SPI 846: We Let the Customers Down (And Here Was My Response)

SPI 846: We Let the Customers Down (And Here Was My Response)

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host. He believes if you aren’t building a community around your brand, you will be left behind. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Hey, it’s Pat here, and I hope you’re having a happy Friday and happy December. We are almost at the end of the year and at the start of a new era at SPI. I’m excited, especially for the last episode of the year for you. It is a special treat, and I’m part of the way wanting to hold the guest a secret, but I’m actually going to tell you because I know a lot of you are long time fans and are curious and I want to get you excited about it.

The guest is none other than John Melley, the voiceover guy who has been the reader of fun Pat facts since 2008 so it’ll be 850 fun facts that we he would have read by the end of the year and he is our special guest just to close out the year. And it’s a lot of fun. So I hope that you will listen to that. But I hope you listen to this because first of all just wanted to get you excited about that. But second of all, I wanted to share a fun little story and it’s not necessarily all fun because some customers were unhappy about something that involved me and the Pokemon space and a company that I partnered with.

So I’m going to share with you the full story and in the end you might seem like or you might feel that this wasn’t really a huge deal. But I think when it comes to customer service and helping your people, your audience, your followers, your subscribers, your customers, your students, your members, helping them feel like they are able to trust you it is the most important thing. And when you get to the point at which you are selling something or partnering with another company, and especially when you were partnering with another company that offers a service or offers products and they don’t deliver, then it’s on you.

And in this case, it was actually on me. So. Over at Deep Pocket Monster, which is my Pokemon YouTube channel, by the way, we are now at 1.15 million subscribers. Since we hit a million in November, we’re already at 1,150,000, which is insane. I’ve seen it on other channels before. When you hit a million, you just start to gain even more momentum.

And we’re seeing some momentum there, we’re seeing some momentum from dubbing. Yes, we are dubbing some videos in other languages. Spanish and Portuguese are just flying right now. More on that later, but shout out to Eleven Labs, by the way, because although Google has, and YouTube has, its own automated AI dubbing features, it’s not good.

I’ve heard many complaints from people who have seen some videos of mine that have had those auto dubs on, and I worked with Eleven Labs And they have human beings on the other end that even though it’s AI, they have human beings check the language and to make sure that it’s appropriate and to make sure that it’s actually making sense and not just like, you know, when you translate something in Google to another language and it’s like a word for word translation, but it doesn’t actually translate perfectly in the other language.

Well, Eleven Labs again, has a human being check the AI so you can have dubs on your videos that sound like you. But in other languages, it’s amazing. And we’re actually seeing hundreds of thousands of views. From these other countries. And it’s so interesting now because we just came out with another video a few days ago that was only in English, we hadn’t yet set the dubs for it yet. It takes a little bit of time. And so many comments came in in Espanol and in Portuguese asking, where are the Spanish dubs? So this is going to be pretty heavy for us in 2025. And it might be something I explore for SPI as well. The podcast, there’s a lot of fun things that are available now with AI, things like that, that can help you reach more people.

It’s not just like a, like a cheat code or a, or an easy button to get things or to get around things. It in fact can help you reach more people like with languages. Anyway, to go back to the story, I went on a long tangent there. So I worked with a company recently that made a deal with me. They said, Hey Pat, we’d love to have you stream on our platform.

This was a online live streaming shopping platform. And it’s one that’s been well known for quite a long time. In fact, I’m going to let you know the name of it because they actually made it right in the end. But this tool, this app is called Whatnot. Gary Vaynerchuk has talked about it a little bit. A few of the people in my audience here at SPI have asked me about it.

You can sign up for an account and you can sell to a live audience. And it’s mainly used for collectibles, cards, Funko Pops, shoes, but a lot of people are using it for other things too. You could sign up if you’d like, but they wanted me to be the sort of celebrity streamer and do some giveaways, but also bring people on the platform to be first time buyers.

You know, that’s a KPI for them. First time buyers on their platform. And I have this audience of raving fans, loyal fans, in the Pokemon space, who if I tell them to go to an app to buy something, they will do it. And that’s exactly what we did. Our goal was having 50 new buyers for this thing. You can have auction based products, but I didn’t do any auction based products.

I don’t like auction based stuff. These were products that were sold actually below MSRP. So it was in fact beneficial for my audience to purchase for me. So I wanted it to be a win for everybody, right? A win for Whatnot so they can get first time buyers, a win for my audience so they can get products at a very low price and a win for me because sponsorship dollars and they want to work with card party, which is my event.

I love marketing where everybody can win. But in order for everybody to win, everybody has to do their part. And the stream went really well. We had thousands of people show up. And our goal was 50 first time new buyers. We had 300. So we killed it for them. We were so happy. Everybody was stoked. Until, after a week, I heard back from their team, and they said, You know what, we dropped the ball a little bit on fulfillment.

And there were a few customers, four total. Now out of 300, four is not that bad. But to me, not good enough. This is an example of where, you know, I used to get upset at my dad because I would come home with a 95 percent on my math test. And he would say, what happened to the other 5%? Right. And then I worked for hours with him to get that other 5%.

And this is why I have a little bit of trauma, but also why I had a 4.0 grade point average, got into Berkeley, all this stuff. I mean, I thank him, but also I hated that. I love my dad, by the way. But when it comes to customer service and especially with the loyal audience that I’ve built and the following that I have, it had to be a hundred percent or it wasn’t good enough and I told him that and unfortunately four people didn’t get what they had paid for. So before I even had a chance to respond, Whatnot had already done a good job of communicating with them. They didn’t ask me to do that. They did it themselves.

They reached out to these four customers who paid for something and didn’t get the product because they didn’t have any more of the product. There was a miscalculation in the warehouse or something like that. They already refunded them and gave them some additional credit to purchase with, which is a good start, but I couldn’t help but think about how disappointed these customers were.

Especially because these products also came with a special coin that was pretty exclusive, and thankfully I had more of them. But this was something that was special about this stream. You can get this coin in addition to these products that you purchase. And it’s the only place you can get it right now.

So I sent the team, a pretty honest email. And I said, I was disappointed. I talked about the trust that I built with my audience and the trust that I had with them to fulfill. And I said, you know what, if you think it’s silly that I’m upset about four people, then we probably shouldn’t be working together.

And I demanded to get the contact information for these four people. And I said, you know what, I’m just going to buy those products myself and send them over. I just, that’s the right thing to do. And I got a very, very kind, very honest email back. Not even really apologetic, just we dropped the ball, we are going to take care of it.

They’re sending me the product so I don’t have to pay for it. They gave me the email addresses because they knew how important personal communication was for these customers to me. I sent them the email, haven’t heard back yet because I literally just hit send on it and this is why it’s fresh on my mind right now.

And they said, and this is really important to me, they learned what went wrong so that it wouldn’t happen again. And I love that. That to me shows that this company is in it for the right reasons. That they know that they made a mistake and they understand the importance of my relationship with the audience so much so that they offered a refund, gave credits, and are paying for the product in the end.

Which, I think they should have said that initially, but maybe they didn’t know to the extent at which I cared. And that’s something that’s always been a part of my DNA when it comes to business. Doing what I feel is the right thing, despite it being maybe hard, despite it, maybe not feeling good, despite it, maybe costing money.

I was ready to eat about $400 so I can at least help these customers understand that I know where they’re coming from. And I’ve had a lot of experience with this kind of thing before, and it seems like Whatnot has as well. So I want to commend them. I want to thank the team over there and we’ll still be working together in several ways down the road.

And I’m just, again, most grateful for the fact that it was a learning experience, even on my end, I could have done more due diligence on the process. I know that we also sold a lot more than we thought we were going to. So the people who perhaps were in the fulfillment center or warehouse weren’t, you know, ready for it.

So, you know, I realized there’s a lot of things. involved in, there’s a lot of variables, but I mean, I want 100 percent satisfaction as much as possible here at SPI. I do the best and I have an incredible team who supports me in that regard as well, and we’ve done so much to make up for mistakes that we’ve made in the past.

I mean, I’m thinking all the way back to 2016-2017 when we first started selling courses when we started the memberships. I mean, all this stuff and I think that even on the other side of things, you know, like Whatnot, they did a really great job. I think people in general are pretty graceful with mistakes that you might make.

So I’m not hopefully scaring you into thinking you have to be 100 percent perfect all the time. But I think understanding that, especially for paying customers or people who invest their time into what you have to offer, putting yourself in their shoes and understanding, well, ultimately, what is it that they really wanted?

And after the fact, after the sort of mishandling of something or the miscommunication, the most important thing is they just want to know that they’re being heard, that they’re being listened to and that something is being done about it. Every once in a while, you might come across a person and I have here at SPI before and in some other businesses before, you know, the more troublesome customer who is entitled, who is essentially out of line. And in those special cases, you deal with them on a case by case basis and you have empathy and you, you know, move forward from there. But in general, when people are upset, the first thing to do is just hear them out to understand where they’re coming from.

To not even get defensive, to not even share about why things happened the way they did. They don’t care. They just want to know that they’re heard, and that something’s being done about it. And for many people, like myself, that it won’t happen again, or at least protocols will be in place to have it be less likely to happen again.

So anyway, just an honest experience, and I wanted to share that with you because, yeah, it’s Pokemon cards. It’s cardboard with cartoons on them. But it’s also real people, real money. And it’s important that we understand that. I hope that was informative and maybe even gives you a little bit more insight into perhaps even how I’ve matured as a business owner over time, you know, in the early, early days when I started selling eBooks to help people pass architectural exams, when I would hear a complaint, I would shell up.

I would either get very defensive. Or I would go into a hole and kind of just like not want to make any more sales because it was too traumatic for me. But I’m learning. And for those of you just starting out, it’s something that you just have to learn by doing. That’s really the big theme of next year for me.

Teaching the idea of learning by doing. There’s so much information. There’s so much to learn out there. How do we navigate this world of so much information? And information that often we’re not even asking for. This is what I like to call Lean Learning. You’re going to hear a lot more about that if you haven’t already.

This is my new book coming out June, 2025. Lean Learning, how to achieve more by learning less. It’s sort of a book that I’ve written for my kids at their age, but also for everybody else in this age of the internet and AI. And I truly feel that your ability to learn new skills quickly and to learn from your mistakes faster, it’s going to be your net worth and your value, your net value adaptation, right? Those who adapt survive. Anyway, thank you so much. I appreciate you. And I look forward to serving you in the next episodes. We’re coming down to the end of the year here, have a happy holiday and I’ll serve you next Wednesday and Friday and the next Wednesday and Friday after that.

And we’ll go from there. Thank you so much. Hit subscribe if you haven’t already. Cheers.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!