Dave starts the show by talking through a story of the heater in his house going out just days after Christmas. The guy that came out to fix it had recently had a bad day but he couldn’t see past his bad Christmas day and not the fact that nearly 10 families were without heat on Christmas and had to call his company for help.

Just the past few weeks hundreds of thousands of families in Texas and across the United States (and in some other countries) have recently run into heat, power and water issues. None of these people wanted to have any of these issues but here they all were at the mercy of so many other people.

For Dave the whole experience was rather uncomfortable as he felt bad for this person but also was currently in a bad situaiton.

• It was just days after Christmas and now a new unknown and possibly rather large expense.
• There are kids, animals and adults in a house with no heat that was quickly getting colder and colder in.
• It was well below 32F outside and within just 5-8 hours of no heat the house had already dipped well into the 60s.

Empathy?

The whole experience left Dave scratching his head in how this person could not see the bad spot that all of these families were in that had called him. Yes is day had been long and ruined but what about all these families likely facing high bills and emergency rates? The lack of empathy by this employee towards me and towards those that had called him in a time of need just made no sense.

For an example of HOW TO properly work with and talk to your customers check out our episode with Jay Sofer – Do You Deal in Trust? How to Unlock it for Your Business W/ Jay Sofer.

Frontline Workers

What training or support do you have in place for your workers? What do you do proactively to invest and train your employees?

Do you ever read reviews, listen to customer service calls, look for trends in reviews and try and understand if it is the customer, a single person or a company/team wide issue that needs to be addressed.

Firing Clients

The customer is not always right – sorry! As an owner/boss/leader at a company you should also be ready to protect your employees from customers that are abusive. This could be on phone/zoom or in person for those employees that are frontline workers – protect your people!

Accommodate your employees when you can and when they need it. If they raise their hand and say “today is just not a good day” see what you can do to help them help you not get into a bad situation.

Full Transcript

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00 ] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Hey guys, welcome to another business of digital podcast episode, and a great to have you with us. And, uh, how’s it, Gordon,

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:17 ] Dave, it is going, going, going.

Matt Siltala: [00:00:20 ] So for today’s episode guys, we’re just going to jump right into it.

Um, I like this one. I like talking about the subject and, uh, when I don’t like your story, obviously, but I like the meaning behind it and what we’re trying to do with this, but we don’t know necessarily what we’re going to call it yet, uh, for what you guys are reading, but it has to do with empathy and, um, who has it?

Do you have it, Dave? Do I have it? The business owners have it. And so this comes from a, you know, a experience that you had where. You weren’t, you were, was not so much given to you, but, uh, [00:01:00 ] you know, let’s just chat about that and we’ll go from

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:02 ] there. I will, I will gloss over some of the details, um, because this happened a couple of months ago, but, um, basically my wife woke up at like 1:00 AM, some noise kind of woke her up.

She didn’t know what it was. Um, looked around kind of listened to, she didn’t hear anything went back to sleep. It was about what was it? I’m looking at my notes. Cause yeah, it was a couple months ago. Um, it was like 3:00 AM. She woke up her, so, and she was like, and woke me up and she was like, it’s fricking can cold in the house.

And I’m like, it’s always cold in our room. She’s like, no, it’s really cold. I’m like, yeah, yeah, let’s talk my arm out. It was super cold in our room and I’m like, Maybe she’s right. Got up, walked over, grabbed my phone. Didn’t want to turn on any lights. Went up to our little thermostat, hit the up button, hit the down button, nothing worked.

And I was like, well, that’s not good, no. Walked back out to the other side of the house. Um, there’s another thermostat that [00:02:00 ] controls a different area, you know, turned on the light. And I was like, maybe I’m just not awake. It’s three in the morning. This is, you know, I, I get up early, but not today. And, you know, Pushed it up, pushed it down, turned it off, turned it on nothing.

I’m like, Oh, this is awesome. So went back, told the wife, I was like, Hey, um, I think there’s something wrong with our heater or furnace. I’m going to go downstairs. I’m just letting you know, in case it blows up or something, you know, you know, you know that I’m actually down there, uh, go down there. Oh, it’s cold down there.

It’s not firing. It’s not on. Um, spend a little bit of time trying to figure out what could have happened. Oh, look, the breaker had been flipped, so started doing math in my head going, Oh, that thing she heard at one in Nam that woke her up was probably something with the furnace, blew the circuit, you know, blew the fuse.

Um, flipped it off. Okay. Flip it back on, start messing with it. [00:03:00 ] The igniter, you know, nothing. It’s not firing back up and like, awesome. It’s four in the morning. Um, I’m going to have to call easing company. Yeah, it’s freezing outside. It’s now, you know, deep down, it keeps dipping in our house. It’s down to like 62 and we have no heat and this is the only way to heat the house.

So make a call, call the company, you know, all that fun stuff. Um, eventually the guy comes out and later on, uh, And I start talking to him, he’s kind of grumpy. He’s going through the stuff, tries to figure out what it is. Um, and then just kind of fast forward to talking with him later, before he left. And he was, you know, like I said, a little grumpy starts kind of talking about how he’d spent his Christmas, you know, trying to see his family and then basically getting calls.

And he said, I think it was like, By seven or 8:00 AM. He had six or seven calls lined up for that day. So for him it was like, you know, Mary F and Christmas this stuff. [00:04:00 ] Yeah. And he’s, as he’s telling me this story, I’m looking at my furnace broken, you know, this is like four days after Christmas. I know that just him coming out there, it’s going to cost me a hundred or two or $300.

Yeah. Because it’s off hours. So it’s already more, I know that whatever part is going to be fixed on that is going to cost me money. You’re paying premium well, a premium for the time to come out their premium for the, you know, not premium for the parts, but I’m like, I did not plan to drop a whole bunch of money today, you know?

And then I started thinking about him and his Christmas and I’m like, well, one, you have a job, so you should be happy. But too, do you think those people really woke, expected to wake up on Christmas day Christmas? You know, and maybe having, maybe having a couple of people over, maybe not because of, you know, COVID but you know, waking up with the kids and instead of being happy and trying to hang out with your kids or your family, you’re now freaking out because you have no heat.

[00:05:00 ] It’s below freezing. It’s the winter in Chicago, like. Do we need to move out of the house for the weekend. Do we need to get a hotel? What are we going to do with the animals? Um, how much is this going to cost me? Like, I don’t think any of those people really wanted to call him. And I understand you had a bad day, but here he is talking to someone who also is probably perhaps maybe buying a brand new furnace, which is going to cost.

Gosh, knows how much money. Um, I know I just dropped money into them, fixing things and having them do a checkup literally two months earlier. Like literally, I paid them to come out just to make sure that we didn’t have this happen and look what had happened. And so as he left, I was like, I’m not going to curse on this episode, but I was like, Christmas, what a jerk?

Like, I’m sorry, you had a bad Christmas, but there was seven families or 10 families or whatever that had an even worse Christmas, because they just had spent, who knows how much money they didn’t plan for. Yeah. [00:06:00 ] Um, and so I wrote this story down, you know, you thinking, I, I almost next time I call, I go, please don’t send that guy out because he’s a downer.

No, it’s like, that’s my experience with that company now. It’s interesting. They sent this guy out who basically, I understand how to bad day, but I’m like, so did all these other people because of your job?

Matt Siltala: [00:06:24 ] Yeah. Well, I mean, it is, it’s interesting because when you’re sharing this, it makes me think of an example of, uh, a friend of mine that owns a locksmith company in New York city, uh, the upper East side area.

And, uh, anyway, it’s, it’s interesting talking to him about how he’s grown his business. And one of the things that, that he’s told me that’s helped him grow his business is. Simply having empathy. He