Customer Success is essential

Customer success is necessary for a thriving business. Without it, your business is as good as finished. I learned this as a painter.

Making sure my customers were satisfied was integral to my job as a painter.If the customer wasn’t satisfied, you’d get paid for the job you completed, but what if that customer needed something else painted in the future? If their experience was poor, do you really think they would give you a good recommendation? As my boss said,

You have to do things right in order to do them again.

My boss would constantly be on the phone with customers, asking them about the particulars of a job, or reassuring them that we would soon be able to paint their house. His phone never left his side, and was never left to ring. In the end, he would have to turn down work as we had such a good reputation that we got more than we needed from word of mouth!

Treating our customers right required a lot more than just showing up and doing the work. As a courtesy, we would always try to schedule our work around what was convenient for the customer. While painting their house, we were essentially strangers on their property, and we had to be careful not to do anything that could upset them or leave them with a negative experience.

We would cover flower beds so as not to paint them, and we were very careful not to leave anything in their grass for too long — lest it kill the grass and leave a mark. We would paint decks and we made sure to never leave them half finished over the weekend in case they were to be used.

When I painted four million dollar custom homes I found that the more expensive the house, the more interested the home buyer was in what you were doing.You had to put more work into making those customers happy.

In the really expensive custom homes, the home buyer would come and inspect how the work was going everyday. Oftentimes, they weren’t even that interested in the particulars of your work — they just wanted to chat, and get to know you on a personal level. It was difficult to please them, but we worked for the homebuilder for a reason — we could pay attention to detail.

Everything in my client’s house had to be perfect.

If a piece of trim had too many nail holes in it, or didn’t look right for some reason, it was replaced and repainted. If our company hadn’t paid attention to detail, they would have found another paint contractor and we would not have been working there.

Working as a painter taught me how invaluable customer success is. I got to experience first-hand how one good customer experience leads to more good customer experiences. Eventually, this snowballs out of control, and your business will have more high quality, well paying customers than you know what to do with.

Recently, I landed an internship with a startup called Spendabit. And my first priority is Client onboarding. Just today I began helping clients list their products on our website. It is my first day doing this, and I have already helped a couple clients with the onboarding process, solving their technical issues for them. Good thing I know how important customer success is.