Did You Forget Your Customer?

Data, marketing, SEO, mastermind groups, industry events. Each one can earn a place in how you run your shop. There’s one resource that gets skipped more often than any of them, and it already left with a receipt.

Your customer bought something from you, and they’ll need more. A repair. A tubeless refresh. Some advice on a slow Tuesday. They also know things about your store that you don’t.

This spring E-MOUNTAINBIKE Magazine surveyed its readers, eMTB riders engaged enough to answer a magazine survey. 54% said they got neither a proper explanation of their bike’s features nor a basic suspension setup when they bought it. 70% had never adjusted their rebound. 80% had never touched compression.

You may not sell many eMTBs. It doesn’t matter. If an enthusiast who reads bike magazines leaves the shop confused, the person who bought a hybrid for the bike path probably isn’t doing better.

You’ve probably seen the same thing in your own shop. Someone calls to ask whether the bike has a warranty. A rider is out on the trail with the saddle still slammed from loading the bike into the hatchback. Before through axles, it was a quick release closed wrong. Each one is a sign that something didn’t get through.

That doesn’t mean your staff skipped the handover. The sale happened on a slow Wednesday and pickup happened Saturday at 11. Maybe there was a flyer or a free class. Then the new bike took up space in the garage and in their head, and the flyer went into the recycling.

Say three out of four of those riders really did get the walkthrough. The 54% still tells you something. What the customer takes home is what counts, and for a lot of them the message landed flat or never landed.

The magazine can tell you the handover breaks. It can’t tell you where yours breaks, and neither can your sales numbers. Your customers can.

When I owned the shop, we sent our customers a big survey. The last time we ran it, the clearest result was about service turnaround. We had always assumed people wanted their bike back in 24 hours. Most of them told us 3 to 4 days was fine. We had been working hard on a problem most of our customers didn’t have.

You can’t ask people you can’t reach. That’s why you get an email address and a phone number on every sale and every repair ticket. Not for the newsletter, and not for the spring sale blast. You need them so you can follow up after the handover and ask what went wrong. If your POS is full of customers named “Cash,” fix that first.

Not every customer will answer, and you don’t need all of them to. Some will fill out a form. Some will only tell you face to face, leaning on the counter while you true a wheel. You aren’t running a census. You’re looking for the pattern.

Do it now. The season is winding down, and the rides, the service visits and the pickups are still fresh in people’s heads. Collect the answers this fall, then use the quiet months to rebuild before spring.

If a survey isn’t your thing, have a pizza night. Invite customers in and ask what’s working and what isn’t. Know what you’re getting, though. The people who show up for free pizza tend to be your fans, and one frustrated customer can set the tone for the whole room. Bring in a facilitator if you can, so you’re listening instead of running the meeting.

Whichever way you ask, the hard part comes after. You’ll read that someone at the counter was short with a customer, or that a bike sat for a week and nobody called. Your first instinct will be to explain what really happened. Don’t. The customer isn’t wrong about how it felt.

You might find out you’re doing everything right, and that’s worth knowing. You might find out you’ve been missing sales: products people wanted that you didn’t carry, or hours that didn’t fit when they could get to you. Or you might find out it’s your team, and that the way people are treated at the counter is why they don’t come back. That one is the hardest to hear and the most useful.

Asking and then doing nothing is worse than not asking. It tells customers you didn’t really want to know.

What would your customers say went wrong after the sale, and when did you last ask them?

Ask now. Read every answer. Pick one change and make it. Then tell the customers who answered what you changed because of them.

If you want help building the questions, or the framework for the night, schedule a 20-minute call.