Thanks to James Blain for voicing what everybody in the limo and bus industry is experiencing and bringing solutions on how to tackle these issues. Common issues operators face are insurance, delivering consistent customer service, the process and the systems to scale, and 72-hour rule on how to handle crises.
Insurance.
James shared that there is a lot of misinformation and miscommunication about insurance. The cost per accident is going up, even though the frequency is going down. So, what’s happening is the number of overall accidents is dropping year over year, but the cost per accident is rising. The carriers are focusing more on the cost of each claim. The carriers aren’t just betting on the frequency; they’re pricing for severity. They aren’t betting on that at all. Frequency isn’t the big deal anymore.
Customer service.
Unfortunately, every single piece of research for the past three years in a row has shown that customer service is getting worse across every segment, across everything in the U.S.
If you want to win, make sure that the people that answer the phone are very polite, very helpful, and willing to go above and beyond, and equipped with useful, helpful, great information.
With the short attention span we all have now, there are only seven seconds to set the tone for the entire trip. Your chauffeurs are the brand–the way they dress, the way they look, whether the vehicle is clean, whether they’re smiling, whether they’re in a good mood-all of that is immediately going to set the tone.
72-Hour Rule
So, the-72 hour rule is about what happens after it hits the fan. Okay, something happens. There was an accident, a missed pickup, or some kind of failure. You didn’t renew the insurance until the last second. You got slammed with higher rates. It doesn’t matter what it is. Something hits the fan. That is the zero hour, the zero point. When that happens, everybody’s in that mode looking to point a finger. All right, what happened? Whose fault was it? How did we drop the ball? How did we screw this up? How did we do whatever happened? Then, after the first day of trying to figure it out, you have your next 24 to 48 hours. This is where you’re primed for change. You’re like, all right, let’s talk about how we can keep it from happening again. You’re talking about ideas.
So, there’s intention there, but the action may not happen right then and there. Then you get to the 72-hour mark. There is a fork in the road at this point. You’ve now had three days to go over and figure it out. You know what happened. You have a decent idea why it happened. You have a way to fix it. Ideally, at the 72-hour mark, steps are taken, and training’s implemented. You get a new vendor. You get it figured out. You do something so that the zero incident doesn’t happen again. The alternative is inaction–doing nothing.
People talk themselves out of taking action. The urgency phase. There’s a new fire. You screwed up something else. Something happens, so that you don’t do anything about it. But here’s the psychological point on that. The psychological point on that is your brain can’t live with saying, “I didn’t do anything about it.” Our minds hate that. They can’t deal with that. So, what do we do? It was a fluke. We were overdue. There is no way it could happen again. It‘s not really our fault. This is just part of doing business. All that. The point becomes your mind can’t live with the inaction, so you make an excuse.
The processes and the systems.
What is the single biggest difference between companies that scale and companies that stall? We see a lot of companies that will grow really quickly, and then their lack of systems, their lack of consistency, makes it really hard for them to continue to grow, or they hit a point where they have to stop growing because the little problems are now giant monsters that they’re fighting, and it’s stealing their ability and their time to grow.
Winning teams, or ultimate top performers, usually go through a process. All of them typically start with some form of repetitive practice. It’s spaced out. It’s over and over. It’s drilled into them. There’s a magical last step that separates a good team from a championship-winning team, from top-tier performers. It’s the game-day review-idea of a debrief, reviewing afterward. How did it go? What did it do? That review then has to go back and influence your practice or your training