Customers Who Overstay Their Welcome (Rise) – DSP 149

Graham and Ashkahn sat down with Mark and Jennifer Gurley at Rise to talk about an issue that can seem scary for float center owners, especially those who haven’t worked in customer service. What do you do about the customer who takes advantage of your generosity and overstays their welcome? How far is too far? And what are the appropriate steps to take when you have someone who won’t respect your boundaries?

Graham and Ashkahn share their experiences from the handful of times it has happened at Float On over the years and how it’s worked out and compare notes with the Gurleys and their float center.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Ashkahn: Alright. Excellent! Thank you guys. My name’s Ashkahn.

Graham: And I’m Graham.

Ashkahn: We are here in St. Louis, for the rise and float gathering, doing some live podcasting.

Graham: Everyone’s going crazy. Hundreds of people gathered around.

Ashkahn: You can’t see it because you guys aren’t here but there are just crowds of people celebrating.

Graham: Pretty sure a fireworks show’s starting, in our honor, in a few minutes here. We have some special guests with us here- Mark and Jennifer Gurley.

Ashkahn: They made a big mistake naming their floats and they’re not calling them girlie floats.  

This is what we’ve been telling you, where you guys had a huge opportunity you could have had the greatest floats that are named out there- Gurly Floats.

Mark: It was on the list!

Ashkahn: So where did you go; what’s the name of your float center now?

Mark: Infinity Float Center.

Ashkahn: Obviously you can hear how that’s not as great as Gurley Floats

Mark: Actually it’s better. We found out there are eight other Infinity Float centers in the world.  

Jennifer: No eight total.

Mark: Yeah eight total so seven others.

Ashkahn: Interesting.

Mark: We are currently working our way through all of them. We just floated at one recently.

Ashkahn: You’re like, I’m like an Infinity Float center

Mark: We’re going to get a tattoo of each Infinity Float center

Jennifer: All the logos!

Ashkahn: Where’s the furthest one? Which one’s the furthest away from you?

Mark: Well I think we hit the furthest one so far; we just hit New Zealand for a couple weeks.

Ashkahn: That’s about as far as you can go .

Mark: Good place; yeah.

Ashkahn: Actually I think that is, yeah, the furthest you can go.

Mark: Pretty far, yeah.

Ashkahn: Alright. You guys have a question?

Mark: We do have a question. So, we ran into a pretty unique situation, really about a month ago. We even kind of have a policy; we have a big lounge in our place, and we have a policy that we always welcome people in- people who are floated obviously, and people who are just interested. We tell them, even if you’re not floating, come by, have a cup of tea, if you need some relaxation just chill out, we’ve got tons of space. Books, coloring, etc.

We had a client take that to the max. Kind of went to the top of the spectrum. She did float, at one time, and then she was very excited when I told her, well if you want to come back tomorrow and just have a cup of tea there’s no pressure to float again. She was staying at a hotel near us, near the float center, that was in walking distance. So she came back the next morning and had a cup of coffee, which we don’t serve. We just let them know, for some reason, we had told her we had coffee in the back for the employees; so she requested a cup of coffee, and was a little disappointed we didn’t have creamer for her. Had that. Then the next day she showed up in the morning, with a bowl of cereal and some milk, and a backpack, and some blankets, and kind of camped out. Ate breakfast. Just stayed there for hours. Finally left. Then the next day… so she became a regular.

It was the first time we’d ever had a client that was just a… and she had some issues; some mental issues, for sure. She made it clear to everyone she had some mental issues. So we eventually had to tell her to leave. We can’t just have you here all the time. We’re sorry; you kind of overstayed your welcome. You no longer floating; she never floated again. And you kind of freak out my staff. She was saying some weird stuff.

Jennifer: She would pull towels off our towel rack that was in the hallway and go and take a nap in the back lounge. We have two lounges.

Mark: This is what she was doing during the day, while her husband was working. She had some mental issues that she was working through. But, we had to get her out. I had to actually tell her, look, if you don’t walk home or to a hospital, I have to call the police, to get you out. This all goes to my question- my life-hearted, high, easy answerable question- Have you guys ever had that situation? And how have you instructed your employees to handle a person who just won’t leave? Or is acting irrationally?

Graham: I’d say I’ve experienced that a little bit, before.

Ashkahn: I don’t know what he’s talking about. I come by every day. I eat my cereal very politely in the corner.

Graham: I’m still trying to get Ashkahn off this podcast!

Ashkahn: I brought my own blankets!

Graham: So this is interesting, right. We just gave a talk, like a few hours ago, specifically about being open and people won’t take advantage of you, and stuff like that.

Ashkahn: Less often than you think.

Graham: And the reality is- the world’s just not a black and white place. There’s no way to make policies that cover every situation. There’s no way to really protect yourself from all the random crazy things that can happen in the world. Even if you were to have a really strict- you can’t be in our center unless you have an appointment- you’re probably still going to have some situation that’s going to break your rules, in the future. At the end of the day, I think what you guys clearly realized in this process is that sometimes you just have to deal with those cases on a case by case basis, right? Like the world’s just a big complicated place, and no matter what you do there’s always going to be someone who breaks your system, and you’re going to have to deal with it personally. And we’ve totally had to deal with this. We’re the same thing- we’re super open, come hang out, we’re very welcoming. If we do that twenty-four hours a day, that adds a whole ‘nother layer to it.

Ashkahn: If people want to come in the night time, for example- and for a while we did internships just, around the clock, if you want to come and intern from PM until like AM, you could be in during that time period, and that’s a lot of people who want rest and don’t have a place to go home to at all necessarily.

Graham: We were very welcoming.

Ashkahn: We’ve had people sleep on our couches, and all kinds of different behavior that you wouldn’t hope for, from someone that you’re trying to bring into, do a good service to, or just be nice to.

Graham: You know, I do think it’s important to point out that even with the story you guys are saying and the story we’re saying- these are still pretty rare cases, right? Has it happened to you more than that one time?

Mark: We’ve been open a little over a year; first and only time.

Graham: We’ve been open over seven years now and I can count the number of times we’ve had this issue on one hand.

So it’s nice to know that even if you are totally opening yourself up to these sorts of things, the amount of times that in real life it actually comes to bite you in the ass, it’s not like every day there’s some other person that’s like, I’m going to live in this corner! I prefer oatmeal to cereal!

Ashkahn: If there is that’s a really good, it’s like, okay no our policy isn’t broken, it’s just the world is a fundamentally chaotic place. As long as the examples are less than .O1 percent or something like that, I always kind of view it as the world is just chaotic and crazy, not the laws you’re laying down.

Graham: And your real question is, what do you do in these situations, right?

Mark: Well I would say two things. What do you do?  Do you guys empower the employees to do that? Or is it, they call an owner?.

Graham: I’ll say yes. If they want to.

We empower them to do both. Even our shop manager- this is a good example of that- being in charge of the shop- I mean even when we have meetings, high level meetings, about what’s going to happen in the shop, we usually end it by saying, and, it’s your call. Not like it’s our call and you have to implement it. You’re the one running it- it’s up to you. All of our staff, when they’re in the shop, we try to say- it’s your shop when you’re in here. You have final say. You don’t need to ask us for permission. We hired you because we trust you. So absolutely we give them permission. But sometimes they don’t want to do it.

I like to view us and even the manager of our shop almost more like a safety net than anything else. So our employees – I hope, and this is the message we try to put out to them – they feel comfortable knowing that if they wanted to; and what you guys did I think is exactly what you need to do, just need to go up and be like I’m really sorry you just can’t come around here anymore, we have to run our business. And most of the time people are pretty receptive to that.

Mark: She was.

Ashkahn: And when we had the issue with our people, as soon as we had that conversation, that was it, the problem was solved. And if our employees feel comfortable doing that and they want to do that they don’t have to ask us they know they can, but sometimes they just don’t want to. It’s not like an easy or fun conversation to have. And in those cases they know they can just push it off onto us; be like, listen, it’s making it hard for me to work here, I’m not sure I feel comfortable having this conversation with them do you mind coming in and doing it? And that’s kind of what we view our position or a manager’s position, yeah we’ll do the dirty work if you want us to, that’s what we’re here for, but definitely don’t feel like you can’t make that call to make it happen if it’s bothering you.

Graham: Where’s there anything wrong with your policy? I’d say nothing’s broken about your policy, and even like Ashkahn said, if you had to script this policy you’d still have weird problems and cases.

Mark: I was going to say, you guys mentioned earlier about policies. We’ve always had this policy and actually very few people have taken us up on it. But eyebrows raise when we tell them, yeah you don’t have to float just come in have a cup of tea and talk a little bit. I think that endears a lot of people to the center, that end up coming and floating and then walking out.

Graham: It’s a cool thing. There’s a few mutual [inaudible 00:10:53] here, yeah?

It’s worth noting, that there’s a few… if you’re in a situation like this and things get a little bit more extreme, there are certain things you should know. You should never make physical contact with people. You should call the police. You should just kind of keep those things in mind. We let our employees know about those things too. So that if push comes to shove and they’re in a more serious situation, they know not to physically remove someone from our shop. There’s of course a few of the extreme…

Ashkahn: You can actually have people come in and do, like if your staff gets big enough or if you’re ever just out of it kind of like we are from our shop- you can do things like escalation training and stuff like that too; where people come in and teach your staff both legal and emotional best way to deal with situations like this, and how to get people leave on their own without any physical contact and hopefully without calling the police and things like that too. So…

Graham: We also will tell our employees to just make up store policies if it’s ever helpful for them. So they can just be like, actually it’s our company policy that you can only hang out three days in a row, I’m really sorry. Those are just the rules!

Mark: I love it.

Graham: Yeah, blame it on us, make up policies. If it’s ever useful to you, totally just claim store policy.

Mark: I’d let you stay but yeah our owners are real bastards.

Jennifer: That’s perfect!

Mark: Great idea.

Jennifer: Done.

Graham: Absolutely. Problem solved.

Mark: Perfect.

Graham: Well thank you guys so much for coming on the podcast.

Jennifer: Absolutely; thank you.

Graham: And for the rest of you out there: if you have any podcast questions yourself, just fold a thousand dollars into an envelope and ship it off to 4530 Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland.

Ashkahn: We’ll consider it.

Graham: Yeah we’ll think about it. That’s how you maybe get our attention.

Ashkahn: That’s the beginning of a relationship.

Graham: Alright. Have a good night everybody. Bye.

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