, it’s very hard, you know, I should say, it’s very easy to be reactionary all the time. But a leader, and when I say leader, Harry, I mean, everybody in the organization is actually a leader, not just the founder, CEO of the MSPs, everybody has to take ownership for their own behavior and their own reaction to different situations. So we talk about that and behavior, our is respect. And we talk about respecting, not only everyone else, you know, everyone has a different upbringing. You know, you and I are different parts of the country. So many different, you know, situate scenarios that you and I could even talk about, but also respecting ourselves internally. Are we drinking water are we you know, taking care, exercising, eating right, getting some sleep, it’s really important. I have a breathing exercise that I teach everybody so that we can self soothe ourselves, a his appearance. And so that’s where those collars come in. And I talked about logo shirts, and we talked about grooming, and posture, by the way. So I thought about before I got on the call today, you know, where was I going to be on the screen? We’re doing a lot of virtual now. Where am I positioned? What am I wearing? What did I want to how do I want others to perceive me that’s really important is perception is reality, and is all about networking. And I do two forms of networking, networking on the sales and business development side with you, I call them QBRs. But other people call them technical business review meetings, quarterly business review meetings, whatever you call the meeting with your clients, as well as going to chamber events and networking events. We talk about that. But there’s other one piece that a lot of MSPs don’t pay enough attention to that we did. And once we did, there was a huge turnaround. And that’s our engineers, our on site engineers have this massive opportunity while they’re on site, to plant seeds. So they’re the day to day engineer. And they have a really cool opportunity to make suggestions and recommendations to our clients. When they see sales coming. They’re like, ah, what are you trying to sell me now. But the engineers their day to day, and if you have an engineer that’s polished, that has a wonderful relationship with your clients, then they’re much more apt to listen to what you know, to recommendations of upgrades. An example is we worked with a school and private school and they got all new Macs, and but they kept their old printers. And this is a very basic example. But the printers just weren’t compatible. And we kept going in and fixing and fixing and fixing whatever we did, what the reality was. So when we talked about this in a staff meeting, like this is not a good use of time. Go back to the the, you know, the client, who happens to be the buyer and say, you know, I, I’ve noticed that, or I see that we keep coming back. And I’m concerned that it’s not going to be a permanent fix, and you’re in it’s one day, it’s gonna crash, and they’re just not compatible. Can I have Eric, who happens to do the majority of our sales in our company on our MSP? Come see you and talk to you about new printers. Absolutely. have Eric, give me a call. So if my engineer wasn’t trustworthy, didn’t have a good relationship and didn’t present it in a way that was concerned for the well being of our client. That none of that would work. But I talk about that building that brand and building that credibility with our clients. And that’s why I call this class confidence plus credibility equals cash. And the last piece is your dynamic dialogue, which is your voice and almost everyone that I MSP that I work with, is my target audience for sure. Success, our MSPs almost everyone I work with. The first thing they say to me is, I want my text to sound more confident. I’m tired of getting phone calls from clients saying, I don’t don’t trust what your engineers saying, or don’t send him back for, does he really know what he’s talking or she know what they’re talking about. So I hone in on what does a leader sound like? What does the CEO sound like? What does a salesperson need to sound like? And what does an engineer who’s working with a client need to sound like? Not just getting the words out? But we talk about geekspeak and too many acronyms in our industry. Oh, right. You got your DNS and you got your people don’t even know what MSP stands for. So

Harry Brelsford 

no, no, don’t don’t get me go on.

Lisa Shorr 

Yes. So we’ve been talking about that, too. So that’s the class in its six modules. I put together for everybody. There’s 42 videos, eight hours of content. Wow. Yeah.

Harry Brelsford 

Congratulations. Well, I’ll tell you what, we’ll get you back next quarter. And I think what would be cool is if you have an I’ll make a side note but some tales tales from the trenches. Maybe you can talk about a specific MSP in Dallas, Texas that did this, this and this. took your course. And they went on in are driving more success. Alright, thanks.

Lisa Shorr 

Hey, thanks so much, Harry.