As pet sitting business owners, difficult clients are inevitable. However, the way you as a business owner chooses to react to the situation is what truly defines you and your business. Liana Sanders of Wet Noses Pet Sitting in Fort Collins, Colorado, expertly handled a major customer service issue in her business, so I decided to bring her on the show to discuss how she remedied the problem.
Listen in as Liana tells her tale and offers up some expert advice on handling difficult clients and providing top notch customer service. Some of Liana's tips and topics include:
The importance of using phrases such as "This is my understanding of what happened" & "I'm sorry about the stress this situation has caused."
Why business owners MUST have good phone and email followup as well as offering to appear in person to talk through the problem.
The reason why business owners should make their employees feel like they have their backs by 'shielding' them.
Why pet sitting business owners should not offer any resolutions or remedies until they fully understand the situation
How businesses thrive when they utilize a 'separation of power' as well as giving situations TIME!
You can learn more about Liana on her website and on her blog.
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Transcript:
This is episode 71 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready—Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. This is Bella Vasta with Jump Consulting, and today I have one of our own with us.
Liana Sanders is here with us from Wet Nose Pet Sitting and Dog Walking. I am so excited to have her on because she is in one of my Facebook groups and we had a debacle. Now you guys have got to understand that I have a lot of people in my Facebook groups and unfortunately sometimes people just come in there to vent or complain. I was really impressed with the situation that Liana had and how she handled it. I wanted to put her on a pedestal—I know this is probably embarrassing—but I wanted other people to hear about this scenario because we all have these kinds of situations in our businesses. I wanted them to hear about the steps that she took, not only for her own sanity but also to de-escalate the problem, back up her team, and still make the client become a raving fan. This is stuff we learn but hardly ever see implemented. So without further ado, welcome to the show.
Thank you. For those of the listeners who might not know you, can you tell us where you are, the background of your company, how many people are working for you, just kind of an understanding of where you're at?
Sure. I have a pet sitting and dog walking company in Fort Collins, Colorado, which is about an hour north of Denver for anybody who knows Colorado. We’ve been in business for about seven years now. I have a full-time manager and staff that runs anywhere between about eight sitters to fifteen at any given time, depending on how many are full-time and how many are part-time. Our business is mostly pet sitting. Dog walking isn’t as big here in our area, so we do a little bit of everything and we really specialize in high-needs houses and high-needs pets—a lot of very ill animals and a lot of households where the humans have health problems. We do a very high-end service for people that have really high needs.
Which must make it interesting as the business owner.
I do. I have a whole other business. My pet sitting manager actually handles the majority of our normal stuff for our pet sitting company. She handles most of the training, day-to-day operations, and scheduling with our clients. I give kudos to our manager—she’s fantastic. She’s been with us for many years, first as a pet sitter and now as the manager. I pretty much step in and handle the end of hiring, management of any situations that go wrong,
