Exceptional customer service, Qaulity customer service lessons from Deremiah CPE

Why your staff may be turning away your customers by the truckloads because of rudeness and indifference. Learn how to solve your customer's problems fast and have your most angry customers eating out of the palm of your hand

In today's highly competitive environment, good products and good marketing aren't enough. To succeed, you also need exceptional customer service. Quality service touches our lives in two important ways: the service we give and the service we receive. Deremiah, *CPE, is an amazing customer advocate. This year alone he has captured the world's attention when he received Nightingale Conant's "Acres of Diamonds" Award. I was fortunate to have interviewed Deremiah, *CPE, right before his new book was written. In this rare interview he shares hot tips, techniques, and lots of suggestions for giving your customers the kind of service that you yourself would like to receive. This is a down-to-earth interview that shows you how to 1) Take stock of your customer service strengths and weaknesses. 2) Commit to continuous improvement. 3) Foster positive face-to-face and telephone service. Deremiah also shared some nuggets of inspiration on how he handles his most important clients. Whether you're new to the business of providing customer service or a seasoned pro, this recording will give lots of great advice and a positive perspective on the challenges of providing good customer service. Please listen carefully with me now as I interview one of Americas most humble Customer Passion Evangelist, Deremiah, *CPE...Transcripts of recorded from 07-02-2004. For more information and to contact Deremiah email me

Daramiah: Michael to me is a sign of life. It means that someone has vitality. They have passion. They have a love for what they do, and for me, more than anything, that comes across first. When I would meet disgruntled customers, and then I got to the point, to be honest with you, in my company I developed such a reputation for taking care of bad customers that anytime bad customers would come to our company, not that they would come but would surface in our company, the managers would come and give me the information, “Can you go out and do this call? This is all this customer’s problem.” Especially when they were a customer giving a great deal of money, and I would go out and resolve those issues.

I’m just saying that that type of mentality, knowing that my job was to go out and resolve an issue, not expecting to receive any money directly from doing that, but knowing that those kind of actions have to naturally bring back prosperity and wealth.

Daramiah: I have to be honesty with you, I was adopted – not legally – when I was in college by a Jewish woman who’s a very well-known writer for the Chicago Tribune. Her name was Anita Gold and she did a lot of antique columns and stuff. She just really gave me a lot of foundation and premises on how to get people interested in what you do.

I, again, have built up a huge collection of newspaper articles and write-ups and stuff like that, and just never really learned how to take that information and market it in such a way that I’m getting back returns on it, and getting more into what I do instead of less away from it.

Michael: What is it that you want to do? You want to do speaking for money, right?

Daramiah: Yeah, speaking for money because that’s where my gift is, that’s where my natural talent is, but I’m multi-talented. I write songs. I write poetry. I do photography. I won probably about six awards at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago for more work.

Sometimes people look at my portfolio and they’re amazed by the many myriads of things that I’ve done and actually succeeded doing, but I have not attained the kind of success that I really want out of the experience, and now I’m actually going after it looking at the nuts and bolts of the foundation of how things work so that I can be in a real product and stuff like that and really to set myself apart for what I do.

Daramiah: Michael, there’s real mixed feelings about Chicagoland, primarily I think because most of my relatives were form the ghettos of Chicago. I had a lot of negative experiences. Gangs and people wanted to jump on me or fight, and having lived in the projects since I was six years old, having to fight on a weekly basis sometimes, as I began to grow older it just began to wear thin. This is not the kind of life that a person wants to live. But, amazingly for me, my father was in the military. He ended up going into the military and the military won’t allow you to let your family come with you right off the bat when you join but the eventually let you come six months to a year later and we were actually pulled out of Chicago, out of the projects.

Daramiah: I was probably about four years old when we first started traveling as it relates to the military. Somewhere around six years old when we really started living with my father.

Daramiah: One brother, one sister at least during that time in my life. I now have two additional brothers because my parents had gotten a divorce later on in life.

Michael: So, you moved around with your dad. He was in the military and you all moved around to different places.

Daramiah: That’s right. I lived in about 13 cities in the United States and two cities in Germany. So, growing up and having an experience of the ghettos of Chicago but then starting school in Alaska and having opportunities to live in Germany, my background is not even typical American.

Michael: You have a pretty diverse background especially being in so many different place.

Daramiah: Exactly. I’ve lived from Trenton New Jersey to Texas and Oklahoma, California. I’ve lived in Alaska. I’ve really lived all over the north, south, east, west hemispheres of the United States and being the kind of introspective person that I am and observant, I’ve picked up a lot of things from how people operate and communicate and stuff like that.

Michael: Did you like moving around or was it kind of a pain? You made friends and then you’d have to move again.

Daramiah: I didn’t really mind moving. I love traveling, and even now, I can live in the same community but I have a lot of things that takes me outside of my community every now and then.

Daramiah: Four children of my own and one adopted son who I had adopted before I had kids. He is a successful artist living in California where you are down in Englewood.

Daramiah: My oldest son is Christopher, the adopted one. He’s about 34 this year, and then the son who is 21. Danielle, who is 14. Demetrie who is 11, and then I have one who is named Dustin David who is 6.

Daramiah: Actually all of them are living with me except for the oldest. I’ve got four living with me.

Daramiah: Oh, yeah. They’re almost four to five years apart so, each one of them takes care of the other.

Michael: I had read a little bit in some of the questions related to your security expert. What was your first major job as your started growing up? You went around to so many different places. Did you ever work when you were in different places? Or were you still too young.

Daramiah: To be honest with you, I really didn’t start working until I went to Oklahoma and I was somewhere around 12 or 14, I started working. My mom used to go to a barber college, and I’d shine shoes at the barber college.

Daramiah: I probably did it for about a year because the barber college only lasted for a year in terms of my mom getting an education there.

Daramiah: You better believe it. It wasn’t the first time I had shined shoes. Id did it originally when I was about five years old. My cousins would walk down State Street in Chicago, and they would carry their home-made shoeshine boxes and shine people’s shoes. Because I wasn’t old enough to shine shoes, and didn’t know how, they would shine a customer’s shoes and one would shine one and the other one would shine the other, and they’d let me stand in the middle and judge each one.

Michael: That’s great. What do you remember about your cousins doing it? Did they do a nice presentation? How did they get the sales?

Daramiah: They promised them that they would do a great job. I think they were probably charging about 25 cents during that time because this was the early ‘60s. Michael, what they would do is they would give them an example of what their shoes would look like. Sometimes they would offer do one of their shoes for free. So, by doing it for free, the person would have a nice shiny shoe and the other would be dull.

Michael: You can’t go wrong there. You guys were kids and you all were out hustling making some good money.

Daramiah: That’s right being very entrepreneurial about the process, but not having any business education.

Michael: You did that with your cousins and then when did you first start doing it?

Daramiah: No, I didn’t. Luckily for me, my mom had a real solid relationship with the owner of the barber college, and I would come there from time to time and watch her cut hair anyway. So, what happened is one day I was just looking at people’s shoes and I was thinking of another benefit that I could bring the people that come to the barber college, and people would come there to get their hair cut because it was cheaper to get it cut at the barber college then it was to go to the regular barber shop. So, I would offer people to shine their shoes, when I would see that their shoes needed to be shined.

Michael: That’s great. So, how much were you pulling down at 14 every week? How many days a week did you do it?

Daramiah: Actually, my mom was going to the barber college I think on Saturdays, and I was going there one day a week. Most of the time, I was making anywhere from 18 to 20 dollars. I remember being able to go out and buy my own pair of shoes.

Daramiah: Well, I did that for about a year, and then my parents – this was during the time they were starting to g o through the divorce process, and my mom ended up separating and we had moved out of the house. We were living in an apartment, and I remember one summer that my mom was like, “Hey you’re going to have to go out and get a job because I can’t pay the rent on this place.”

So, I went out and luckily for me, I had a friend who worked in the construction industry and they allowed me to come out and push cement for the whole summer, and that’s rough when you’re trying to play baseball, too.

Daramiah: What they would do is they would lay the foundations to homes. So, what I would do is they would pour the concrete into the area where they were laying the foundation. I would have shovel and I’d have to push.

Daramiah: Exactly. As I learned to do that better and do some of the driveways, they began to teach you how to trowel and use the hand tools to do the finishing work.

Daramiah: You’re really making me reach back. I don’t think it could’ve been more than maybe three something an hour.

Michael: Yeah, you’re probably right. Minimum wage, the first time I got a job, was like $3.35.

Daramiah: They weren’t paying me much above that, but it was some decent money. But, it was hot in Oklahoma.

Daramiah: I did that for the whole summer. So, I did that for roughly about four months, and then I was back in school.

Michael: What led you up into the whole speaking? What about the security specialist? Did that come before the speaking?

Michael: All right, let’s talk about the speaking. How’d you get turned on to speaking?

Daramiah: Well, what ended up happening is my parents got a divorce and I moved. My mom decided one day that we were going to move to Chicago. The one thing that I have to share with you and I’ve learned to overcome the fear of sharing this and that is that my mother would periodically suffer a nervous breakdown, and so my mom decided one Saturday afternoon that we would leave Oklahoma. I left all of my friends, and she didn’t allow me to say good-bye to any of them. It was a very tragic experience for a 16 year old kid. I got to Chicago and was living with a cousin of mine. I was really down on my luck, contemplating committing suicide. Like I said, I had a life-changing experience that really made a difference in where I was going to go after that. I found I regained the confidence to live.

Daramiah: I had a Christian experience. I was attending a church and decided to give my life to Christ, and that’s what made the difference in me wanting to have the will to live and through that experience I began to really recognize that I had this gift of speech. I began to share this gift. I would do a lot of work with other teenagers like me.

Daramiah: Sure I could, and then having the life experience that I had going from so to speak, the Ghettos of Life, to middle income America because my father had a pretty good rank in the military, and then coming all the way back down to poverty level again. I had a lot of insight to share with young kids who only knew poverty.

Daramiah: Without a doubt, always communicating a message of hope to them, challenging them through my own life experience. Letting them know if I can do it, if I can overcome these odds that I’ve been through, then I’m sure you can.

Daramiah: Definitely. No joke, I had people coming attending during the school day and needing inspirational counseling or something like that, and people just knew me by my nickname. They called me the preacher because I was always challenging and encouraging the kids in my schools to step up to the next level, especially kids who’d be getting involved with drugs and gangs and stuff like that. I lived in a community where I can say the gang issue and the drug issue and all of that kind of stuff was pretty heavy.

Daramiah: No, I didn’t. The primary reason was because when I lived in Germany, my brother who was about three years older than me, got strung out on drugs. He was using acid and Mescaline and all that other stuff, getting high, and people really mess up their whole world.

Daramiah: He got off it periodically from time to time, but drawn back into it because a lot of people that he would hang with. He was a very bright young man during that time. The guy was an honor roll student 3.7-4.0 grade point averages most of his life.

Daramiah: They gave him a wrap of things, something about he had broken into somebody’s house and taken something, and they said they found some evidence of a ring that came out of the person’s house and they said it was on him.

Daramiah: Illinois. I’m really not sure where he’s at, at this exact moment because they moved him a couple of times recently.

Daramiah: It’s a very challenging experience because nobody would want their relative behind bars and I guess one of the things that made it real bad for him is he suffered a lot of issues with manic depression and that kind of thing. When he was in jail he messed around and different guys were trying to violate him and he choked one of them to death, and when you’re in jail and you kill somebody, they really want to do away with you. He had such a rough history of those kinds of things that they ended up being a lot more compassionate about his situation because they know he did not go out and intentionally go out to do something to somebody. Harm came to his doorway. As a result of that, he should have been in jail for two years, and ended spending 15.

Daramiah: I appreciate your condolences and everything, but life is full of choices.

Daramiah: We make the ones we make and I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter what race you come from, it doesn’t matter what background you come from, everybody is exposed to making good or bad choices, and we all get stuck with the choices we make. They become the end results of what we experience.

Michael: That’s right. Life’s like a chess game. You’ve got to really think ahead and watch who you hang around with because you may not do anything, but because of someone else you could end up in that situation.

Michael: So, you were nicknamed the preacher, and you’re always encouraging other people to better themselves and such. Were you preaching Jesus Christ or more just on a personal note?

Daramiah: There was a mixture of both because they would let me speak in churches and so that’s where I really got my start in terms of speaking publicly, speaking from the pulpits in churches at 16,17,18 years old, but a great deal of my actual speaking skills came out of me talking to people everyday about their lives, and one thing I learned quite early, and I was almost having the same conversation with a relative of mine today, is that I gained some wisdom about how to communicate to people. You can’t beat people over the head even when you have something great to offer them. You have to communicate with them and reach them on the level of where they are. And the most important thing in communication is developing a relationship and a friendship with a person. If you can do that, then it makes it much easier to offer them, even on a subtle level, the things that you’re about and that you believe in because people really watch more of what you do than what you say.

Michael: Where did you learn how to serve customers with greatness? Is this kind of like unique selling proposition when you speak customer service?

Michael: Where do you think that fundamental ideas of how to serve customers with greatness came from?

Daramiah: To be honest with you, foundationally, it came out of the Bible, watching what Jesus would do as he served people.

Michael: And what were some of the things that he did that made him such a good servant or communicator?

Daramiah: One of the things that he did was he put other people’s needs above his own without any real desire to expect anything from someone. So, that’s what I began to apply different occupations that I began to participate in and one of the areas where I really began to test is it when I was in the security industry because I had so many customers. They were customers in my territory before I had a territory, but I still had to learn how to lead them and a lot of them had problems.

Michael: Where does that come from, “Give and you shall receive”? We know it’s discussed in the Bible and it’s a universal law.

Michael: But, maybe more “Give and you shall receive” is more what we’re talking about here.

Daramiah: That’s right. I think it comes out of Luke. Actually I think it says, “Yield and it shall be given unto you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will men pour into your bosom.” And back then, they said the men wore these big garments. If you could imagine, somebody filling the front of their garment up and men pulling it up to their chest. That they would perceive men will fill up the coffers of their gown pulled back into your life. A little fundamental principle that I use for the service mentality and where I get all of my ideas out of was Jesus said that the greatest in the kingdom is the servant of all because James and his brother were talking about being placed on his right and left hand side when they get to Heaven and all that kind of thing, and Jesus said, “I can not give you this place. It’s not my place to give you this place.” But he said, “The greatest in the kingdom is the servant of all.” So, if you want to be great, he said, “You must learn to serve others.”

Michael: That’s so important. I’m thinking of – I just made a connection. Claude Hopkins, when he was young, his mother was very religious and he was brought up in the church, and I thought of that because Claude Hopkins really knew this law of giving and you shall receive, and I bet a lot of that maybe have been influenced by his younger years, and a lot of that is all in his advertising and everything he did.

Daramiah: Yeah, it is. A matter of fact, it’s a principle that I’m seeing more and more of especially when you look at the marketing campaigns of people talking about overload bonus where you give people so many bonuses that they can’t resist the option to purchase from you because you’ve given them so much on the front-end.

Michael: I’m testing this concept everyday with all of my audio recordings 117 hours. I just give them to people. Other people would charge for them, but it all comes back. I’ve definitely proven it. It all comes back. One way or another, it comes back to you.

Daramiah: that was one of the things that someone really revealed to me when I began to take the concept, nothing new but I just put a title to it, “The Service Mentality”, and one thing that I began to do is I go out of my way to give people more than they were giving me and not expecting anything in return. What began to happen is something that someone shared with me one day and they said, “You know what? The person that serves the other person, as I said, “reap what you sow” or “what you sow you shall reap”. When you get something, then they say you open up a door of reciprocity and another people almost have to by human nature turn around and want to give to you.

Michael: What is the number one reason why you think people lose customers, businesses lose people and customers and business?

Daramiah: The number one reason why people lose customers is because they don’t take out the time to really offer the customer the edge giving them the advantage upfront because people are always expecting to receive something before they give and as a result of that, people when I was selling Mary Kay products, one thing that Mary Kay believed in – she would say, “Never come to a customer with dollar signs in your eyes.” She said, “Teach them to like your product by allowing them to try it before they buy it.”

Michael: That’s a great saying. I love it “never come to your prospect with dollar signs in your eyes.”

Daramiah: And, most corporations don’t. Most corporations anticipate the sale before the sale has actually been earned. This is not a good principle any way you look at it. You can’t expect a tree to give up fruit until you’ve given the earth a seed.

Michael: What makes your approach to handling the customer so unique and preemptive?

Daramiah: When people do work with me, they do identify that I am genuine about this principle and that is giving people as much as I can give them, going out of my way to meet their needs first.

Michael: Give us examples of how you use that for instance in your security business. Tell me about that.

Daramiah: In the security business, what I would do is I would go out to pre-existing customers.

Daramiah: In the security business, what I would do is I would actually communicate the benefits of why clients need security protection whether that’s burglar alarm systems, fire systems, camera systems, access systems.

Daramiah: Yes, I did called Security Links of America. They were like the second security company in the country back during the late 90s when I was working up until the year 2000 then they were bought by ADT.

Michael: When you would make the contact would you go out and visit the people or were you doing this over the phone?

Daramiah: I would actually go out and visit the people. The one thing that I learned the year before I came into the security industry, I had spent two years in the mortgage industry, and a great deal of my prospecting was done over the phone. What I did was I used methods from that where I would, even though we had an existing prospect in the security industry who wanted our business. I would talk to the customer over the phone and identify what their needs were over the phone.

Daramiah: Exactly so I could find out what was the pain that motivated them to call our company because most customers call a security company in service. They probably had a break-in or something.

Michael: Yeah, then the company talks about their fear and what happened and they want to vent.

Michael: Isn’t that true that that’s when people call a security company after a traumatic event or something like that?

Daramiah: That’s right. One of the things that I identified is that quite early on for years I grew up communicating with people talking and speaking, but then I learned the power of listening. What I found is that the more I would listen to my customers, the more they began to seem like they had natural confidence in my abilities. I think because most people don’t listen, especially salesman. They want to offer a solution once they find out what they’ve got an in of what the problem is. My goal is to get them to talk more.

Daramiah: Yes, they would. They’d talk a lot more because like I said, most people aren’t used to people listening especially salesmen.

Michael: That’s a great strategy. I use it all the time. It’s brilliant. By the time you listen and listen and listen, they think you’re the greatest guy in the world just because you’ve listened to them and you haven’t said a word.

Michael: That’s very powerful. So, you were in this security industry and what did these techniques do for you in the security industry? Did it bring you to the top of your game?

Daramiah: You better believe it did. The first paycheck that I received when I started in the security industry after they would give you a paid month upfront and then on the fourth month, they’d take you off of that automatic payment that they were giving you and you are on your own. I got a check I think it was like $14.62. I had a real bad situation where my company was not giving me the leads in my territory because they weren’t sure I had the experience to sell.

So, what I had to do is I had to create a strategy to partner up with guys who were selling in my territory, and I had a friend who was a gentleman. He would let me go out with him and then after a while he would let me talk to the customers as he began to see that I have this gift to be able to communicate with the customers, and actually I became to resolve some of his customers problems as we went out on the runs, and he would come back bragging to the bosses about that. Finally, they let go of my territory and gave it to me. Then, I would go out and a lot of customers, like I said, that I had at the beginning had problems because they were pre-existing customers, I would get a customer leads of new customers from those customers who were pre-existing and I would go out and find out that these customers had problems with our service.

So, what I began to do is I began like set aside the principle of serving these customers and straighten out their problems. As I grew, as I was approaching the process, what I would almost do up front is I would go to these customers and this took about a year or two to develop this understanding. I just kind of stumbled across it. when I would go out and see a customer with a problem, what I would do is I would tell them, “Okay, Mr. Customer, if I can take care of your problem – this is what you said your problem was – if I can take care of your problem, would you allow me the opportunity to give a letter to send back to my manager about how I took care of you.”

The law of reciprocity working again, I gave them something. I took care of an issue that they had, and I took care of it in a fashion that they would appreciate it. So, they felt obligated to respond with, “Yes, I’d be more than happy to do that.”

See, in the beginning I used to come and ask them that question on the back-end, but what I began to do is after going out there and meeting them, I would ask them that question on my first meeting with them. “Mr. Customer, if I take care of your needs and I meet them – you say your problems are X, Y, and Z – if I take care of X, Y and Z, and I can do this within the next couple of days, would you write me a letter of commendation to my manager saying how much you appreciated the work that I’ve done?” And, they would say, “Sure, no problem.”

So, what I began to do is I began to collect these letters from these customers. I never had any sales training – training. Nobody told me the thing about customers buy more and all that kind of stuff. I had to learn that as a result of reading and studying on my own. What I began to do is these customers when they had an opportunity to begin to investigate a new product that they wanted, they would come back to me because I was so dependable and they could not find that in my company before.

Daramiah: I would say something like for every five customers I’d probably get about two letters.

Daramiah: He reacted extremely positive. What began to happen is they began to post these letters that I was getting in a newsletter that our company would produce about the customer service and what our salesmen were doing. So, what began to happen is I began to build two things – I began to build stronger relationships with the customers who hadn’t been serviced before, now getting great service. They wanted to turn around and help me get more business, and then on the internal side, with the internal customer, my manager, my boss, my supervisor – they began to get these letters and then they began to pass the letters up to their bosses to show off to kind of wave them in to say, “See, I’ve got this good employee and he’s doing this great job.”

Michael: Were you getting the support with the company to solve the customer service problems?

Daramiah: Amazingly, because this company was born during that time there were a lot of companies that were buying companies up, and letting go of the existing groups that ran these other companies as they consolidated. A lot of times, we didn’t have enough men out there in the field to take care of the problems, but because I was so genuine about taking care of these problems, I began to develop a reputation through the letters going up and began to build favor through the managers so that they would say to me, “If you run into any problem and somebody’s not helping you resolve a problem with a customer because our customers are important to us, let me know.”

With that out there, people began to naturally take care of the issues that I would have with customers because I began to develop a reputation as a salesman who takes care of the customers. It’s kind of like one of those things that is like an oxymoron.

Michael: So, you’re taking care of the customers. Did you start moving into more of a customer service role?

Daramiah: No, I didn’t. I was still in the consulting business, and I was growing my business.

Daramiah: Yes, selling and making commissions. My business picked-up and after – remember that check I told you of $14.65?

Daramiah: Well, after six months of working the way I just described, I ended up meeting my quota for the whole year.

Daramiah: That’s right, and as a result of doing that, I became one of the top 100 salesmen in the company and I got my first trip to Puerto Rico.

Daramiah: I’d probably say across the country, I think we had about 500-600 salesman across the country.

Michael: That’s wonderful, that’s great. You had kind of branded or learned a technique to shoot to the top by listening to people and by really taking care of people. Is this what you now speak on when you speak to people?

Michael: Why are people like Mark Victor Hansen, Brian Tracey, Wes Brown endorsing you and what you do?

Daramiah: They’ve heard some of the success stories and they’ve actually heard my presentation, and being they’re this top country’s motivational speakers, they feel that my caliber of presentation is on the same level as they are.

Daramiah: A great deal of them has come through referral, word of mouth. I do a presentation one place and someone will give me a call back. I did have a woman who was running her own agency, and she really helped me foundationally get my start in terms of actually speaking and getting paid, and it started with me speaking first in high school. This was a lady named Margo Pershonis. She runs a speaking bureau called “Connections”.

Michael: I see. So, there are speaking brokers or speaking agencies who try to get people booked.

Michael: I see. Well, what do these speaking jobs pay? I know some of the big dogs make $10-20,000 a speech or is that over exaggerated?

Daramiah: No, that’s not over exaggerated at all. I’m not a big dog. So, making $5,000 a presentation is pretty much where I’m at this point. If they get a promotion because of some the awards and things like that I’m accumulating as well as some of the more affluent opportunities I’m getting to present.

Michael: Right, as your demand goes up, the price goes up, and the brokers make a piece of that.

Michael: That’s not too bad. So, are you with just one agency or can you be with multiple agencies?

Daramiah: Yes, I just got a call about a week ago from, believe it or not, one of the people that heads up Barry Switzer’s speaking bureau. He’s starting one. He’s the former coach of the Dallas Cowboys football team and all that.

Daramiah: That’s where the basic focus of my niche is because that’s where I have the most experience in the professional world, and that’s where I have the most experience as well with my previous function of talking to kids and stuff like that.

Michael: This year, Dan Strutzel, Vice President of Nightingale Conant nominated you for the “Acres of Diamonds” award. Tell me, what is the “Acres of Diamonds” award.

Daramiah: The award is an award that Nightingale Conant gives out once a year to the person that they believe is living the philosophy of Nightingale Conant, that is to empower themselves to reach people in the community and to do positive things, and I’ve been working with people in the community for well over 20-some years, and I think what pretty much has transpired is that all of the good things that I’ve been planting have finally caught up with who I am or where I am that the felt compel to give me that award because the people’s lives that I’ve been changing. I’ve been doing a lot of work with at-risk children from single family homes and stuff like that.

Daramiah: Really out of all the nominees. I think that they have a few dozen people that were nominated from the speakers that were out there. It’s from other people who do community-based things and it really boils down to the people that they’re aware of doing great things. They actually met me about two and a half years ago, and they were very impressed with me then, but being that I had not had the track record that I do now have, it’s kind of hard to give somebody an award when nobody really knows too much about them.

Michael: Right, after being nominated, how does it feel to win the award? How does that help you now continue in your speaking mission?

Daramiah: It feels great to win the award primarily because of the fact that it allows people to now be drawn to you and be drawn to what is special and unique about you. I’m excited about the opportunity to take this award now and move it to the next level to prove to people through other relationships that I’ve developed with them that this award was not given me but that through my conduct and my professionalism, I earned this award.

Daramiah: Actually, it was a ceremony luncheon combined. We had about 25 people from the Nightingale Conant organization join me for lunch with my family and with eight boys from Glenwood School Camp who I mentor.

Daramiah: Yes, he was. I sat next to Nick all afternoon and it was just beautiful.

Michael: Give me some of the other people who were awarded this award? Was Brian Tracy at one time, and Mark Victor Hansen and Wes Brand all awarded this award at one time?

Michael: So, it’s not just your ability on speaking. It’s really a package deal of what you’ve done for the community and how much you’ve given, an all around thing.

Daramiah: Right. One of the things that they’ve kind of shared with me, some insight that I gleaned from the experience yesterday – an executive from Nightingale Conant told me, he said, “Daramiah, you really deserve this award.” He said, “We know a lot of speakers, and they haven’t come through what you’ve come through, lived through some of the negative experiences that you’ve been through, but not only that, have turned around and devoted their lives to pouring back into the people’s lives through the community and the kind of thing. A lot of speakers speak, but they don’t give back by spending time with people and really given genuine service.”

Michael: That’s great. What qualifications do you have to have to be nominated for this award? Do you have to be members of a speakers’ association?

Daramiah: No, you don’t. I guess you just have to be in the hemisphere of the Nightingale Conant executive staff. If they know about you and they know about the work that you’re doing, then that’s part of the foundation of where they begin a pool of the names and the list from.

Michael: Why are people so reluctant to give the customer the advantage in their relationships do you think?

Daramiah: I think it’s just a natural human function of being selfish. People are selfish and self-centered so they tend to want to get something before they give something. That’s not how it works in the customer service industry. As a matter of fact, one of the things that I fought with when I was in the security industry was really trying to reeducate my company on the purpose of a customer service department and understanding that service is a byproduct of a servant. You can’t have service unless it comes from a servant. So, if it fundamentally is rooted in a servant then you have to begin with that kind of mentality before you can begin to say that you’re offering customer service. People are trying to get the end result without going to the root first and determining, “Well, what does this come from?” Service is just a byproduct of a servant and that’s why most of them don’t get their customer service because their people aren’t servants.

Michael; In your emails to me, you have a lot of charisma in the way you write. Does charisma help you and will it help others in their relationships with their clients?

Daramiah: Sure it will because charisma is to me a sign of life. It means that someone has vitality. They have passion. They have a love for what they do, and to me more than anything that comes across first. When I would meet disgruntled customers, and then I got to the point, to be honest with you at my company I developed such a reputation for taking care of bad customers that anytime bad customers would come to our company, the managers would come and give me the information from it, “Can you go out and do this call?” Especially when they were a customer giving a great deal of money. I would go out and resolve those issues. I’m just saying that type of mentality knowing that my job was to go out and resolve an issue, not expecting to receive any money directly from doing that, but knowing that those kinds of actions have to naturally bring back prosperity and wealth because those are the premises upon which wealth is built, no different than in a family. If you have people serving one another in a family, then people that normally don’t’ serve will begin to serve the others, and it begins to grow and so you begin to have a wealthy family. To me, wealth is not just what you receive as payment for the work you do. Sometimes you receive a wealth of smiles when you make people happy or a wealth of thank yous when you do something special for a person. You’re rich when you receive that.

Michael: Right. Are there certain types of customers that we should want to avoid as we build our business?

Daramiah: There sure is. We have certain customers and a lot of times when you deal with customers over a long period of time, you begin to know right up front these customers. Some people have trouble sniffing them out, but there are people who expect to get everything for nothing. When you come across a customer like that, they’ll drain your company dry and you can’t afford to give them everything that they want because their expectation level is out of the real strategy of what a real relationship is about.

Daramiah: What I would do when I was in the security industry, I would go out to customers, especially if I know that I’ve given them a lot of perks on the front-end and they didn’t appreciate it, and if they wanted to whine about it, I’d begin to realize, “Hey, if I take care of this customer, and they become a customer of mine, I’m going to have a whiny customer for the rest of my life.” So, what I began to do is I began to accelerate the cost on other things because if you’re going to have a customer that’s going to whine, then you need to build in the financials of course to take care of them. Otherwise, what’s going to happen is he’s going to drain you for everything you can give him and then on top of that, he’s going to drain you for everything that he believes that he can get in the future.

Michael: It’s very expensive to take care of a customer like that. So, what do you do? Do you get rid of them?

Daramiah: Yeah, you get rid of them. That’s what I do. I get rid of mine just by beginning to accelerate the costs on other items especially most of these customers in the security industry were measuring your price out to somebody else’s price, and all of them were price motivated. If your price would be higher that than the other person’s, they would automatically go with other person in some of the cases, I won’t say most cases because I have to be honest with you, my price strategy was always higher. My boss and them had a guideline of there they wanted us to sell the customer, but they would give us our commissions as we sell them on a higher level, and because I gave such great customer service and I know the cost of the service, I began to build that into the price.

Michael: Your service became more valuable because they got the customer service, and you didn’t become just a commodity like everyone else. This is really important. You have thousands of businesses out there who have customers, and these customers, the bad ones, are draining them mentally, draining them financially, and you would say that your best advice to any small business, large business is to get rid of these customers as fast as they can.

Daramiah: You can mess up your business by not taking care of the customer, and then you can mess up your business by getting the wrong customer.

Michael: That’s true. What would you say is the quickest way to improve your skills if you’re having problems with disgruntled customers? Give me some techniques that I could use if I have disgruntled customers. I’m not necessarily saying bad customers, but customers who have a problem with something. How do you handle that?

Daramiah: One of the first things you want to establish is that you want to establish a mentality that the customer’s always right even if the customer’s wrong because that will give you a good premise from what you need to be responding.

Michael: So, if I say, “Daramiah this security service you sold me is a rip-off.” What are you going to say to me?

Daramiah: I’m going to say, “Well, based on what form of measurement, how is it a rip-off to you, and how can I better help serve you in this area where I can show you there are many hidden benefits to the service I’m offering?”

Michael: “I saw an ad in the paper from ADT and it’s a lot less money there.”

Daramiah: One thing I’ll share with you is that you can always go and get your system for less anywhere, but one thing I can promise you is that you won’t get the service on the back-end that you need from the actual sales rep who is selling you the product.

One thing that I will share with customers at that point was, “Right now you’re measuring a smoke detector against a smoke detector, but one thing you’re not realizing is that after the system is sold to you, there are some other costs that you have to incur. One of the costs that some of my customers who I receive that come to me from companies that aren’t treating them well, share with me that they have a cost of frustration. So, that’s something you can’t measure in tangible ways. So, you don’t realize by getting or inheriting the wrong sales rep, you can inherit frustration, and that costs you money and time and energy.”

Michael: That’s a great way to handle it. Acknowledging that the customer is right, and talking to them in the way that brings them to an understanding of what their real objection is really about is obviously one technique. What are some other techniques to handle disgruntled customers that you have found effective?

Daramiah: Listening to them. Letting them vent without interruption. Letting them share all the things that they say they’re unhappy about, and actually when they’re sharing with you if it’s over the phone, have a pad and a pen. If it’s in person, still have a pad and a pen. Preferably, I would always use a yellow pad because it’s kind of like a yellow light. It tends to make people slow down a little bit. It’s a legal pad so you’re taking notes, and they respect the fact that you’re not just listening to them, but you’re showing the signs of a good listener.

Michael: Is there anything else you can think of? Listening is incredible. Proving to them that you’re listening by taking notes with the yellow pad. Letting the customer know that his objection is valuable and right, and you’re able to overcome it with an answer that makes him see what his real objection is.

Daramiah: And, sometimes allowing them to call other clients of yours that have been through trouble times with you and know your performance.

Daramiah: Yeah, it makes them a major difference. Customers who had a negative experience with your business buy you made a comeback in their lives and you allowed them to take you back again and strengthen your relationship, those are good customers to have phone numbers of and share with your clients. They can contact this person. “See, this person had a problem, too. Not like yours, but they had a problem, and you can call them up and you can ask them how I resolved the problem.” One thing is I’m not perfect, but I’m willing to resolve any problem and to me that’s more valuable than me telling you that you’ll never have a problem because most companies li. They say, “We’ll take care of you. You’ll never run into an issue.” I was always up front.

One of the things I tell people upon first meeting them is I say, “One of the things that I learned when I was in the mortgage industry-“ and I learned this in surveying some of the top mortgage people in the industry who have been in the mortgage industry for 25 years, because when I first came into the mortgage industry I didn’t know anything about it. So, I had a general manager and I asked him. I said, ‘Do you have any friends that have been in this industry as long as you have?’ He said, ‘Sure I do.’ I said, ‘Would you mind if I call them up and I just ask them about three questions and those three questions would be – what are the three most important things that I need to know to take care of customers well?’ One of the things that I learned in the process of serving some of these people who have been in the industry for a long time was one principle was give the bad news out first.

So, whenever there’s a problem that a customer is having or that I’m having. A customer has ordered something and for some reason, they’re not getting the product when they expected. What I would not do is come back and delay the customer. Some of the sales rep would not answer the call or they would answer the call but they would let it go to their voice mail, and then they would not respond to it until two or three days later hoping that the product would be in so they could go to the customer and make them happy.

Well, that was not my approach. As soon as I heard that the customer was disgruntled to leave me a voice mail or if they were talking to me live, I would immediately let them know what the problem was. Even to the point if that meant that it wouldn’t make us look good. Why? Because people more than anything need to know that I’m going to be honest above everything and at all costs, and amazingly sometimes a customer will still be angry, but I would always turn around and say, “Well, Mr. Customer, I told you the truth. I didn’t lie to you. There’s one thing that you can say about me, and that is that I’m being honest, and I know that it’s not what you want to hear right now because you want your problem solved, but I do want you to know that I’m still being honest with you.”

Michael: Is customer service a big business? It appears to be one of the most highly ignored areas of companies’ businesses. What is poor customer service costing businesses here in the United States?

Daramiah: Tremendous money from a retention level. Organization and corporations are losing customers by the ship load because people are not satisfied and happy with the service that they’re getting. It also costs you more than just losing a customer. Sometimes you don’t realize that the benefits of keeping an existing customer. It is much easier to retain a customer and resell a customer on repeat service over and over again than to lose a customer and then have to start that relationship all over again from one. You can’t do that. That wears a company out. That wears people’s time out, people’s energy. So, I love selling through referral. I love building my business off of the contacts and the relationships that I already have. I have put a principle in place in my life where my philosophy is win one customer at a time. I can build an empire if I just win one customer at a time. I don’t have to try to win thousands of customers. If I take care of that one customer and like Christians say you’ve been converted, if I can convert that customer and really make him a customer of mine, that customer will reach out and grab other friends and relatives and tell them how great I ma.

Michael: Did you find this to be true as you grasped and built one customer at a time, did you find that it was happening? They were referring their friends naturally?

Daramiah: Sure they were, and not only that going to the referred customer is always an easier sale. You don’t have to work as hard. It’s like somebody saying, “Hey, let introduce you to Michael Jordan.” You’re not going to give Michael Jordan a hard time because the person has such a good relationship with a super individual that you just want to be a part of that relationship.

Michael: The thing that I think that even seeing how building it one at a time is smarter is that people say, “Well, I don’t have time to spend all this time with my customers. My days are so packed with so many things to do. I can’t give all my customers all this time to build the relationship.” And, a lot of people want to not build those relationships because they don’t want to have the personal involvement. How would you respond to that objection?

Daramiah: You can’t really build anything until you’ve secured the relationship, and if the relationship is not secured I don’t care if you drag hundreds of customers into your coffers, you’re not going to keep all of those customers. That’s the first thing that you have to remember. When people come through the funnel of doing business with you, which you have to remember the funnel is always big on the front end and smaller on the back end, you’re only going to get a couple of customers out on the back end. You’re not going to win all of those customers to you in terms of long-term, lifetime customers.

Michael: But, what you’re talking about is building a long-term, lifetime customer.

Michael: You could be sure if you take the time at the beginning to build that relationship that that relationship will mean multiple other customers automatically because you invested in the front-end.

Daramiah: W Stone, in a book that I read about when he was selling insurance, and that’s how he did it, and if it’s worked for him and it’s worked for dozens of other people, it’s got to work for you, too.

Daramiah: That’s right until his business got so big he’d have to hire people to take over those customers that he brought in because he could not manage them.

Michael: So, in your speaking business, you’re speaking about customer service. Are businesses ignoring this? Or do businesses have a desire to improve their customer service? Do they understand what it’s costing them and does that open up doors for you to do your speaking to these companies about it? Do they feel it’s important?

Daramiah: A lot of times, people don’t recognize the real value and importance of it. There are very few companies today who are really recognizing first of all the value of training the employees because of companies cutting back. People also cut back on training, and therefore when you cut back on training, you cut back on knowledge and information that causes things to grow. I’m like the fertilizer, you’re finding that the companies that do hire me, the do recognize that and some of them are converted to realizing that after they talk with me deeper about the problems that they’ve been having at their company, and that comes through by communicating with people and trying to identify for them why their business isn’t doing well. In my book, in my philosophy, everybody’s business should be booming. There’s no excuse for your business not to be exploding. Even if you’re just beginning, you build it one customer at a time is guaranteed to increase it. If you only increase it one percent a day, look at the increase that you’re going to have after a year’s time.

Michael: So, give me a word picture describing the attributes of a great customer service person. How would that look in my company?

Daramiah: That would look like, first of all, a person who goes out of their way to serve others, a person who puts others above themselves, and I mean in a genuine way because to me, more than anything that genuine side is important. That is one of the things that salesmen sometimes try to sell to people, and they don’t believe it themselves. You can’t sell something that you have not really genuinely identified in yourself, and being genuine is important to being a good customer service.

Another thing that would probably help tremendously for companies is them changing the concept of customer service. Instead of saying, “Customer service”, say “Customer Servant”. I think that would really stamp a better image in their imagination of what the people who work for the customer service department should be about.

Daramiah: The book that I was trying to remember by W Stone is “The Greatest Success Secret that Never Fails”.

Daramiah: That was the book. He did about 12 chapters on different methods that you could apply.

Daramiah: I was thinking about it because at the end of each chapter he would give a summation of what you should’ve learned and he always used the open door image as a metaphor of opportunity.

Daramiah: That’s right, and he talks about how he began his insurance empire right here in Chicago on the north side.

Daramiah: CPE stands for “Customer Passion Evangelist”. Actually, that grew out of back in ’99 I was going to a lot of Internet seminars where there was a big Internet community meeting in downtown Chicago once a month, and of course, me being in the sales industry, that was an opportunity to meet people and to network because they were the Internet community. It seemed like they were more about networking than people that I was working with. When I would go to these meeting and meet people, it was pretty interesting, pretty fun, and I think I was introducing myself to people. Then, I kind of go this idea when I introduced myself, “Just don’t introduce myself as a security consultant” because standard businessmen generally just introduce themselves and just say, “Yeah, I’m the Operations Manager of so and so and so and so.” People are supposed to be impressed with that. What I found that it wasn’t challenging enough to get people interested and one of the things that I like to do is invoke some humor in my relationships, and I found that it opens people up. It relaxes people. It’s a good ice-breaker. It makes people start off on the right basis.

So, what I began to do is I got the idea because I had to introduce myself to four people because we had this little game that we were playing where we had to introduce ourselves to so many people. Whoever introduced themselves to the most people within like a five minute time frame would win the prize. So, I was going from person to person to person and it just dawned on me, “I’m not going to introduce myself as a security consultant because I’m more than just a security consultant. I’m the Customer Passion Evangelist. That’s what I am.”

Daramiah: Exactly. So, when I would introduce myself and say, “I’m the Customer Passion Evangelist.” You’re right, they’d say, “What is that?” So, that opened up the door for greater dialogue. Saying, “I’m a security consultant didn’t have the same attractiveness.”

Daramiah: Exactly. One of the other things that I would do is they would after asking me that, they’d say, “What is a Customer Passion Evangelist?” And, I would respond with an answer that wasn’t very profound, a response so to speak, I would say, “A customer passion evangelist is a person that evangelizes customers with passion.”

Daramiah: Then they laugh. It built such good relationship bonding that I’ve got to take this into the future. You wouldn’t believe it. After about a year of me winning awards at my company, we ended up getting sold out to ADT and they were making me up business cards. We had to submit our old business card via fax. So, what I did is I took my business card and I saw how it was laid out, and when you fax a card it just looks like regular print. So, what I did is I typed on a piece of paper the same information that I had, but I put on there “Daramiah Phillips, *CPE” and I sent that in and they sent back my business cards.

Michael: I’m wondering, “What is a CPE?” People don’t know what a CPE is.

Michael: Is it important to articulate to your customers why you believe people are choosing to do business with you over others, to let them know reasons why they should do it and how you found this technique to work for you?

Daramiah: It definitely is important to communicate to me everything as it relates to what customers need to know about why people are doing business with you because if they don’t understand the premise that’s motivating other people then you lose the opportunity, first of all, to communicate some major benefits that they may not realize in doing business with you. So, this becomes real important for people to understand that and I don’t think that you can ever over communicate the value you bring to people because people don’t realize all the things you do, and even just drawing back on Claude Hopkins, that was one of the things that I got out of reading the information off of your site. Claude Hopkins did is he exploded before people realized the thing that was hidden about how they did the business that they did. So, it’s important that people understand that details.

Michael: It’s called “preemptive advertising”. That is exactly what Claude Hopkins did with all his advertising. He gave people reasons why and it had all started through John E Kennedy, who was one of the earlier thinkers about what advertising really was. He’s the one who set the foundation for modern advertising and he wrote a couple of books. One was called, “Reason Why Advertising.” And this even works today with psychology. Let’s say that you’re at Kinko’s and there’s a big line to get to the front, and they did a test, and this is in Robert Chaldini’s book called “Influence”, and let’s say that you would break into the line. Well, they took two subjects of people. The first one would go, “Can I get in front of you?” And, then the second one would go, “Can I get in front of you because I have an appointment and I’m late for dinner?” Now, no matter what the excuse was, by adding “because” giving a reason why they wanted to get in front of them, they were much more successful in getting what they wanted.

If selling the idea of great customer service is like playing chess which we talked a little bit about earlier, how do you avoid getting into a checkmate with one of your customers?

Daramiah: First of all, you have to think ahead. You have to anticipate what you think the move of your customer is going to be before you ever get to that move which means that sometimes you just have to have some collective history with dealing with customers with your product, and as you begin to gain more history, it’s kind of like that philosophy that goes, “fail as much as you can as quick as you can so that you can begin to actually have the successes that you need to grow the kind of business that you need.” Most people are afraid to fail, and we have to sometimes fail in the beginning in order to gain greater knowledge on how to avoid the checkmates.

Michael: Right. Are you available to do speaking engagements for companies if they wanted someone to come in there and consult and talk to their employees about customer service and put together a plan that would improve their customer service and improve bottom line results for their money financially?

Daramiah: Sure I am, and I think the key word that you said was “building a plan.” I don’t want to come in and do a motivational presentation, but I really do want to look at the business, examine what has been working and an area really where the company feels like things haven’t been working and create a plan for the success that they need to build.

Michael: So, you’ll come in to a company who has problems. You will meet with the key operators of the business whether it’s a CEO or Operations Manager. You’ll discuss what’s going on in the business, and you will put together a strategy plan to implement for the business to improve customer service.

Daramiah: Without a doubt, put together a 60 or a 90 day plan and examine the results.

Michael: How are your fees paid on that? What do you charge for that or is that all different depending on what you’re going to do?

Daramiah: It really depends on how extensive a company wants me to go into the specifics and if it’s going to be a short-term one shot deal or is it going to be a multiple long-term deal. All of the costs are going to be relative the length of the actual project that we’re going to be working on.

Michael: What would you tell me if I’m the owner of a company, and knowing what you know from actually becoming almost at the top of your game in the security industry with customer service and using the techniques and bringing those into my company. If I’m willing to work with you, and I’m at a level to where the pain is so great because of our poor customer service, I want to make changes and I bring you into my company, what can I expect from your services? What can happen to my company as a result of me implementing your ideas and strategies?

Daramiah: Well, one of the things that I think will develop is better understanding of your customer needs and what they are and how we can actually go about creating a plan for the specific solutions to why they’re not getting what they need. That’s key. So, those are some of the benefits that I’m willing to provide. I can guarantee you that there will be success because whenever I’ve worked with any other organizations in the past, success has always happened. Whenever I’ve ever worked on my own, the success always comes because of the fact that I actually put myself into a position where I’m looking at it from the customer’s point of view, and I’m looking at it from a servant to the customer. The word servant actually really means slave. You’re actually working for that individual. A lot of people don’t want to look at it from that standpoint, but I’m at the mercy of the customer.

Michael: Can I expect more sales for my company once my customer service problems are solved?

Daramiah: Sure, that has to take place because the philosophy that I implement through the service mentality brings all of that as a result. One of the things that will also happen and most people don’t expect it to happen is the attitudes will change about how they approach the customers. You actually get into more genuine sales serving position to step up to the level of customer service that I’m talking about. It just won’t happen if you’re looking for a quick fix. You’ve got to really develop a mentality. That’s why I call it the customer service mentality.

Michael: I wanted to talk to you about that and I really appreciate you sharing it with all of my listeners, and I think you’ve given some real powerful ideas and you’ve shared a lot about your experience, and I would encourage anyone who’s having problems with their business, who’s having problems with disgruntled customers, who’s having problems with their employees not getting along, to contact you and at least talk to you about some solutions that you could maybe provide for them and you can do this. You don’t have to be in Chicago to do this. You can do this over the phone.

Daramiah: Yes, I can. As a matter of fact, a great deal of the work that I’ve done in the past is right over the phone.

Deremiah, *CPE, is an amazing customer advocate. This year alone he has captured the world's attention when he received Nightingale Conant's "Acres of Diamonds" Award.

Deremiah is currently is selling out of his bestseller "52 GREAT WEEKS To Unforgettable Inspirational Service" and here is what Dr. Myles Munroe said in his forward of the book...

"52 GREAT WEEKS To Unforgettable Inspirational Service" provides a tremendous contribution to the body of knowledge and wisdom available to companies, civic and service organizations, trainers, human resource development programs, and non-profit organizations. In his simple yet profound way, Deremiah leaps over complicated formulas and theories, delivering practical insights for the individual involved in customer relations. This book is destined to become a classic filled with practical principles guaranteed to inspire, motivate, challenge, excite, rally and equip your service team to create life-long customers.

Deremiah is specially gifted with ability to communicate these time-tested ideas in a way that captures the heart of the reader. I highly recommend this book for the manager, supervisor, CEO, executive, teacher, pastor, and leader in any discipline. I believe if you apply the precepts in this book you will truly see that it may only take 52 weeks to make your company or organization the successful one you only dreamt of. Read and explore the treasure hidden within these pages. I was fortunate to have interviewed Deremiah, *CPE, right before the book was written and he shared some simple but profound ideas on his first marketing experiences. He also shared some nuggets of inspiration on how he handled his clients. Please listen carefully with me now as I interview one of Americas most humble Customer Passion Evangelist, Deremiah, *CPE...

Michael: I want to thank you for listening to hardtofindseminars.com. If you want to get in touch with any of the people that we interview, please contact Michael by email, or you can call 858-274-7851.