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Hey friend, welcome to the Inventory Genius podcast, where we work together here to make you an inventory genius. We talk about profit, we talk about cash flow, and we definitely talk about your paycheck. Because at the end of the day, it's all related to your inventory. Let's go. Hey there, welcome to the Inventory Genius Podcast. Today I am prepared to ruffle some feathers and um yeah, I hope you have thick skin. But I feel this conversation is so necessary. I am so passionate about what I'm about to share that I had to put it in a podcast episode. So are you ready? Let's dive in. We're gonna talk today about if customers annoy you, you're really missing the point. That's what I've titled today's episode If customers annoy you, you're missing the point. Welcome back. All right. So everywhere I've been looking on social media lately, I'm seeing small business owners posting content about how frustrating their customers are. Customers are asking too many questions, customers are taking too much time, reels that make fun of how customers actually want help and service, how customers interrupt the founder or the entrepreneur or the business owner's day. And honestly, this thinking blows my mind because on one hand, I keep hearing business owners constantly talking about how sales are so slow and how hard retail is right now and how desperately they need more customers. But then I open Instagram and I see business owners publicly complaining about how the very people that are actually keeping their doors open. We can't say that we want growth while simultaneously acting irritated that customers even exist. And if you say, you know what, Sierra, that's not me. I'm not posting about that on social media or making a reel about it. I want you to think a little deeper. How do you talk to about your customers with your team behind the scenes when you get home at night? And you know what? Like everything that I share here, I'm not throwing the blame and you know, acting like I've never been in your position. In fact, I have to say that I remember being frustrated with customers and how they annoyed me. I remember when I had my retail store that some days at the end of the day, I would, in fact, and to my regret, complain to my team members about customers. So this isn't an isolated, I just see it on Instagram and that was never me. I'm speaking here from someone who had a retail store and I understand the frustrations we can have. But here's the thing: we have to change our mindset. Customers are not an inconvenience to your business, they are the reason your business exists. Without customers, you don't have a business. You have inventory and you have bills. And I think somewhere along the way, especially with the social media culture, business owners have forgotten this. So while I say yes, from time to time, I would have an attitude and I would have to check myself with how I talked about my customers to my team or even internally to myself, I think social media has completely blown this out of the water. Because now we are looking for likes and reposts and engagement. And we're thinking if we create that funny reel about how annoying customers are, it's going to bring us more looks. But here's the thing: the people that you're creating your social media content for are your customers. And how do you think they feel when they look at your Instagram reel and see how annoying they make you? Now, your Instagram post or your Facebook post or your social media post or your TikTok, it might be funny to other business owners, but at the end of the day, it's not resonating with the very people you're trying to service. There's a trend online right now where businesses create relatable content for other business owners, videos mocking customers, posts, making fun of the questions customers ask, sarcastic content about returns, browsing, customer behavior. And listen, I can understand that retail is hard. People can be exhausting. Service industry industries require emotional energy. I completely get that. I have done there, I have been there. Okay. But here's the problem: the people laughing at that content are other business owners, not your customers. Your actual customers are watching too. And here's what they're hearing when they see these types of social posts. They're hearing, you annoy us, you're difficult, you're a burden. We don't actually want to help you. Why would someone choose to shop in an environment where they feel unwanted? Here's the reality: customers have options. And I used to tell my team this: they can go anywhere. They can go across the street. They can go online. And that was back in the day, you know, my retail store, like it's back in the day, we didn't even have social media. Now customers can shop online. They can go to Target, they can order from Amazon, they can support another boutique, they can spend their money literally everywhere else. They don't need to choose your business. They choose your business because they want connection. I'm just gonna break it to you. You don't have a unicorn of a product. You don't. If you sell beautiful shoes, there's 10,000 other people who do the same thing. If you sell unique jewelry, there's 100 other businesses around the corner that can do the same thing. If you have candles, furniture, decor, uh, I don't know, whatever else you might sell, food, um, really any type of inventory, they can find it somewhere else. They're choosing you because they want connection. They want the experience you're offering, the service, the expertise in the community. And here's what makes me so sad. I truly believe behind these social posts that there are amazing customer service brands. They don't realize that the message they're giving is counterintuitive to what they actually do. And people are only going to give you so many chances. When your social media content communicates annoyance instead of appreciation, it repels the very people you're trying to attract. Here's what customers actually want: they want to feel welcomed, appreciated, helped, valued, and remembered. How much different would it be if you created an Instagram reel or a TikTok video showing how much you loved your customers, cared for them, helped them in the fitting room, or serviced them at their own home or at their place of business. That's it. People remember how your business made them feel far longer than they remember what they bought. The business owner that wins long term is not always the cheapest. They're not always the trendiest. They're not always the biggest. And here's a fun fact: they don't always have the most reach on social media. The businesses that win long term are the ones that make customers feel important everywhere, whether it's on social, in store, at the register, over the phone, or behind the curtain where no one ever knows, talking to their team, creating a culture that appreciates and welcomes in every single customer. Customer service is not an interruption to business. You know, when I shared with you a few minutes ago how I remember times I would get irritated, a lot of times it was because I was struggling with my own leadership or the massive task I had to do, all the things that owners fight through, right? Like we feel pulled in a million directions. And so sometimes that irritation with customers would simply be because I was in the middle of a task and they walked through the door and needed my customer service. And I had to stop and check myself and say, Sierra, the reason you have the massive TED-to-do task is because you have a business that is supported by the customer that just walked through the door. So stop what you're doing, change your attitude, show appreciation, and service that customer well. Customer service is the business. Answering questions is the business, helping people make decisions. This is the business we're in. Building trust is the business, creating relationships, especially for small businesses. Because small business cannot compete purely on convenience anymore. And we can't compete on product or price anymore. You compete on experience, and experience starts with what people observe about your brand. If your experience feels cold, dismissive, irritated, transactional, people will leave or they're not going to show up in the first place. Okay, so let's shift our mindset and say, okay, how do we bring good customer service in? Sierra, maybe I've made a mistake. How can I recalibrate? Maybe I have had a couple of those conversations in the back room complaining about the customers that just walked through the door with my team. How do I shift? How do I correct? Let's take a shift right now into some practical leadership that you can bring into your business. If you want better customer relationships, it starts internally with how your team thinks about customers. And here are five ways I'm going to give you to train your team to better appreciate customers and the service you offer them. Number one, I used to say this to my team all the time. I don't write your paycheck. The customers write your paycheck. I might physically, and yes, you know, I wrote paper paychecks. I might physically write your paycheck. I might physically type in the thing that needs to be sent over for direct deposit. But at the end of the day, the customers write your paycheck. It sounds blunt, but it really matters. Customers are not bothering employees. Customers are literally funding, payroll, rent, inventory, bonuses, growth, and opportunities. Without customers, there's no business. When a team understands the direct connection between customer experience and business survival, perceptives will change. And it starts with the leadership down. I am speaking to you. You are the owner of the business. It starts with you and it trickles down. It starts with leadership and it trickles down. And so that brings me to point number two. Stop celebrating sarcasm and complaining. I want you to create a culture because culture stops at the starts at the top and it trickles down. If leadership constantly complains about customers behind the scenes, employees absorb that mindset. And I am here to tell you from one owner to another, it is very easy for our employees to already have that mindset because their skin is not in the game. At the end of the day, they can leave our businesses, they can go work anywhere they want to. They are never going to have the same urgency or skin in the game as we are. And so it's already easy for them to have that kind of culture of complaining, right? And so if we feed into that as owners, that is a trickle-down effect that will be rotten in your business. Your team mirrors the energy you create. Instead of complaining and having a culture of complaining and irritation, I want you to celebrate positive customer stories, recognize great customer service moments, talk about customer wins, reinforce your gratitude. Every single person that walks in, I am thankful and grateful for them. You create the culture your customers experience. Number three, I want you to start to think about training emotional intelligence, not just sales skills. Okay. Great service is emotional intelligence. You're teach your team how to actively listen, how to stay and remain patient, how to read customer energy, how to handle frustration with calmness and clarity, and how to make people feel seen. Customers remember kindness more than perfect wording. They remember a kind moment, a kind word, a gentle word in relation to how they might feel about how they look or the product that they purchased from you. Number four, remind your team that questions mean interest. So instead of showing irritation if people ask more questions, remind your team that people are asking questions because they want to purchase from you. They're trying to investigate if the purchase will benefit them. I see business owners get annoyed when customers ask questions, but questions are just buying signals. Think about it that way, right? Questions mean they're curious, they're engaging, they want to trust you, they're considering whether you can provide a solution to their problem. An asking customer is far more valuable than a silent customer who just leaves. I want you to think about that. An asking or an inquisitive customer is far more valuable than someone that walks in your store and walks back right back out. Questions are opportunities, not inconveniences. And I want you to start thinking about that and training your team to think about that as well. And number one, or number five, build a culture of hospitality. Hospitality is different than customer service. If you have a notebook, I would love for you to just write this down. Hospitality is different than customer service. Customer service says, how do we complete this transaction? Hospitality says, how do I make this person feel? The shift changes everything. Train your team to greet warmly, use names, make eye contact, offer help without pressure, thank customers genuinely, even if they don't purchase something. This can be the hardest thing. I'm gonna bring it back to a real life example. A lot of times I worked the evening shift or the last shift alone in my store. And so everyone else, all my employees had clocked out and gone home for the day. And I had an hour commute. I had little kids. The last thing I wanted to do was to stay beyond the day, the time of closing. I think we closed at 5:30 p.m. And so at five, you know, at five o'clock, no one's coming in. I would start to mop the floor, straighten up the racks, empty the garbage, you know, all the things so that the minute it hurt hit 5:30 p.m., I could lock the door and head home to my kids. I had a young family. So the last thing I wanted to do was to help someone who came in at 5:20 p.m. Now I'm not just, I'm not saying with all of this conversation that you need to let people push over you or disregard boundaries, rules. You do not need to let customers be unkind or cruel to you or your team. But we also need to set boundaries, rules, and communication with kindness. So when that person would walk in at 520, it would be okay for me to say, hey, how's it going? I'm so excited that you're here. I want to let you know that we close in 10 minutes. Is there anything that I could get for you super quick? Because we only have a couple minutes before the store closes. There's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is for me to have a bad attitude when I see that car pull up because this person spent time out of their day to run over to my store when their shift at work closed because they wanted to support me. This is the mindset shift I'm talking about. Creating a culture of hospitality. How can I make this person feel in the short amount of time that I have? How can I make them feel like I appreciate they spent their time stopping at my store on their way home from work? So here's some final thoughts. At the end of the day, customers are humans. They're spending their hard-earned money with you. They're trusting you, they're choosing you. This is a privilege. And small businesses especially should never lose sight of that. Yes, I understand customers can be difficult. Retail is exhausting. I worked it for more than a decade. Business ownership is hard. I'm still in the thick of it. But publicly building a brand around irritation toward customers is one of the fastest ways for you to damage trust. Your social media should make customers feel excited about shopping with you, not afraid that they're secretly annoying you or what you're saying behind their back. Because the businesses that grow long-term are the ones that deeply understand this. Customers are not in the way of the business. Customers are your business. I hope this conversation challenged the way that you're thinking. And again, maybe you're not posting on social, but business owner to business owner telling you the things that I've made mistakes in in the past and how I want to challenge you to correct that. How are you talking about your customers to your team? How are you thinking about your customers when no one's looking and no one's watching? I want you to dial in and get the customer service focus right. This doesn't just mean that you cater to everyone's whims, that you're open 24-7, that you answer DMs 24-7. Not, I'm that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is the way that we talk about people, the way that we project how we think about our customers, it matters. People are watching, and at the end of the day, they have choices. You cannot on one hand tell me that you want your sales to increase while right away on the other hand, complain about the people who are making those sales happen. And that's what I want to leave with you today. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you all next week. Bye for now. Hey there, friend. It's time for you to start winning at business again. I want you creating more profit and keeping more cash every single week in your business. Head on over to Sierrastockland.com, click on the programs tab, and you're gonna see multiple ways that we can work together. Whether you're doing $50,000 a year or $50 million a year in top line revenue, there is a place for you. The Inventory Genius Framework has helped hundreds and thousands of product-based business owners just like you create more profit and keep more cash in their business. I want you to win. I want you to start taking a consistent paycheck, paying off that debt, and just feeling confident and comfortable when it comes to your numbers. You can do this. I believe in you, and I'm here to help. Head on over to Sierra Stockland.com or click on the link in the bio, figure out where you might best fit. We are here to help you. Let's create more profit and keep more cash starting today.