This week I'd finally reached the "enough" point with our cable provider. The bill just keeps going up and up, and the reality is almost everything we watch now isn't network TV, but on one of the streaming apps instead. If the Washington Caps have a game on ESPN+, I probably halfway watch the game with my phone leaned up against one of the cat or dog bowls while I'm making dinner for the furry herd.
I checked out Hulu+Live and YouTube and coupled with keeping our cable TV company only onboard for Internet access, I could cut our bill substantially. So called the cable company fully prepared to strip our service down to Internet only.
But...I could hardly get the words out of my mouth when the customer service rep gave me a quick "let me see what I can do, can you hold for a moment?" And within moments she was back with a deal. We'd get the brand new client price for the next 12 months and to sweeten the pot further, bumped up our Internet speed with no increase in price. And you know what else? How about we swap out those $15/month control boxes for $5/month Xumo boxes?
And while I'm happy to get the deal and avoid making other changes (at least for now), why does it take threatening to leave to get the same kind of treatment that new clients automatically get?
Now admittedly, old clients in our real estate business may not get the same treatment as new clients get, but it's not because we take them for granted.
Instead, it's a reflection of the more experienced we are as agents, the better we are at taking care of our clients.
We've made mistakes and we learned, and improved.
We've had more time to learn even more about our local markets.
We've developed better relationships with our builder reps.
We've got more systems in place to make sure nothing gets missed.
We've got a bigger referral network now than we did years ago (ActiveRain helps significantly with that!).
For that matter, blog posts aren't the same as they were years back either. We learned what worked and what didn't, and adapted.
If we're willing to continue learning, our newer clients should always start off in a better position than we could offer our "older" clients at the time we worked with them.
Keep learning and improving.
Until next Tuesday, just Ask An Ambassador if you need help,
Bill & Liz aka BLiz
Comments(15)