Episode•April 21, 2025•26 min

EP215: Transforming Your Customer Journey: Simple Steps for Big Impact

People have long thought that the quality of the product is the most important thing for getting and keeping customers in a competitive business world, especially in construction. But the idea that the customer experience is more important than the quality of a product is becoming more popular. In this episode, Brad talks about: The disconnection between how we buy and how we sell. Steps to create a clear process from first contact to post-job follow-up. Importance of communication and setting expectations throughout the process. Personal anecdotes to illustrate the impact of customer service. Link to Resources: Grab Brad's tell-all book: The Contractor Profit Blueprint https://thecontractorprofitblueprint.com You've been invited to check out Job Tread! https://www.hammerandgrind.com/jobtread Help us get the word out to other contractors by leaving us a review or sharing our podcast! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Transcript

0:03

The customer experience is the single most important aspect of the entire customer journey. Hey, it's Brad here. And before we get into the show, I want to tell you about the show sponsor. Now, I personally use this company in my own business. And so I was thrilled whenever they reached out and said they wanted to sponsor the show. Today's sponsor is JobTread. JobTread is an all-in-one construction management software. JobTread streamlines processes for builders and contractors from estimating and scheduling to job costing and invoicing. With JobTread, you can create precise estimates quickly improving the chance of winning jobs. And their dynamic scheduling allows you to keep projects on track with Gantt charts and scheduling tools. JobTread also allows you to collaborate with teams, vendors, and clients in one location. No more missed information. Who said? She said. It's all in one location. And their API integration tools connect with your favorite software like QuickBooks Online, Hammer CRM, or any other API. friendly apps. JobTread is perfect for builders and contractors of all sizes. Whether you're a solo contractor or run a large team, JobTread scales to fit your needs and works great for remodelers. home builders, deck builders, pool builders, and general contractors. Try Drop Tread today and learn how it can help streamline, manage, and grow your construction business. Visit jobtread. com or click the link in the show notes for more details. Now let's get to the show. Hey, welcome back to the show. For the first time since, I believe, January, I'm going to be doing a solo cast this episode. Now, don't get too upset too quickly. I do have more guests scheduled, some more interviews coming up. But due to vacations and being sick and a number of other things, I just haven't been able to schedule some interviews. So please bear with me. I am dealing with some respiratory stuff, but the show must go on. I've only missed two episodes since I started this podcast, and I want to make sure I don't miss a week, even though I may sound like a guy with smokers coughing. It may be a little rough to listen to, but we do have a good topic today. And we're going to dive into that right now. So what I want to talk about today is mapping out your customer journey. Now, this may seem like something that is not important, but it's actually very important to your business when it comes to sales and closing people. I don't know what it is. I can't figure this out. I don't have my pulse on it. I don't have my finger on it. I don't know really. what this, you know, what the phenomenon is. But for whatever reason, when we're the buyer for something, we have a certain expectation that we want to be met during the buying process. But whenever we're the seller, we just like throw that out the window and don't think that's important. And so it's like this disconnect from the way you buy versus the way you sell. They don't match up. So what's the most common thing that happens whenever, you know, you reach out to a service provider to have service done, you go to their website and you fill out a form and you get an email and it says, thanks, somebody will be in touch with you soon. And that's it. Or you call them and if they do answer, then, you know, maybe you're able to schedule an appointment or maybe it's, well, you know, we'll have our sales rep reach out to you and give you a call back, you know, on the next day or so. And it's just like, you're left hanging. You don't really know. I mean, yes, they're telling you someone's going to reach out to you, but you don't really know exactly what the next steps are and when to expect it. And so one of the things you can do, it's actually very simple to do. It's very, very powerful to elevate you as a professional is map out your customer journey from start to finish. From very first contact, whenever they go to the website and they're searching for, you know, your services. And they're looking for information to when they first contact you, to after the contact is made, to the sales call, to after the sales call, to the on-site consult, to after the on-site, to the job starting, during the job, after the job's finished, and then follow up and into the future. Like the whole journey from the very beginning to the end, you should map that out. You should have an actual process that's being followed. And then once you've documented the process, you actually create content and you create flyers and different things that you give and videos and stuff that you give to your customers along the way so they know where they're at. So there's lots of ways you can do this. There's no like, this is the way you have to do it. For example, one of the things that I did and a lot of my clients do, and we talk about this. If someone goes to your website and they fill out the form on your website, typically there's like a confirmation page. You know, it's like, thank you. We received your request. We'll be in touch within 24 hours. But what you can do with that one simple point of that journey is take them to a landing page with a video of you explaining the next steps. And so they fill out the form and then the landing page or the thank you page, confirmation page, whatever you want to call it. The next page is a video of you that pops up and it basically says like, Hey, this is Brad with so-and-so construction. Thank you so much for filling out the form. We're super excited to hear more about your project. Here's what you can expect next. We know I'm going to call you. One of my sales reps is going to call you. We're going to reach out to you within the next four hours. And so that we can do this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're telling them what the next step is. So they're not wondering, you're actually explaining it to them. And this may seem like, oh, Brad, nobody really cares about that. You know, we'll reach out. No, you're setting yourself up as the expert from the very moment of first contact. You're setting yourself apart from all the other contractors. Okay. And this is just one tiny aspect of the entire journey. You know, one of the other things you can do after you have a phone call, if you follow the sales process that I teach, you're going to have a discovery call first. You're going to, you know, learn about their project. You're going to give them some ballpark pricing. You're going to check out timeframe. You're going to make sure it's a good fit before you actually go out to their house. But after the call is over, you get on and you email them. a summary of everything that you just talked about. Even though you just talked to them two minutes ago and you basically went over all this, you get off the call, you send them an email with a summary of all the information about the call that's important to them. Again, it's the extra touch that you're listening and that you are a professional and that everything is going to go well throughout the whole process. This idea of like, you know, trust me, bro, everything's going to be good. It's not, that's not how you run a business. You know, you can't just say, well, the product's going to be good. I promise you when it's all said and done, it's going to be beautiful. But the entire process through that is going to be like crap because I don't communicate well. I'm not going to return your phone calls. I don't email after so-and-so and I don't do this and I don't like texts and I don't do me, me, me, me. It's all about me, me, me. But as long as the product is good at the end, that's all that matters. You're wrong. You're a hundred percent wrong. It does matter. It matters more than the product. And this is the part that contractors get so stuck in and they miss huge opportunities to deliver enormous amounts of value and more importantly, charge more for that value. The customer experience is the single most important aspect of the entire customer journey. It's not the product. Yes, I know. You know, you've been a carpenter for 500 years. You probably built Noah's Ark and you're like the best thing on sliced bread. You know, the whole world owes you a debt of gratitude because you're so amazing of a craftsman. But I'm here to tell you that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Your ego is going to have to take a hit here. It doesn't matter how good you are. If your experience that you give your clients is terrible, it doesn't matter. You can fight me until you're blue in the face. You will lose this conversation. You will lose this argument because it's not true. Customer experience is 100 times more important than the quality of the product. And I can prove it to you right here with a simple little test. Have you ever gone to a really nice restaurant and the food was amazing, but the service was terrible? And you left there thinking, man, I'm so glad we came here and ate because the food was amazing. I will bet any amount of money that you've never said that. You've never said, I'm so glad we came here because the food was amazing. The product. What you did is leave there saying, man, the service really sucked. I'm not coming back here because that server sucked. It took us 30 minutes to get a drink. Took us an hour to get our food. This sucks. It's all service. experience. It's not product experience. The food was amazing. The service sucked. Therefore the entire experience was terrible. That's true. You guys know exactly what I'm talking about. That is the same thing for your construction business. It's not about the product. It's not about how tight the joints are. It's not about the color or the finish. Yes, that stuff's important. I'm not saying you can't, you can just throw shit on the wall and that's good enough. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm telling you is that you can produce average quality work with an amazing experience and you will run circles around the guys that do amazing product with terrible experience. And this is the old school, you know, way of thinking from the craftsmen of like, well, as long as I do a good work, who cares about anything else? I can show up an hour late every day. I don't have to communicate well. As long as I do good work, that's all that should matter. Wrong. That's completely wrong. So when you're mapping out your journey, you look for opportunities to where you can insert customer experience of value added experiences. Recently, I had a somebody, a contractor, had scheduled a call with me about getting help in his business. And he. you know, it was a Zoom call. And so I log in and the contractor doesn't show up. So I always reach out to make sure everything's okay. They didn't, you know, they didn't forget about the meeting or didn't get the link or whatever. So I call them and the contractor doesn't answer and I get his voicemail. No problem. I'll leave a message. And usually it's something like, Hey, I miss you on the call. Hope everything's okay. We need to reschedule, you know, something like that. The voicemail for this particular contractor. It starts off, and I'm paraphrasing here, but I'm giving you the main points. It basically says, hey, you've reached so-and-so services. Sorry, I couldn't take your call. I am a very busy person. I'm a small company, and I wear many hats, and I'm not just the owner. I'm the foreman. I'm the lead guy. I'm also an artist and an intellect and a poet and a world traveler. And so as you can imagine, I'm a very busy person. And sometimes, you know, things like phone calls fall through the cracks. And I do want to talk to you about your project. But, you know, it's just easier for me if you send me a text or email. That way I can communicate better with you. And I'm a really good communicator. You know, once we get to talking and you'll see how good of a communicator I am, but I just prefer email or text. So please consider one of those. And then we can talk about your project. That's essentially, again, I'm paraphrasing, but that's what the voicemail was. Hey, just a

12:28

quick time out from the show. If you're a frustrated contractor who's dealing with low profit margins, stuck working on the tools every day, or doing free estimates for people who are never going to hire you in the first place. I invite you to my private contractor community, The Profit Club, where contractors just like you are adding two to three times more profit each year without producing any more jobs and finally getting completely off the tools to never do another free estimate again. So if you're ready to increase your profits, stop doing free estimates and get off the tools, then all you have to do is click the link in the show notes to learn more about The Profit Club and see how I can easily two to three times the cash in your pocket, give you a proof. sales process that will convert more jobs with ease and get you off the tools once and for all. And the best part is you can do all of this without having to produce more jobs than you currently are. Click the link to learn more. Now let's get back to the show.

13:22

I even told the guy, I was like, Hey, just a free piece of advice. You might want to change your voicemail. Cause that, that pretty much sucks, right? What this guy is doing is saying, you're not important enough to me. for me to be able to take your phone call. So if you really want to work with me because I'm so busy and I'm an artist and an intellect and a poet and a world traveler, you're just going to have to send a text or email. You're going to have to do it my way if you want to work with me because I'm so important, right? That's essentially what this message is saying. If I was calling that person, I would not leave a message and I would never call them back. Okay. Like that is not how you set first impressions with new clients. Now, if you can't answer the phone, if you're busy, that's fine. I get it. But anything that you do that is outward facing to your clients, your website, your social media posts, especially your voicemail, you know, your emails, anything that you do that's outward facing to your clients has to be presented. in a way that is a benefit to your clients. Again, customer experience, okay? So here's an example. When I was too busy, when I was still on the tools and I was too busy to answer the phone, my voicemail message said, thanks for calling. You know, we're probably working on someone's house right now, doing something, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. For faster service, you can go to our website and submit a request. So I'm telling them like, hey, if you want to get faster service, Go submit a website request. I didn't tell them don't leave a message because I, it may fall through the cracks. Now, if they left a message, I still followed back up with them, but I'm, I'm trying to word it in a way that's beneficial to them that if they want faster service, go to our website and fill out a request. Why am I doing that? Well, I'm doing that because it's putting them in front of my stuff. If they haven't gone to the website yet, I'm introducing them to all my content, you know, content and. services so they can get a better idea about me. But also it's easier if I get an email on my phone with all of their contact information and what they want, because now I have all the information I need to triage that lead. If it's not something that we can help them with, I can just send a quick email back, you know, Hey, got your request. So sorry. We don't offer those services. Or you said you need it done right away. We're booked out six months. Is that going to be a deal breaker? Like I can triage. that because I'm sending them to the website and I have that information. But what I'm not saying is, hey, I'm too busy. Send me a text or email. I'm not doing that. I'm wording it in a way for faster service. Go to our website. It's just how you say it. Like, it's just a wording. You're just changing some words. I'm trying to make the experience better. Now, obviously, it's better to answer the phone. But if you can't answer the phone, then you got to make it the next best option. Right. You still have to make it a benefit to them. You're not just saying, Hey, uh, you know, I'm too, I'm too busy. Don't bother me. Cause you're basically telling your customers from day one or from the very beginning that you don't care about them. It's all about you. I mean, that's not what we're trying to put true here. That's not what we want. Now, how can we take this to the next level? Well, you know, there's information that we can put out there. We can have blog posts. We can have content on our social media, on our website, where we start sharing with them what it looks like to work with our company. So I had a video that was also turned into a blog that said what to expect on the first day of your remodel. And I tell them exactly what's going to happen. As soon as we get there, we're going to figure out parking arrangements. We're going to make sure that our trucks and trailers and things aren't blocking you or inconveniencing you. We're going to figure out the best way to get in and out of the work area and then protect that. And I'm telling the customer. This is what you can expect on day one. I'm setting the expectation, right? And it's just a video. I recorded it one time and now I can repurpose that a thousand times over and over again. I can set it up as an auto email that after the job is sold, you know, maybe I have it set up to where a week before the job starts, they get the email with the link to that blog post that has that video. I can create value that way. I can educate through the process. I can create a flyer or a PDF that says, you know, congratulations on working with our company. Here's the next steps in the process. The next step is you're going to meet with our designer and then you're going to pick out selections and then you're going to do this and then we're going to do this and then this and this and this. Right. And you're telling them, here's what to expect every step of the way. Let me tell you a story. The opposite of this. I don't know. This was 2006, I believe. So I had an opportunity to go on a mission trip with my church. I'd always wanted to do it. I hadn't had an opportunity. This was the first opportunity. And this was a construction mission trip where we're going to go to another country and work on the church there. Now, this particular trip at the time was to Russia. And so we're going to the city of Krasnodar, Russia. And so we go there, you know, first time ever doing a mission trip. And everything's going fine. And then the morning that we're coming back, a huge fog rolls into the area. And the local airport, like the previous, you know,24 hours or whatever, all the flights have been canceled. And we have to, like, catch this flight to Moscow and then catch our international flight back to the U.S. So we're kind of freaking out. And we go to the airport. And sure enough, it's packed. I mean, it's a small little regional airport. But I mean, there's like no seats, everyone's standing, people sitting on the floor. It's packed. And you're in another country where most people don't speak English. And you're like trying to figure out like what the heck's going on? What do we do? So we find this person that works at the airport. And they basically said, you're going to get on this bus and go to another airport. And that was like the most amount of English that we got. It was get on bus and go. You get on bus and go. That's what he said, literally what he said. They didn't tell us what was going to happen next. They didn't tell us, you're going to go to the cellular port, you're going to get on the plane, everything's going to be great. It literally just said, get on bus and go. And there's like three charter buses out front. We have no idea where we're going. We literally don't know where we're going, what's going to happen, anything. So we get on this bus, and it's a two-hour drive to the next city over. or there's an airport. But we didn't know that. They didn't tell us that that's what was going to happen. We blindly had to get on this bus. And for all I know, for all I knew, they were taking us out to the middle of nowhere. They were taking us to the gulag or something and never to be heard of again. Right. But we're riding on this bus for two hours with no idea what's happening. And that's how your customers feel when you're not giving them the next steps. When you're not giving them the expectation, setting the expectation for the future. You know, I mean, literally, I had no idea what was going on. We didn't know. We could have been killed. They could have killed us. We could have disappeared. No one had any idea. It was nerve-wracking, to say the least. And that's what you're doing with your clients whenever you don't tell them what to expect next. Most contractors see this as, well, it's just common sense. It's more work for me. I don't want to micromanage you. I don't want to over-communicate. That seems silly. I don't have time. I got to get back to the job site. And you just write all of this off as not important. I'm telling you right now, if you spend more time on your customer journey and setting expectations, the amount of success you will have in your business with leads and experience and reviews and referrals will be ginormous. Like you will have a new problem, which is everyone will want to work with you. And that's the problem everyone wants to have. If you're having a hard time getting referrals, if you're having a hard time getting, you know, following through on the sales process to completion, there's a very good possibility that your customer journey is terrible. And you got to take a look at that. So there's lots of ways you can do this videos, PDFs. You can create blog posts. You can make social media posts. We were talking about this in the Profit Club or a marketing call yesterday about how you can do marketing posts that uses pseudo ways of explaining what's important. And so one of the things that I use as an example is we're talking about our unique selling position, what makes our company unique. And so if you made a post like a social media post or a video, Like where someone's interviewing you, maybe your office manager or another person's interviewing you and they say, hey, Brad, what do customers love most about working with your company? And so I'm responding to this as an interview question. And I could say something like this. Well, you know, most people would say that the quality of our work is amazing and that, you know, we build amazing, beautiful things. But surprisingly, what we get the most comments and the most... feedback and the most praise for is how well we communicate with our clients throughout the whole process. And so that's like a, that's a pseudo way of saying like, yeah, we're still going to do quality work. We're still going to do these things over here, but what's really important and what's really been presses a lot of people is how we communicate. And so people who are, who want to have good communication, if they see something like that, that's going to trigger. that inquiry in their mind of like, oh, that's what I want. I actually want a contractor who's going to call me back when they say they're going to, who's going to show up when they say they're going to, who's going to actually do what they say they're going to do. The bar is so low here, guys. I mean, the bar is set so low that any little thing that you do above that is going to make you stand out from the crowd. It's going to turn you into a purple cow. And if you just keep refining that over and over and making it better and better and better and making the customer journey better, better and better every time you work with a client, you're going to be so far advanced. You're going to be so purple. You're going to be such a purple cow that your competition is not even going to be able to keep up with you. They're going to be calling you and asking you, how do you do it? And it's such a simple thing to do. Yet most contractors overlook this because they're too busy, air quotes. You have to make this a priority, guys. Look at audit your customer journey. Ask your customers that you just got finished with, how was the experience? Don't hold back. Tell me the truth. What areas can we improve on? Start getting that right. Start getting the customer journey right from first contact to job completion. And you will see some amazing things happening in your business. I'm going to have to end it here, guys. I literally just can't breathe. This respiratory thing is kicking my butt. And I'm having trouble breathing. So I need to end it right here. Hopefully you got some value out of this. Hopefully be able to come back stronger. And once I kick this respiratory thing in the butt, we'll have more interviews coming up in the future. Do me a favor. If you get any value out of these. Go to your favorite platform and leave a review. Let's get the word out. Let's help other contractors in their business by spreading the word about the podcast. and helping them out. And if you do need help in your business, always feel free to reach out to me. I'm here to help you crush it in your business. I'd love to talk to you and learn more and see what we can do. Guys, that's it for the show. You know where to find me on the platform. Search the social media for Hammer and Grind Podcast. Go to the show notes and check out what we got there. Thanks again for hanging out with me. And remember until next time, profit is not a dirty word.