Be Loyal or Be Honest!

Can we take a second to talk about the idea of being loyal or in the very least being honest?

I feel like the idea of being a patron customer who stays loyal to a business or service has been lost. 

Allow me to start by telling you about a recent experience Matt and I had with our phone carrier. I had been with the same carrier since high school…almost 20 years. At one point in our dating years we ventured away thinking we would save, only to turn around and basically beg the carrier to take us and our phone numbers back. I swore I would never leave the carrier again…

Fast forward to our move to North Carolina, and a realization that our service was terrible and continuously getting worse. Calls were getting dropped or not even received, missed texts, garbled conversations, the whole bit. Being both business owners we needed better, and had allowed the literal poor service to go on for far too long.

Matt asked me to log into my old carriers app and the first thing that pops up on the screen:

Ooof. I felt this immediate sense of guilt and as though I was doing something wrong. They had been good to me, maybe not monetarily good to me, but in the sense of fulfilling a need for many years, they had done the job. 

Until they didn’t.

We even contacted them to see if it was in their plans to fix the service in our zip, and we were told their direction no longer included the individual consumer, it was focused more on larger business contracts. We were peons compared to the corporate dollar.

Yeah, maybe I’m still a little bitter about it.

Point is, I don’t feel as though people value or put trust into a company or a person providing a service, enough. Whether that be an employee to a company, a parent/player to a coach or team, a parent/student to a teacher/school, a patient to a doctor, a consumer to service. 

There’s no loyalty from the beginning, so there’s no opportunity for reciprocation to show appreciation for the customer loyalty.

Let me flip the coin though. I know for a fact that people are sick and tired of being bombarded by tacky and misleading sales techniques, they’re tired of being provided horrible service and passed off down the chain of command, and they are certainly tired of businesses dropping the ball on holding their end of the bargain.

It’s a two way street, a tit for tat, a dance that takes two to tango. But the dance may end up costing you a little more so you have to ask, does the better service and overall product make the loyalty worth the expense?

Another story: My parents have been with an insurance carrier for an obscene amount of years. When I started in the industry, they were pretty resistant to me (their own daughter) running their numbers. 

Why? 

They are really freaking loyal to their company, and the company in turn has been really good to them. I’m talking yearly meetings with their agent, bi annual client appreciation events that were worth their time, prerecorded happy birthday phone calls, oh and the big kicker…paying a major claim on their shake shingle roof that was old as dirt and needing to be replacing before they could sell their home. 

Now let’s be clear, they paid a ton of money to the company over the years, probably more than what they would have had they shopped around, but when it came time to show up in a really important situation, the company did. And by golly my own parents will remain loyal customers to said company until they die. They even get this weird twinkle in their eye when they talk about the agent they had for the majority of the years…

I’ve licked my wounds and put on some band aids after realizing I won’t be able to sell to my own parents, but what I can tell you, is that I want that agent/client relationship with as many people as I possibly can. That’s special, and certainly worth the effort to earn the business.

I want to be the person associated to the company that people think highly about because we in turn have done them right. Nothing would be more fulfilling as a business owner and representative of a local NC company than providing the service and the thoughtfulness that people paying for, deserve. 

You may have to pay a little more for that service, but if any company or service isn’t holding up their end, please for the love of all that’s holy, just be honest and just tell them the truth. Don’t ghost them, be rude to them, or hope they’ll just go away. Give them a chance to rectify if there's a problem, or at least give them the closure that they need to be and do better, maybe even earn your business back. 

Simply, be loyal or be honest. And come be apart of my crew, my parents won’t be there, but I’m still pretty awesome:)

www.ncfbins.com/michaela.lawson