How To Think With Dan Henry Why You Should Not Listen To Your Customers Complaints
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Have you ever heard the saying, “The customer is always right.”
Well, this statement is completely false when it relates to your online business...
If you are trying to build the next Walmart or Target, then I could definitely see how you could justify this mindset... but I’m sure that isn’t the case for you!
Knowing when to listen to the right kind of “complainer” will save you so much time and negativity.
There’s more to the picture when you have a student or client complaining...
That's why in today's podcast I will show you the different types of complainers to ignore!
In this episode, I am going to cover:
- The two types of “complainers” and which one NOT to listen to
- Why people complain and how to stop it from happening
- The main reason we turn away hundreds of prospects from joining our programs
If you got value from what you heard here, please be sure to subscribe and rate this podcast! Bonus points for you if you write a review! ;)
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— TRANSCRIPT —
Hey, everybody, in today's episode, I'm going to cover why you should not listen to your customer's complaints most of the time and how doing so can actually ruin your business.
All right, everyone. So there is an old thing that I'm sure you're aware of.
Well, then it's, the customer is always right now. I do not agree with this statement even in the slightest. And you also have to consider the source. The person that came up with this saying is Harry Gordon Selfridge. And he owned a popular department store in the early, it was like 1909. When he started as Selfridge department stores, now he was very, very successful. Don't get me wrong, very successful, but it's a department store. Okay. He did not sell high ticket coaching or, you know, consulting or things like that. He sold, you know, clothes and trinkets and things like that. So you have to understand that when it, you know unless you are trying to create the next Walmart in the world of online business and in coaching and consulting and selling digital programs, the customer is not always right.
They're just not, especially because they're coming to you to become educated, to solve a problem. So clearly, they don't know everything. And that may sound like harsh advice, but I'm actually going to break it down for you and allow you to understand the difference between two forms of complainer's okay. Two forms of complaints and why you need to completely ignore the first one. And you actually need to listen to the second one. Okay. Because the customer is right some of the time. But not always. And that's very dangerous. And to me, toxic thinking, okay, but let me break it down. So you don't think I'm just a, I'm a complete tool. So there are two forms of complaints. There are habitual complainers and legitimate. Complainer's now a legitimate complainer is somebody that complains because something actually wrong has happened, right. You've made a mistake, and they have a legitimate complaint when a legitimate complaint happens.
Almost everyone who is breathing would complain. Yeah. There are some people who just aren't the type of people to complain, and they won't. But for the most part, when you make an actual legitimate mistake, or there's a problem with your product, you will get complaints. However, there is what's called, as I said, habitual complaining. And that is a behavioral thing that is a behavioral form of complaining, which means that people who are habitual complainers do because it is a set behavioral pattern that they do. And it doesn't matter what you do, how good or bad your product is, they are going to complain. Okay. So I'm going to break down why people complain, and then I'm going to show you how to decipher between the two and how to make decisions based on customers' complaints and how to ignore the ones that are habitual complaints.
Okay. So first of all, let's talk about habitual complaints. You have to understand that human beings like to complain, they do. There are far more habitual complainers, and there are legitimate complaints far, far more, and no matter what you do, you will always get complaints. I'll give you an example. Recently in our sold-out courses program, I saw a post in our private group, and one of our clients was talking about the length of her webinar. And she was saying, you know it is a, is a two-hour webinar, too long. I have customers complaining that the webinar is too long, and I don't want them to complain. So I think I need to make it shorter. So there are a couple of problems with this number one, customers aren't complaining because you got to understand a customer is a customer. A customer is somebody who has paid you money.
A prospect is someone who has yet to pay you money. So, first of all, we have to understand that prospects are complaining, not customers. All right. When a customer complains, it's a bit different than when a prospect complains because a customer has already given you money. Okay? Now customers can still be habitual. Complainer's a lot of them, but you must understand that ultimately the ultimate form of evaluation on whether or not your product, your webinar, or your marketing works is whether or not somebody buys it or not. Okay? Everything is quantifiable based on metrics, your conversion rate, your email, open rate, your email, click rate, your attendance rate for your webinars. Those are the metrics in which we measure how effective something is. Not. If people complain, people will always complain. Okay? Whether your webinar is two hours, three hours, six hours, 10 hours, 30 minutes, five minutes, or the fact that it even exists, people are gonna complain.
That's just part of the game. And let me go over quickly. Why do people complain? So you understand the behavior, and then we'll get into how to, how to decipher it. So you gotta understand the complainers tend to be less healthy. They have poor career performance and more failed relationships. And they're basically miserable. And when I say complainers, I mean, you know, habitual competitors, people that complain all the time, which is a lot of people. And so these people are always going to be unhappy with various products because they're just used to complaining. When you complain, you actually invite more negativity into your life. And, you know, people don't actually realize they complained. The habit actually becomes invisible. And you know, people aren't bad people, you know, they, they just realize that this behavior is happening. And if they did realize it, I would guess a lot of them would want to change it.
But the thing is, it's hidden, it's invisible. A lot of times, you don't realize you're complaining. And one of the reasons that is is because people complain to validate their beliefs. Okay. They have a belief, and they need to Valley. They didn't know that they're right. That they're, that they're, they're correct in the way that they're feeling. And therefore, one of the ways to do that is to complain, okay. And that's because complaining is a way to avoid responsibility. Okay? If you believe that you have failed because you are lazy, then that means something is wrong with you. But if you fail because the coaching is too long or the webinar or the lessons are too long, or, you know, whatever, then nothing is wrong with you. It's a problem with the product. And see, no one wants to admit that something is wrong with them.
So if they can complain, they can now find a way to place that blame on something else and complaining, reinforces negative thought and actually invite some more of what you are complaining about into your life. So even, you know, if you, if you find yourself complaining a lot, you're actually making it worse. And I'm not saying that sometimes the complaints can be legitimate or not legitimate, but if you complain all the time, I highly doubt every single complaint is legitimate. Okay. And you're actually creating more negativity and inviting and attracting more of it. So you're complaining about this, this thing, but you're actually making it happen more because you're complaining. All right. And another thing is complaining also increases procrastination. It's easier to complain and then to solve the problem. It is okay. And finally, complaining creates bad luck, reality. What I call "The bad luck" reality.
It's this alternate reality that you create in which nothing is possible. The world is out to get you. You're just, everything's out to get you. You just don't get good luck. You know, the universe hates you, and therefore nothing positive is possible for you. Okay? And when someone is in that mindset, it doesn't matter what you do. You will never be able to make them happy. And what you'll have to understand is going back to, the customer is always right. Some customers are just not good for business. Okay. There are like, we turned down a ton of people that apply for our programs. We do not want toxic negative mindset people, because you got to understand if I let's say I saw a high ticket program, right? And you come into this high ticket program, and you join the group you get in here, you're super excited.
You just dropped a ton of money, but you feel good about it because, you know, you trust me, you trust my company. You've seen our results, yadda, yadda, yadda, you get in. And all of a sudden, you see posts in the group of people being super negative and complaining. You get on a coaching call, and somebody jumps on and just starts singing the blues. And you just, you get this icky feeling that you know, that positive, go get her environment that you were so excited to become a part of is now tainted because you have all these people who are not only being negative and, and, you know, being a drag, but they're starting to reinforce negative beliefs in you that maybe you had suppressed because you want, you want to succeed. And it's just not a good environment for people.
Especially when they pay a high price, I paid $30,000 to be in masterminds. And the last thing I want to do when I go to a mastermind event that I paid 30 GS for is to sit down and have somebody whining and crying and moaning. I just like, I don't want that. Like I paid 30 grand, shut your mouth, and do the work. Like, don't bring your negativity in this room. Okay. If I paid $7 for something or 97, or even a thousand dollars for something, all right, maybe I could understand it, but I pay five, 10, 15, 20, 30, grand. You know, I want a good positive environment. And so that's why we don't let a lot of these customers in or prospects. And because we know they're going to cause a problem. And we, we want to keep the integrity of our program, the quality of our program high.
So to say the customer is always right is insane. And so the deal here is that, you know, if you have somebody complaining about your webinar, your marketing, your emails, you got to understand that it's likely that they could be a habitual complainer, in which case nothing will make them happy. And if you make business and marketing decisions based on what they say, well, now you're going to start negatively affecting your business because you're basically making a judgment and a decision based on nothing, right? Because it doesn't matter what you did. They're always going to complain. Okay? Cause some people just always complain. Some people are never happy. And so if you start making strategic decisions based on those complaints, well, now you're making terrible decisions, right? So what you should really make decisions on is things like actual actions, right? If somebody is truly unhappy and they have a legitimate complaint, you will see it in the forms of actions, right?
You will see refunds, you will see chargebacks, you will see a low conversion rate, low email click rate. You will see these actual metrics happen. People will not buy your stuff. Okay. But I mean, and that doesn't mean that there won't be some illegitimate or habitual complaining in the refunds, in the disputes, but, but you can still improve the process. Right? Like recently, we had an elevated dispute rate, and I couldn't figure it out. Right. I could not figure it out. I'm like, why did our dispute rate go up? I was like blown away. And so Brandon, who heads up our customer service, one day walks into my office. He's like busting in the door, which, you know, normally people don't bust in my office door, and they knock her or, or Slack me and asked to come in or whatever. But he's like Boston the door.
And he's like, Dan, he's like, I found it. I figured out how to dispute a problem. I'm like, okay. And he's like, did you see this email? I said, what email? And it was an email for failed, a failed payment sequence. And what we had done is we had, I remembered we had hired or we had consulted with a company that apparently was good at, you know, failed payment sequences and stuff. And we consulted with them and kinda like modeled some of their emails. And one of the emails, the subject line was, Hey, you know, Hey, so-and-so does someone have your card? And in the email, it said, Hey, you may want to call your bank and check on your card because you had a failed payment, and the bank might be blocking it. So you may want to call your bank.
And so what ended up happening was, in reality, people were seeing this email when they had a failed payment, and they were probably skimming it, and they freaked out, called their bank and disputed the charge or call their bank. And the bank rep simply said, Hey, would you like to dispute this? And they dispute it. Okay. And as soon as Brandon showed me the email, I was like, Oh my God. I'm like, of course, that's it. And so we changed the email, and immediately our dispute rate tanked and dropped down way back to a totally acceptable level. And I was just like, wow, something so silly, something so ridiculous. So, you know, again, that was our fault. That was totally my fault. But I didn't find that because people were emailing me or posting on my Facebook and going Dan, I'm unhappy. It was because we had an elevated dispute percentage.
There was a clear and present effect, not just people complaining. All right, good understand. I've sold over $10 million with webinars, with internet marketing. And I have all kinds of people complaining. Right. I have people who have literally sold $5,000 with stuff, and they have people complaining. People will always complain because the majority of the population, sadly, our habitual complainer's all right. So what you have to do next time, you're evaluating your complaints to have to ask yourself, are these complaints tied to an actual measurable metric? Okay. And if so, then you need to look further into it. For instance, you could always gather a list of emails of all the people that have ever refunded or charged back your program or your coaching or whatever, and simply send them an email and say, I noticed that you refunded. I just wanted to, you know, get your opinion and I want to know why you refund it, right?
And then when they all email you back, you start looking for patterns right now, you will see one-off people, people that are just completely out of their minds crazy. And you obviously discard those, but then you'll see, you'll see legitimate patterns. And when you see the patterns, now you can start making strategic decisions in your business to eliminate those things that debt caused those refunds. Okay. And even if those things kind of are silly, they still triggered these measurable negative results. And that is something you should pay attention to hence, to measurable negative results not, not random customer complaints. Okay. Again, $10 million sold through webinars. And every single day we get some form of complaint about our webinars. Okay. Our webinars convert extremely high, very, very high. One of my webinars actually is probably, you know, the exceptionally good conversion rate for, you know, for what it is, you know, compared to the rest of the industry.
Exceptional show-up rate, exceptional, all the metrics for this particular webinars is probably one of my best webinars. It is my best webinar I've ever done. Literally, all the metrics, all the sales numbers, all, all the, all those individual measurable metrics are like literally as good as they could possibly get. Yet. We still get tons of complaints. Why? Because people like to complain. So if I were to actually take those complaints seriously and then make changes, I could cost myself a ton of money. Okay. And the thing is unless there is a measurable result tied to that complaint, there's no reason for me to just, you know, jump up and change things. Cause I got one complaint. So that is the thing you really have to evaluate. Now we take customer complaints very seriously, but we, we evaluate them to make sure that they're a real complaint and they're tied to a negative action such as like I've mentioned this, this dispute rate, all right.
But people saying, Oh, the webinar's too long. The lessons are too long, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's universal complaints. You're going to get stuff like that all the time. All right. And honestly, if somebody doesn't have the patience to watch a 50-minute webinar, like I literally have a webinar that's 50 minutes, and I still get complaints that it's too long. If you don't have the patients want a 50-minute webinar, I do not have the patience to work with you. So I don't want to work with you. All right. So, you know, another thing is, is a lot of these habitual complainer's ladies, people, the complainers are people you do not want to work with. Therefore, if you remedy, if you solve their complaint, you might start actually selling those people. And you don't want that. All right. Again, part of marketing is to, yes.
It's to attract customers, but it's also to repel people you don't want to work with. All right. And trust me, if you just try to work with everybody because you want to make money, you'll be very, very unhappy. You'll be very unhappy. And honestly, most of the time, when I've seen people try to do that and they sell less, okay, you can actually sell more by resonating with the right person than trying to resonate with everyone. So you, you, you, you must understand you must. Yes. You must take customer and prospect complaints seriously, but you must take the evaluation of whether they are habitual complaint or a legitimate complaint just as seriously more seriously. All right. So that's what I want you guys to do. I want you to look back at all the times you thought about changing something or deleting something or doing something differently because someone complained and asked yourself, is this complaint tied to a measurable negative result?
Or is this just somebody being a habitual complainer? All right. And what I can do in a future episode, maybe I'll do it in the next episode is I'll talk about how to actually fix your mindset. If you're listening to this, episode using, Oh crap. I think I'm a complaint. I think I'm a habitual complainer. That's okay. I used to be, when I was younger, I was a habitual complainer. And then, one day, I fixed my mindset, and that allowed me to be way more successful. So I can do another episode on how to actually identify that if you are, fix it and create a much more successful life for yourself. You have to remember the complainers are not bad people. They are simply people that have limited their own success, and it's never too late to fix it. All right. Love you guys. And I'll see you in the next episode.