James Blain 0:00

When I go do training, the first thing I do when I sit down with the company is I say, tell me about your culture. Tell me about how you're communicating. It ends up touching every part of the business. the biggest way to make an impact on your business, is the culture and your approach, and keeping your fingers on the pulse is how you do it. Hello everybody and welcome to another exciting episode of the Ground Transation podcast. This is one of my favorite kinds of episodes. I am joined by my partner in crime, my favorite person to hang out with on Fridays, my Ken Lucci, right? My financial genius buddy. Yeah. Yeah. Ken, how you doing today, buddy?

Ken Lucci 1:00

Well, to be accurate, my business partner's the financial genius, I just happen to be the mouthpiece. Um, as we say all the time, he paints the pictures, but I tell him what the colors mean. So great to be here with you, James. How are you?

James Blain 1:13

I'm really excited about what we're gonna talk about today because I think brand equity and understanding your brand and understanding your reputation. Something that I hear people screw up all the time and I say, screw up, because I think it's a missed opportunity and I think it's something that people don't quite understand. I'm lucky enough that in another life I did a lot of marketing. I spent a lot of time on that side. And

Ken Lucci 1:39

You're kind of a frustrated marketing guy. I, hate to see missed opportunities.

James Blain 1:43

I think for us, this is something that is, for a lot of people, it's really tough, right? To get your head around this, to really understand this is tough. And I think one of the other things that we see a lot happen in our industry is we are a logistics industry,

Ken Lucci 1:59

Yes, we are.

James Blain 2:00

a lot of time, it's a lot of effort, it's a lot of expectation. And I think, you know, I'm gonna call it what it is. I think we got a lot of ego in our industry and I think we

Ken Lucci 2:09

wait a minute. Say that again. Say that

James Blain 2:11

We got a lot of ego in the industry, right? We get all the hate mail for this one.

Ken Lucci 2:15

really small business entrepreneurs have egos. This is news to me.

James Blain 2:20

yeah, What? Oh my God. What the id, what?

Ken Lucci 2:22

I'm shocked by this information.

James Blain 2:24

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's revolutionary. Well, but, but I think, I think when we start getting into this, and I'll kind of point out when this ties back in, but I think when we get into this and we start looking at it, I think a lot of times that ego turns into a little bit of shortsightedness. And so, Ken, I, I, I, I want you, I want you to tee us up. How did this topic come up? Share with them why we're having this conversation, because you got a great story there.

Ken Lucci 2:50

several months ago, I had somebody call me who is a fairly large operator who wanted us to, he said, listen, I, I see all the time I want you to do a profit improvement analysis of my business. I want you to tell me where things look good. Things don't look good. How can I improve profits? And then I want you to give me a value on the business because eventually I want to sell it. And he made a comment to me. He said, you know, I don't remove reviews don't matter to me. I just want to grow revenue. and build the value of the business and get out eventually. So I've never met this guy. I did hear of him, through the industry, and then I researched his company before we really went to a next step based on what I saw. I actually emailed him back saying, I really don't think we're a good fit. And primarily because he'd been in the business for a long, long time, and his reviews were horrible. including people writing paragraphs and paragraphs of terrible experiences, not just a three star and a sentence, just like vitriolic diatribe, uh, look up the word vitriolic when you have a chance, uh, James.

James Blain 4:01

Yeah. That's a bigger word than my generation can handle. Ken.

Ken Lucci 4:05

it is no question, there's no question in my mind. That positive reviews feeds brand equity moves you up in your SEO ranking and positive brand equity 100% affects value and affects who your buyer's gonna be. I also believe it affects no. question in my mind how much you can charge when people rave about you. You can charge more. I mean, one of the best people I love in my life is Douglas Schwartz, as far as an operator. Douglas is not the cheapest ride to the airport. He's also not the least expensive wedding provider on Long Island. But because he has 3000 plus five star reviews, he can come in more of a higher price. That's brand equity. I asked John to put together kind of some, some of the bad reviews I'm talking about, and I'd like you to comment on how to make sure they never happened in the future, because every bad review is a teachable moment. But if you take it personally, emotionally, and you take it and you answer with your ego because someone has insulted the company you've created, you're gonna be in bad shape. So brand equity has a direct correlation to positive reviews and negative reviews, by the way. And, positive brand equity has a direct correlation to premium pricing and premium enterprise value. And conversely. Negative reviews kills enterprise value and your ability to command a higher price. So John, why don't you start us out with a couple of reviews and I wanna dissect these and I wanna say, James, to tell us what you would do to make sure it never happens again. And then I do want us to talk about how the owners should have replied. Does that make sense?

James Blain 6:05

I think three major things jump out to me that I want to kick into this conversation from the get go. We spend a lot of time on our podcast talking about technology. We spend a lot of time talking about autonomous ai. when you go ask chat GPT, Hey, I need a ride to X, Y, Z, or, Hey, I need a trip to this, that, and the other. Do you really think if your reviews are crap chat, GPT is gonna be like, oh, well your options are this and this. It's gonna say, well, the top three providers in your area are, or the top provider in your area is, and where's it pulling that data? Straight outta the reviews.

Ken Lucci 6:42

I want you to dig deeper than that. Find me the, best wedding limousine provider on Long Island. What happens if I have crappy reviews?

James Blain 6:51

Oh, it gets worse, right? Because back in the day you would look and you'd see one star reviews and the guy wrote the Bible and you're like, eh. If you look at Amazon, Amazon now has on products where it is reading, aggregating, and giving you the review, and it says, Hey, this is a three star product. People say that value for money, it's middle of the road. The only reason they gave it three stars is it was really cheap. What they hate is it's only gonna last you six months. Now think about it, right? That's the future.

Ken Lucci 7:20

They're doing the consumer research for you.

James Blain 7:22

they're doing the consumer research for you. And so what's gonna happen, people naturally, right? if you screw me, I'm gonna tell everybody, anybody, if I feel like I got slighted, man, I don't care what your reply is, it's not really gonna matter what your reply is to the review. If I got slighted, I'm 10 times more likely to leave a bad review. So think about this, you get 10 bad reviews and it says, you know what people found? When it goes right with this provider, you're good. However, if anything at all goes wrong with this provider, you should expect to be left high and dry paying the full amount, right? It's going to literally spit out the good and the bad and the ugly, and it's going to aggregate that. And if you are a position where you have more negative than positive, it's going to lean on that. And two things. One, it's gonna kick you to the bottom.

Ken Lucci 8:14

How do you know this? How do you know this?

James Blain 8:17

come on. Really like this is me we're talking about, we're leveraging this same

Ken Lucci 8:22

You are such a deep thinking techno nerd. It scares the crap out of me. Every time we try to do a simple thing, you literally take us down this deep road. You have made it much more important to manage, your brand equity and to solve your bad reviews and to highlight and get more good reviews. so impressed with that answer, by the way.

James Blain 8:50

but here's the thing, Ken. We need to play chess, not checkers. If you don't think that AI is the next revolutionary, right? The internet revolutionized things. The personal computer revolutionized things, right? the.com, all of these things everybody thinks is bubbles and they're, oh, it's a financial bubble. But guess what? My generation was raised on the personal computer. The generation after me was raised on the internet. The generation now is going to be raised on ai. It doesn't matter if it financially goes to crap, it's writing emails, it's talking to us on the phone. It's doing everything. And it's a data aggregation machine. The last thing you wanna do is feed it crap.

Ken Lucci 9:32

so this is a simple one. Terrible driver, black Cadillac. Car number 14. Tags number. we redacted it. By the way, we're not gonna embarrass anybody today. Terrible driver. Black Cadillac. Car number 14. Tags are redacted, cutting people off in traffic, speeding, and almost causing wrecks 1 7 26. James, how do you solve this from happening?

James Blain 9:57

Get that driver off your payroll.

Ken Lucci 9:59

Well, well, I mean in all candor, right? I'm I, if I'm the operator, I'm checking my telematics to make sure that it wasn't right. Step one. checking the telematics to make sure this wasn't really a competitor giving me a shill bad review, but, but literally seeing what happened now on telematics.'cause I'm not a tech geek like you, because this person put the date and time, can you pull up that window and see where that vehicle was and the speed they were traveling?

James Blain 10:35

Yeah. I mean, depending on your telematics program is going to define how you do that, right? You know, your Ravens, who we partner with, your Salcon, your Samaras, almost every single one of these is going to have a very simple process where you're gonna go to that date. You're gonna be able to go to that time window. You're gonna be able to look that up. Now, the other thing that is super, super important here is perception versus reality. I'll give you a great example. I just got back from DC and we were riding on a bus and this guy was beaten on the horn, like it owed him money anytime somebody tried to cut him off. And I, I, I don't know, like it just, any little thing he would honk. And every time he did that. Every single person on the bus would pop up and try to figure out what's going on. Now, I happened to catch most of it. He was getting cut off. He was having people almost hit him. He had a lot of situations where I could see frustration causing you to hit the horn. but I will tell you the big thing about that though is most of the times that he used the horn. Were out of frustration. Were, Hey, you type of moments. They were not professional. Hey, I need to hit the horn. I'm stopped. He's like, you know, it's not, this is a, I need to use the horn. It's, Hey, this guy's coming over. I'm gonna honk at him. And then I think my favorite was on the way to the airport. We had a driver go all the way around traffic to the very entrance of the off ramp, then cost three lanes emerge in front of everybody. It was

Ken Lucci 12:11

a black car.

James Blain 12:11

That was in a bus, right? so we got there maybe three or four minutes early. But I can tell you the bus was not very full. And everybody was sitting in the front of the bus. And all I on this bus, were on us crossing all three lanes to get it. Now was that unsafe? He used his turn signal when he went over the lanes. He merged in. You know, yeah. it's unsafe,

Ken Lucci 12:33

Okay.

James Blain 12:33

was it illegal? No. So, so swinging back to where we're at here, right?

Ken Lucci 12:38

do you stop? How do you deal with the chauffeur?

James Blain 12:41

two things. First and foremost, I'm going to telematics first. I'm an investigation type guy. I want to get my facts right. I'm probably going to go to telematics. Then depending on how the telematics situation lays out, and depending on how quick I can get a hold of each, I may be getting a hold of the customer. I may be getting a hold of the chauffeur driver first, but I see it as you have to address all of them because one of two things is happening. Reality, yes, they were driving irresponsibly perception. Maybe they weren't driving irresponsibly. But again, like I gave with the horn example, even though that person hitting on that horn all the time wasn't necessarily the one causing the issues, they had ones merging in. You've got the guy hitting the horn and creating the perception that it's him.'cause I hear the horn. It's not just smoothly taken care

Ken Lucci 13:35

Okay, so now. what's your response to this review? And do you recommend an operator try this? This guy, Salvato Lopez, put his name out there. do you try to get him to take this review down? do you just respond to the review? How do you respond to the review? And then how do you use it internally to make sure it never happens again?

James Blain 13:57

All right, so here's where it gets fun. we have a lot of ego in our industry and so a lot of times the first reaction when we get a bad review is we're gonna go respond to it and we're gonna tell everybody how dumb that person is. Like it or not.

Ken Lucci 14:11

The reviewer,

James Blain 14:12

That's that's knee jerk reaction. And if we were to pull them up, I can pull up countless companies that basically in their review respond to, this guy called me at the last second, I had to like excuses or, you know, he was driving fine. My first step would be I want to IDS. Right? For those that don't know, IDSI, I'm going to go through there. I'm gonna identify, I'm gonna figure, my big thing is one, get my layout. Okay. Then I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna work with that person. I'm gonna reach out and say, Hey, I'm, I'm so sorry that happened to you. Can you tell me about what happened? Can you tell me how we can solve? Can you tell me how we can make this right? Before I even dream about talking about changing the review or anything like that? Because the only thing more powerful then you updating is if they update and they say, Hey, within five minutes of posting this review, the owner reached out to me personally. They made it right. They took care of me, and I can't believe they cared enough to do that. And I've talked about this in Vegas. I'll talk about it again. A lot of times your failures are an opportunity to build a client for life in the way you personally handle it.

Ken Lucci 15:28

so make the assumption after you've checked the telematics you have verified that this guy was speeding. How do you dress the chauffeur? And then how do you use it as a teachable moment to make sure it. doesn't happen again?

James Blain 16:38

So IDS, identify, discuss, solve a couple things. So if we know that the chauffeur was in the wrong, I'm not going to make any excuses when I talk to that customer. I'm gonna say, Hey, I am so sorry you had that experience. That's not who we are. We are taking care of the problem internally. We're making sure that never happens again, right? don't try to sugarcoat it and then talk about, Hey, this is what I can do. This is how I'd like to make it, right? This is how we can take care of you in the future. This is how we can show you who we really are with that chauffeur. Depending on if this is the first time or not, then you've gotta work with that chauffeur to help them understand, one, completely unacceptable. Two, what they should be doing, and three, what happens if this continues? you? Never do that again.

Ken Lucci 17:27

how do you, how do you counsel this chauffeur?

James Blain 17:30

So two things. I would not just look at this one event if it was me, right? Because when I look at instances like this, if someone is doing this with someone in the vehicle, there's a good chance it's not the first time. So if I've gotta investigate this one incident, I'm going back and I'm looking through the telematics that I'm seeing if there's a pattern of behavior. The other thing is something I really, really push is that you wanna be a coach, not a trainer. A lot of people's instinct is, oh, I'll just have'em do an online course, or, oh, I'll just push this, or I'll just write'em up, or I'll do that. There's nothing wrong with having them do that, and I encourage it, but it's a lot more powerful when you're able to sit down with the person and say, Hey, you know, I want you to know that we had a complaint as a result of how you were driving. The problem is even if you're in a hurry, even if you're in a bad day, if you would've done that with the CEO of my top client and we lost that client, that one, I'm having a bad day is gonna cost us. So I need you to understand the why. Then I would talk to them about, Hey, walk me through what happened that day? Why were you driving like this? What happened? And again, I'm trying to figure out, is this a mutual problem? Then once you've done that, you can say, Hey, we need to make sure it doesn't happen again. I have, you know, the pacs defensive driving course. I want you to do this, and then hold them accountable to it. And then document, document, document, document. If it's a first time offense, it might be, Hey, we're gonna sit down, we're gonna discuss it. I'm still gonna file that away. I'm still gonna note it. because what happens most of the time is they go rip the guy a new one or. They just assign him some. It goes one of two ways. It either swings the pendulum to, I'm ripping his head off, or we swing the pendulum to I'm not doing enough, and you wanna try and sit in the middle. That's how you win these. And the way to stay ahead of it is to make sure that the second something like this happens, you make it clear it's unacceptable and you keep this from becoming a pattern or an issue. I see companies that have lots of bad reviews. I know that one of two things is going on there. One, they're either not addressing problems or two, they're playing chess and not checkers. If I know that I'm getting the same complaint over and over, I'm changing my training program, I'm training ahead of it instead of behind it.

Ken Lucci 19:59

I wanna leave it. with a couple things. I'm not a lawyer, but certainly if you are doing any kind of counseling or coaching, even if you don't give them something in writing to sign, you want to have this documented in your own files

James Blain 20:14

Oh, you have to have this documented.

Ken Lucci 20:15

Alright, so that's the chauffeur. The other thing I, I want to clarify with everybody is if you are in a marked car. Number one, you are always being judged by the passenger in the backseat. They may seem like the nicest person in the world and they would never turn you in if you made a mistake, but you need to make the assumption that you're being judged by everything you do and everything you say. It's not a nice thing, but it's true. Second of all, if you're in a marked car with the logo anywhere visible, you better watch what you're doing. I'll never forget, I was in Massachusetts and I was pulling onto the highway and there was a livery car with their windows all down, and this guy is blaring like unbelievably Blair. No, no, there's no customer in the car, but he is blaring music, and this was a logoed car. And it just so happens that the company that he worked for was literally a tenant in one of my family's office buildings, and I called and I said, look. I've taken a video and I'll send It to you. This is totally unacceptable from a brand perspective. I know you work seven days a week like a dog, if these cars are marked, you cannot have drivers doing this kind of stuff. I'm just telling you, it doesn't go any further. It doesn't get posted anywhere, but I'm just telling you. So keep that in mind with any kind of driving, whether you have a ve uh, a customer in the vehicle or not. Um, when you are in a marked car, you can affect the brand positively or negatively. not a bad idea to, maybe yield and let the guy in front of you, and give him a wave instead of flipping'em off. Okay? Next review.

James Blain 21:59

on, Ken. So before we move on, the one last thing I want to touch on is it's not just the car, right? Every time I go to an airport, we come out, we see all the people standing there. Look, if you are someone that has name tags, if you have your logo on your sign, if you have anything there that is an identifying mark, guess what? It's the exact same thing.

Ken Lucci 22:22

Be on your best behavior. Okay, this is an interesting one. Uh, marina w was the person who reviewed, she gave this company a one star. This is a limousine and bus service in Chicago. Do not use this company. This was the most horrific experience I've had with any business in my life. We made the mistake of using the service for our wedding because everyone else was booked. We would have been better off not getting transportation at all. One bus got lost. Didn't show up at all for the first half of the night To make it worse, the driver is calling us in the middle of taking our wedding pictures, asking where he should be So now, instead of using this time for our photographer, we paid for, we're scrambling to try to figure out where the driver is, give her the correct address of where she needs to be, and even wasting time trying to help her get there. We went out of our way to lay out the very root in an exceptionally clear manner well in advance, and this was just disregarded completely. Half of our guests were late or missed our wedding ceremony because of this. Then at the end of the night, the driver approaches and es my husband for a tip while he's in the middle of saying goodbye to our friends and family in the hustle and bustle of things, my kindhearted husband sent a generous tip without realizing that this was already included. Company's initial overpriced quote. The driver obviously knew this and was intentionally trying to take advantage of us. Then as we wrote to get reimbursed for the trouble that this caused and the money was wasted, it took months to get the resolution because of the horrific customer service we spoke to. The manager who was unprofessional would go weak without responding and clearly had no intentions of actually helping the customer who left, dissatisfied from this mistake that their company made just the worst through and through. Cannot warn you enough, even if they are no other choices, do not use them.

James Blain 24:25

put the time

Ken Lucci 24:26

Okay. And I'm just gonna say it. I'm not gonna call out who it is. These are the people that called us. Okay. And I just knew we didn't have enough in. common, I think this is a cultural issue. There's a lot going on here. Okay. as Mr. Service, I. want you to try to dissect how some of this could have been avoided, and then I want to chime in also. So, one bus got lost, didn't show up at all for the first half of the night. I mean, how does this stuff happen? we're in the logistics and hospitality business. Logistics and hospitality. This company fell down in both areas. There's so much here. How do we even address it?

James Blain 25:08

but this is an onion problem. And the problem is every layer of the onion's got mold in it. All right? so onion, you start peeling layers of the onion, right? The problem is there's mold on every layer, right? and usually what happens is the truth is somewhere in the middle,

Ken Lucci 25:22

Sure,

James Blain 25:23

we'll take'em at face if they laid out a route, and I had to guess, I would guess that that driver got tossed on the route at the last second and the route didn't make it to them, and all they got was an address and they probably got it at the

Ken Lucci 25:37

Stop there. No special instructions on the reservation. There were no special

James Blain 25:42

all the time.

Ken Lucci 25:43

No special instructions.

James Blain 25:45

That would be my guess. I would guess that that detail didn't get pushed down. The other thing is even at companies that I've known that are good companies, the backend is what kills us. It takes companies longer than they should to close out trips. Even on a previous episode, I had talked about how I got in the wrong vehicle. I called them every other day for a week and for the first four days they had me down as a no-show, even though I literally called them from the vehicle that I had ended up in that was in the wrong vehicle and told the driver who then said, Hey, can you call dispatch and let'em know and call dispatch and let them know? Right. That company had me listed as a no-show the entire time,

Ken Lucci 26:35

how do you solve that? Is it like everybody's on slack and knowing in real time what's going on?

James Blain 26:41

so two things I would say the root cause is typically culture and it's not training. it's usually culture and the culture is top down

Ken Lucci 26:53

You, that's a golden nugget. There's no question in my mind in this situation with what we're looking at here, it's absolutely cultural.

James Blain 27:02

but there's too many cascading failures here.

Ken Lucci 27:05

That's a good way to look at it

James Blain 27:06

And when I had my issue, it was the same thing. Cascading failures, the person was in the wrong place. And then when I called them it was, Hey, I gotta go to my next trip, tell the dispatcher. And I tell the dispatcher and they say, great, well have a manager call you. And the manager never calls me and then the billing person doesn't see anything in there'cause nobody's put anything in.

Ken Lucci 27:25

I'm gonna shout out a reservation system. There's a reservation system and one of the, things I love about it, and there's some things I don't, but they have an incident module and that incident module, you can choose immediately who, who gets the incident, right? So one company I know any incident goes immediately to the president. Along with the department where the problem is. So in this case, it would've been perhaps the dispatch department. In, this incident here we're looking at, it was, wait a minute, we didn't have a route. The special instructions were not on the reservation. And many softwares have an incident module that will then broadcast an email to say, Hey, look at reservation 7 1 9. our chauffeur didn't identify himself, and the client got in the wrong car. Some people may say, well, you know, that's James, you get on the wrong car. It's not our issue. Wait a minute. Back up. Where was the car when this happened? Right? What's our communication protocol? But as you say, let's get back to this incident because we're not gonna relive Las Vegas. You've got PT PTSD over that incident. I know it,

James Blain 28:38

no. It, it's not me. It's, it's, the reason I brought that up is in Vegas, I had my wife with me, and if I hadn't have been in the car, that would've ruined chauffeur services for her. If that was her by herself, she'd never ride a limo again. this wedding that's ruined, they're gonna have a sour taste. Anytime they see a bus, they're now gonna have a horrible feeling This is an opportunity to lock down someone, to have a raving fan, to have someone that's talking about how great you are. And I guarantee you, if we come to them in five years and we say, Hey, we're doing a wedding, I'm thinking about transportation. They're gonna go, well, I can tell you who not to use. Let me tell you how they ruined our day.

Ken Lucci 29:18

You're right. And look, there's so much to unpack here. Number one, you know, the owner has to wanna solve these problems, the owner has to, want to change the culture. My opinion is this guy should probably own a taxi company, okay? Because he treats everybody like they're a never ending amount of customers to come through the door. Number one, I know he is low priced, okay? everybody in that market tells me he's disgustingly low priced. So he's on a hamster wheel. The hamster wheel is, he's so low priced that he thinks growing. Top line revenue is the answer. Okay? He can't really afford a manager and because some of his reviews are about vehicles that broken down. his entire focus, if he wants to fix this, is to examine the Culture. of that business. And also, God knows what he uses for who's in charge of training, who's in charge of customer service. The other thing we notice is when somebody says, we spoke with a manager who was totally unprofessional. Really? I, I, why is that tolerated? A

James Blain 30:23

culture, but the, all right, so two things. I see this happen a lot. One, does the owner know and two, does the owner care? Those are the two most important questions.'cause I can tell you right now that there are plenty of companies that the owner has got what they focus on and they don't see these things. So one of the things I did at PAX is I'm on our support line. If you send in a message, I will see it. Does that mean I'm gonna respond to it? No, I'm gonna let my team handle it. I have it set up to where I get those in my inbox and I treat that like a checklist. I don't see a reply on it. If I don't see that. One of my team members said, Hey, I got this right, or Hey, I called, or some kind of action on it. I leave it there and I don't take it outta the inbox until I know that that's handled,

Ken Lucci 31:12

The incident module says that the incident module, the person who's gonna claim the problem, they answer the email that they hit check and they own it. let's talk about some realities here of bad reviews. Number one, it. takes 40 positive reviews. 40 positive reviews to truly the reputational damage caused by one public complaint that has gone unanswered. That's number one. Number two, customer perception. Every bit of digital survey data out there says that between 80 and 86% of customers hesitate to buy from a business. After seeing multiple negative reviews, you should strive to have a 4.5 or better, and at this point, for this guy, It's absolutely a reconstruction of how he does business and focusing on total quality management. By the way, there are books out there, the rule of 10. Only about one out of 10 happy customers will naturally leave a positive review. However, what

James Blain 33:28

call bs. There's no way one outta 10,

Ken Lucci 33:31

are you thinking?

James Blain 33:33

to get'em to do

Ken Lucci 33:34

You think it's lower than that?

James Blain 33:35

That one outta 10 has gotta be, if you're asking, if you don't ask, you're not getting them.

Ken Lucci 33:39

so let's clarify if you're sending a review prompt based on the software, what you are saying is one out of 10 will say, if they love you, they'll give you a five star,

James Blain 33:53

I would say it's probably one out of 40 ish would be my guess, if you're prompting them. And, the difference is, so one of the things that you find when you start looking at reviews and you start looking at forms the more information you want or try to get, the more the response tapers off. So if I just say, Hey, and that's why most apps now like their first thing is Gimme your stars.

Ken Lucci 34:18

Get, rate me from

James Blain 34:19

every app now is just rate me from one to five.'cause if they can get that. That's a win. And by the way, to your point, about one to 40 guys, it's a math problem. If you have 10 reviews and one review is a one star, and then the rest are three stars, sorry, you can't be better than a three star. Even if you go get a five star, it's barely gonna move the needle. So they're all pushing for just the stars to actually get like a full review. I would say if it's a bad experience, you're very likely to get this. But if it's not a above and be I, I would say one in 10. If you do 10 above and beyond, you'll get one in 10. That'll rave about it. But I think if it's an average one, it's gonna be lower.

Ken Lucci 35:05

so, so there's another rule of 10. That is, if someone is unhappy, they're gonna tell a minimum of 10 people. That's an old wives tale right before the internet

James Blain 35:17

Well now we have podcasts. You piss me off. I tell everybody right.

Ken Lucci 35:20

so think about this now. How many people are seeing the review we just talked about? It's literally thousands. Oh, by the way, people read negative reviews three times more than they sit and read positive reviews. It's like watching a slow moving train wreck. Which by the way, I honestly think that company that has this many bad reviews has to bring someone in to say, let's examine. It's TQM, total quality management.

James Blain 35:49

Yeah. so before we move on, there's one last thing I wanna leave with, right? I made the joke just now. You pissed me off. I have a podcast, but I wanna quantify that because viral content right now, if you have a crying bride. On Instagram and she's telling the story of how you ruined her wedding and it goes viral. They will tag the hell outta your company name and you could easily see millions of views. So I think the other thing to keep in mind is that each one of these can be a literal viral landmine, especially if something horrible happens and it gets caught on camera. we've even done episodes that you guys have watched where we're talking about, Hey, you know, we've got this bust that's outta control and he's cutting off the truck and he is doing this and that. we're in the industry, we have respect for the industry. We want that to be a teachable moment. So we're blurring that out. No one's gonna be that nice, right when it gets shared, they're gonna push it hard. And then back to my point about chat, GBT and everything else, that's gonna push your brand reputation even lower. So we can transition now into the importance of the good ones, because you can get that same angel effect there. But I wanna point that out because I think a lot of people are like, ah, it's just one guy. He had a bad experience, and they try to brush it off. And the problem is it just takes stepping on that one landmine to completely trash your brand reputation.

Ken Lucci 37:11

Now we're gonna move to dc. We need do one more bad one before after Deboarding the bus from New York at Union Station in Washington. My wife and I were standing to the right of the bus fixing. My 2-year-old son stroller out of nowhere, the driver started backing up. Suddenly there was another company bus employee guiding the driver who also noticed us. The bus swerve suddenly and crashed into my son's stroller, throwing him down and crumbling the stroller and hitting my wife's left leg in the knee area. The impact was so bad that the stroller broke. My suitcase was stuck under the bus and my wife was hit by the tire. We pulled out our son just in time. The suitcase was struck under the bus, and the stroller was damaged. My wife has been in pain ever since. She was bruised on her leg and my son went into a state of shock. Nobody has apologized to us since the incident. We were told to go from pillar to post, but to no avail. I did call nine one and have my wife checked. Her vitals were higher from the shock we had to leave as it was getting late. My wife has been experiencing terrible pain. We have been traumatized by the in incident and the management claims this was not an issue.

James Blain 38:31

$5 million. That's what they're gonna ask for.

Ken Lucci 38:33

what do you think their next phone call is,

James Blain 38:35

Oh, no, no, no, they don't have to make the phone call. They just put this crap on the internet.

Ken Lucci 38:40

And what are you saying? And you, and so, and so the, the

James Blain 38:44

like the lawyer. We all know the personal injury attorneys are not supposed to reach out and solicit, but they don't call'em ambulance chasers for nothing. Like we've heard of them finding incidents and reaching out to them again, illegal. They're not supposed to do that. But you gotta$5 million insurance policy. I know.'cause it's required by law. That's the minimum they're gonna go for.

Ken Lucci 39:03

I want you to dissect this Let's make the assumption that this is actually real and not really exaggerated. What do you do when something like this happens and how do you prevent it?

James Blain 39:16

So even if this wasn't ex, let's say it's a massive exaggeration, right? I'm not saying it is, but let's say, you know, we're gonna give the, the driver says they were nowhere near the bus and I started backing the bus, and, you know, they were, they, they were getting ready to get up onto the curb. Okay. So why are we backing a bus if we know they're not up on the curb? but again, IIDS investigate, discuss, solve. So if they're at Union Station, my guess is this is probably some kind of scheduled service. Kinda like I was saying, a terminal. That bus probably turns and burns and and runs. But two things. You have someone backing the bus and you have someone in the bus. Now we preach this like crazy. Two big things. One, we have a literal poster of what the hand signals between the driver and the spotter are. If you don't have the same hand signals, it doesn't matter if they're back there. Two, it doesn't matter who the spotter is. All right? You do not trust the spotter. You trust your gut. I'm gonna share a very embarrassing story from my childhood, but it directly applies here as it's something that I learned when I was a kid. I was 17 and I worked at a car wash. I'm in the Midwest, so a crew cab, long bed bus long, like it's an RV length truck, right? The longest truck you can buy comes in and it gets pulled around for a rewash. I've got a guy, guiding me in. He's guiding me in, and I am blindly, I'm not looking at any of the mirrors. I'm 17. I'm thinking, Hey, I got this guy guiding me in. I will blindly stare at him. I will trust him. I end up scraping the side of the truck because I'm doing a tight turn in and he's guiding me and he's not looking at the other side. And I end up suspended from my job and they say, Hey, you're suspended. Right? You have the opportunity. And, it was the only time. My entire life I've had this issue. But you're suspended from work. In six months, we can review the incident and decide whether or not you come back. It was basically getting let go. But, but the, the key thing, and the reason I'm sharing this horribly embarrassing story, is I was blindly focused on the guy guiding me.

Ken Lucci 41:30

you weren't looking at all of the things you could have

James Blain 41:33

wasn't looking at anything,

Ken Lucci 41:34

which would were the mirrors?

James Blain 41:36

bingo, I was looking at the guy guiding me in. So let's walk through this. If he's getting backed up and he's got a spotter on the driver's side rear of the bus, and we know that that stroller probably came out from under the bus, near the front driver's door, right? They're probably down in that area. If that spotter's not there or that spotter's not in a position where he has visibility on it, he could variably easily be telling him, come on back, and guess what? If he's making the same mistake I did. Right? And for me, that was a very difficult lesson as a kid. It's stuck with me my entire life, right? If he's not looking at his mirrors, if he didn't get out and look, if he didn't make sure, even though he is got a spotter, he could have those people in his blind spot. And let's try and give benefit of the doubt to the driver. If we ever responsible driver a responsible spotter, and this is just one of those things where he's blindly trusting the spotter and he's not checking like he mentioned, this is a 45 foot motor coach. He could have very easily killed that entire family, not just crushed that luggage.

Ken Lucci 42:47

and let's just, point out, we've hidden the company name here,

James Blain 42:52

Yes, absolutely

Ken Lucci 42:53

but I make the case that someone in your organization. There are services that will do this for you, but if you don't have an automated service that sends you an email, anytime you get a Google review, you just have it manually. Have somebody on your team be checking Google. The most important thing that's missing here, there's no response from the owner.

James Blain 43:19

but in this case, that might be a legal strategy.

Ken Lucci 43:22

but just to say, thank you for reporting this. we wanna reach out to you we are in the middle of investigating it because it looks totally uncaring on behalf of the company.

James Blain 43:34

I would also say that even if you don't have a service, Google My Business, you have Bing webmaster tools. You can go get signed up in five minutes and anytime you get any review it'll ping you. That is the bare minimum. You should be doing

Ken Lucci 43:49

All right, And by the way, look what we're doing here. We're leaving the name in SUV Chicago Limo, five stars. Limo made my best friend's bachelorette party, an amazing success, great communication, fast turnaround for pricing, everything included in the price. They made this so easy for me. Now, if you're looking for the best driver request. Married, she was absolutely amazing. She had the best personality. She was right on time, made all the extra stops we requested. We love you. Mary. What do you learn from this, James?

James Blain 44:26

One, you need to be sharing this and promoting it. and two, one of the neat things that we get to contrast here is before we talked about the driver, where the gratuity was included and the driver was still pressuring for a tip. I grew up and Ken will fever, deny it. He still doesn't believe me, but I grew up going back and forth from here to Spain,

Ken Lucci 44:45

I don't believe it,

James Blain 44:46

family over there, right? Ken denies it. One day I'll hold the passport up. Um, so, so I, they don't tip there. So for me, tipping culture was always really hard for me because over there, if you go to the bar. I would leave a euro every time I bought a drink and I was a big spender, like a huge tipper. Tipping culture in other countries just isn't, and especially here coming outta COVID, we tip for everything now and the percentage is gone to 20%. I can tell you the fact that if you've got all included, gratuities included, everything's there. You don't have to do anything. A couple things, one, we know now that there's benefit clarification that has come through that that gratuity included on the bill is a hundred percent tax free until they get to, I believe,$25,000 and look that up. Don't quote me on it, but I wanna say the first$25,000 of tips there is completely tax free. But the other side is she appreciates and she points out like, Hey, I had one price. I had one price to worry about. I had one person that took care of me. Like, this is the type of thing that you should be promoting and pushing and putting

Ken Lucci 45:53

let's dissect it. Number one, great communication. Number two, fast turnaround on pricing. Number three, everything included in the pricing. The ultimate, the result, they made this so Easy. for me. Oh, and the chauffeur had a great personality. Let me ask you a question, James. What does it cost extra for a driver to have a good personality? Do you pay extra for that? I'm being sarcastic

James Blain 46:21

you lose, money for that if you don't have a good personality. It costs the driver

Ken Lucci 46:25

I'm being sarcastic. Okay. You know, The thing about being successful is, is showing up and looking good in our industry. It's showing up on time, looking great and, and displaying A nice personality. I mean, I think that's 80% of the job, So. kudos to SUV Chicago Limo. Alright, John. Oh, look at this one. Metropolitan shuttle Washington DC Charter bus on the 12th. Of September, I traveled to Washington DC for an Odyssey Cruises with my A A TL, which is all about the ladies group. There were 53 senior ladies. The transportation was provided by Metropolitan shuttle bus service. Shout out. The bus was immaculately clean, comfortable. The bus driver was kind and helpful in making sure the ladies got on and off the bus safely. The ride was very smooth and soothing. It was the best bus ride I've ever had. I would like to express my gratitude for the bus service and the driver for getting us to and from our events smoothly. I will definitely recommend to others to use this service.

James Blain 47:33

I'm gonna shout out to Mike Rose because one of the cool things that Mike Rose does in his driver meetings is he reads the good reviews.

Ken Lucci 47:40

He's our favorite Rose today. He's our

James Blain 47:42

look, I don't pick a favorite rose.

Ken Lucci 47:45

no, today. Today? No. Today. He's

James Blain 47:47

but Mike, Mike can win today. So I will tell you, him and Jay,

Ken Lucci 47:51

Jay gel, the other owner.

James Blain 47:53

exactly. His partner. And I think one of the neat things is probably 80% of the time, your reviews are not about safety, not about smooth, they're about the customer service. What happens is if you don't have a smooth ride, the customer service can't stack on top of it. What I really love about this one is they talk about how it was smooth and soothing and relaxing, right? they mentioned, you know, on and off the bus safely. maybe for them, maybe they're really congested areas, maybe it's packed. so those little tiny extra moments that they take as a driver to do that really count. And I really love in this one how they talk about, it's a relaxing ride. We talk about drive, like water flows. This to me was one of those moments. And there's not, believe it or not, in the review world, that it's not usually the safety they're raving about. It's the service. So I love to see that.

Ken Lucci 48:48

I hate driving in DC because it's just like, it, it's not DC City in the world to, to drive in. So this is fantastic. There's a couple things I would do with this. Number one, if I'm the owner, I am celebrating this driver everywhere in the organization. That's number one. Number two, I am creating a use case with my charter buses, and I'm going to every, social, organization, that I can find. that. would be ladies based or even, just even regular social, rotary Clubs, Knights of Columbus, and I'm using this as a use case, but I'm celebrating the success of this driver. Okay. And I'm also asking him to give us tips. what did he do to make them rave? Okay. one of the owners of one of the larger networks, and I were talking the other day, and he was telling me about a lady who was at the airport who was supposed to be picked up by reservation Uber ride. And the driver didn't show up. So let me tell you what happened. She walks up to one of his vehicles. He's got logos on the side and she said, are you doing work for Uber? And he said, No. And she had been waiting for 15 minutes and the chauffeur said, what's the problem? Well, I created a reservation with Uber two weeks ago, and they've not shown up. Do you know what that chauffeur did? He called National Dispatch and he said, ma'am, we will have a vehicle out here in 15 minutes because a vehicle just happened to be leaving the airport. He turned him around the, the same, network. The vehicle came right behind, loaded the lady into the vehicle, and she paid for the trip along the way or gave the guy a credit card. the guy was telling me this. I, said, look, you need to celebrate. The dispatcher who made it happen, and that chauffeur, who literally could have said, well, sucks to be you. He could have said that, right? He said, he says, standby. Let me see what I can do. those two moments needed to be celebrated. And then I would literally, as the owner, reach out to the lady and say, how often do you travel? By the way, if you open up an account with us, we're gonna give you our corporate rates. They just created a raving fan against our biggest competitor. I'd also use it in a use case if she allowed me to.

James Blain 51:16

No, no. And I, I think, I think you're onto something important, and I'll tell you, the only distinction that you wanna make sure you make there is making sure that when you celebrate, that your team understands the difference between solicitation and being available and being there to help and understanding that everyone's a potential customer, right? Because the win there is not, Hey, this guy went out and solicited and got us a customer. It's, Hey, this lady came up and, and I hear this all the time. Like, oh man, I get people asking me all the time where Uber is, and I'm like, I don't know. Go read the signs. And I'm like, well, that's dumb. it one, I'd say, oh, absolutely. you know, be a ambassador of your industry. Even if they're looking for rideshare, even if they're doing that. So I think there's a huge lesson there in understanding that the win isn't the solicitation, the win is the representation of our industry. The only other thing I would say is that I think a lot of people have lost the art of the thank you letter that review that, that we just looked at where hey, you know, both of the positive reviews. I think there was nothing better to do than to send that person a thank you letter and say, Hey, we really love, and we went ahead and replied to your review. It means a lot to us. We want you to know that we see you. We appreciate you, and we are so happy to serve you and we'd love to be able to serve you again. I can tell you right now, that goes a long way in tying that down and solidifying that even further.

Ken Lucci 52:42

Okay, so let's back up on the bad reviews, dissect them, figure out how to make sure that they never happen again. But if you have a culture that allows that kind of thing and doesn't try to make them a teachable moment and satisfy the client, that's a cancer within the organization. When you get a good review, reach out to the person online and thank them for the review. So we look forward. We look forward to serving you in the future. Look for ways to use it as a use case because they put it out there in public. celebrate the wins, celebrate them with your chauffeur that do well. Don't forget the dispatchers that do well because sometimes they're the unsung heroes and, and look for the reasons to celebrate the wows. Okay. let's back up. One step step. If I'm an operator today, one of the things I'm making sure of is I am claiming all of my online review. Portals. I'm going And I'm claiming my TripAdvisor, I'm claiming my Yelp. I'm claiming my Google business profiles, and I'm figuring out every possible way that I can post things and photos on my Google business profile, et cetera, et cetera.

James Blain 54:01

And don't forget Facebook. Facebook does reviews too.

Ken Lucci 54:04

Facebook business page reviews, equal recommendations. It's a strong trust for local trust referrals. People check Facebook before calling. The other thing with Facebook is there are also lots of groups, mothers groups, those senior ladies, maybe they have a group. The weddings have a group. Corporate EAs have a group same say,

James Blain 54:27

the groups. Right. Join the groups and organically wait. Right. Don't, don't show up and start dropping ads in, right?

Ken Lucci 54:34

No, no. Just be there and offer recommendations. Okay. You know, somebody's on one of these engaged and confused Facebook groups and they're looking for A recommendation, for a wedding venue. Say, listen, I'm a transportation company. I, I do business with these venues, I don't understand why people do not claim. You don't need to pay to claim your profile. And then look at again, on transportation, travel and tours, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Google, Facebook, wedding wire in the Knot. I have mixed reviews on them. What I mean by that is don't spend thousands of dollars, but definitely, definitely figure out a way to claim your profile to control your destiny. And if you are gonna buy advertising, make sure you look at a return on investment. But all of these things we've talked about today, Hither and yawn is making sure you are building your brand equity in a positive way, and also trying to address any shortcomings within your organizations because it's embarrassing when that happens. But don't get emotional. when you see a bad review, don't get emotional. Don't let your ego, get in the middle of it, but back up and forensically dissect what happens the way James has said, and, and you hit the nail on the head. When you look at these negative reviews, you can see where the failures are in the organization. The good news is when you see the five star reviews, that's the stuff to celebrate. And, this is a tough business. I think you need to look for people to celebrate and instances where people have gone above and beyond.

James Blain 56:15

there's one thing I wanna, I wanna leave us with before we kind of, we jump out. I know someone's gonna ask, so I wanna try and get ahead of it. If you have a review that is a negative review and it's, Hey, that person never rode with me. They've mixed me up with another company, I'm worried this might be my competitor. I'm worried this is a disgruntled employee who's upset. So, so a couple things. So if you're serious about reviews, it's not enough to go register and try to manage each one of these individually. It doesn't make sense. There are various services. I don't have a preference one way or the other. but there are various services out there that will give you a centralized dashboard where you can manage all of your different, I don't know if they're still around, but it was basic. It was called, well, Trustpilot one, there was one that I believe has been bought out, but it's called Synap. and it's spelled S-Y-N-U-P. And they are not so much directly on the reviews. They're what's called local listing management. So what they do is they give you a central dashboard for Google, for all of these other ones to where if I update my address in one place, it's gonna automatically reach out and update all of these different directories online. And it's gonna let me see all my reviews in one place. syn up for a long time, and I, I may be pronouncing that wrong. It's spelled S-Y-N-U-P. that's one that I liked in the past just because it had a good price point, it had a good feature set and it lets you kind of integrate into everything. So when you have something like that happen where you've got a bad review at something like. First thing you wanna do is you wanna resist the temptation to just fire off whatever answer immediately comes to mind. you really want to be careful because if you start calling attention to it or you start trying to turn into an argument, you start drawing all of that negative attention to it. With those, you really want to use those tools to report that, to then try to get it taken down. This is where I have good news and bad news. The good news is almost every single platform now has automated tools that can do that. The bad news is they cut both ways. So I don't know if this is still an issue on Yelp, but I knew somebody that had a lot of negative reviews and they decided they wanted to really get it together and they started getting lots of five star reviews into Yelp. The problem is Yelp had figured out, you're a one star guy, now you're getting 10, five star reviews a week. That doesn't make sense. Those must be fake. So it took a year of getting new positive reviews in there before Yelp went, oh, okay, well maybe he's changed his way. So you've gotta realize this is not as easy as,

Ken Lucci 59:05

But

James Blain 59:05

just gonna skew that number. The damage was done there. It is a long game, and you've gotta be methodical. You've gotta take it seriously. And if you're a smaller company, it's all right. You can do those one at a time, but it's when you let it get outta control and you become a one star, a two star, that's when it's gonna be really hard to move that needle. You really wanna try and stay in that four to five, 4.5 is the real target. You're always gonna have a three star or something like that

Ken Lucci 59:37

listen, B2B won't look at anything below a 4.5. And that's why, the company that we didn't really follow up with'em. We just said we're not a good fit. They just don't realize how much that stuff is, shooting them in the foot. And I think that they should take a real hard look at understanding what industries we're in. We're in the logistics business and in the hospitality space. So you just can't build enterprise value. Brand equity translates into positive brand, enterprise value and allow that stuff to continue.

James Blain 1:00:12

Hey, I gotta tell you for me, this is core stuff, and it's not just reviews. When I go do training, when I'm out there on the road, the first thing I do when I sit down with the company is I say, tell me about your culture. Tell me about what you're doing. Tell me about how you're communicating. Tell me about all these things. It ends up touching every part of the business. So if you don't have that culture in place, if you don't think about it that way, and you wanna make an impact on your business, the biggest way to make an impact on your business, and the biggest takeaway we want you to leave with today is the culture and your approach, and keeping your fingers on the pulse is how you do it. So thank you guys so much for listening.

Speaker 2 1:00:53

Thank you for listening to the ground transportation podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to subscribe to the show on apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information about PAX training and to contact James, go to PAX training.com. And for more information about driving transactions and to contact Ken, Go to driving transactions.com. We'll see you next time on the ground transportation podcast.