831 – Cover yourself the right way: Tom talks CYA

Episode 831 - CYA
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute, the entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multi-millionaire Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 831 of Screw the Commute podcast. And I hate being sick. I never get sick. I can't stand being sick. And you could probably, if you listen to this show a lot, you hear I don't sound normal. I guess Mr. Invincible is not as invincible as he thought he was. But you know what? I'm still never going to let you down over it. So anyway, this is episode 831. CYA stands for Cover Your "Behind". This is a method I've been using for years to win disputes. And I got a bonus tip to help you out. Clear at the end. Hope you to miss episode 830. That was international business safety. Actually, it was more electronic business safety. All the kinds of things that happened to you electronically with your cell phones and stuff that you didn't even know about. So it'll really open your eyes. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. That was 830 and today is 831. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my automation book. You need to grab it, grab it and screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:41] All right, let's talk about covering your butt when you're in a dispute. First of all, let me state I don't get in many disputes because a big part of my business attitude is fairness. Unfortunately, other businesses don't always have that same attitude.

[00:01:57] And in many cases, the bigger the business, the worse fairness gets. I'm currently in a dispute with Jo-Ann fabrics. Yeah, I know, I'm a big sewing guy, right? No, I bought two defective sewing machines for my girlfriend, and they won't take the second one back. There is no need to get into the details of that dispute, which if they don't resolve it, you will hear a lot about it forever. But the method I'm going to talk about today is one I highly suggest you adopt if you want to up your winning percentage when getting into a dispute. And I might add, no matter how perfect you are in your business, if you're around even a short amount of time, you'll have trouble with other businesses. And I know this sounds cynical, but after being in business for now, going on 47 years, I can pretty much guarantee all the companies and people you deal with will not be fair when they mess up. All right, so here's a technique. You must be and this is in all caps exacting in all your correspondence, especially things discussed on the phone. Now, before I get into this, there is a legal aspect to this, and I'm not giving you legal advice, but this is what I understand to be true. Of course, check with your own attorney. But what I understand is that notes you take at the time something happened are admissible in court. If it goes that far and notes you recalled later aren't.

[00:03:28] And I'm certainly simplifying this. And and you attorneys out there can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'll bet the attorneys would say you are far better off making notes while you are interacting with someone from a company, rather than waiting and trying to recreate what happened later. So be ready to make exacting notes the moment you interact. So what do I mean by exacting? I mean, you get the name of the person you're talking to. You write down the exact time of the call. This kind of reminds me of what I teach in copywriting. Specific cells in general doesn't. So here's an example. I talked to Sally last week about my bad sewing machine. All right, that's general. Now this is opposed to I call Joann fabrics customer care line at. And then I put the phone number at 10:31 a.m. eastern time on Monday, November 20th. Sally was the representative. Now okay, so that's specific. In other words, given the time 1031, not 1030 exactly. Everything's exact. And recording the call is even better. But listen, there are laws about this, and you better not violate them or you turn into a criminal rather than a complaining customer. Look up the laws. They're different from states and all. All kinds of stuff. Anyway, when someone like your credit card company sees that, number one, you don't have a history of charging back things all the time. In other words, you're not a big troublemaker con person and you're exacting notes of what occurred.

[00:05:09] Not only do you have well, it's the second thing. Not only do you have a better chance in having your credit card company be your ally when they pass on these notes to the company, the company is probably going to say, oh, snap, this person is not one to mess with. And by the time they investigate all the facts you've presented and try to find a recording that they probably made, they most likely will have spent more time and money than if they had just fixed your problem. Now, I do recognize the fact that some big companies fall prey to professional con people who, you know, spill coffee on themselves and then sue the fast food chain, those kind of people. But if you lay out an articulate and exacting. I keep emphasizing that treatise of what happened. They may just give up and take care of you. Also, companies now have the the the threat of social media of what they've done to you going viral and potentially costing them millions of dollars of future business. Now, there's a caveat to that too. We can take a lesson from shyster and convicted lawyer Michael Avenatti. He's the guy that extorted Nike and got caught and, you know, put in jail. So it's a really bad idea to threaten a company of what you're going to do if they don't do what you want them to do. I mean, that's a free ticket to have the FBI listening in on your next call.

[00:06:37] And it is called extortion. Talk to your lawyer again about what you can say and what you can't say. But companies do know there's a possibility of their bad deeds being exposed around the world. So keep your nose clean and don't threaten. Okay, back to what you should write down. Name of the person. The date. The time of day. The length of the call. What you said, what was told to you. If you aren't getting anywhere with the front line person, which maybe can't speak English very well and is just reading from a script, I mean, I had this person just read the same. I told them that's not right. That's not even correct. They read the same exact thing to me three times in a row until I said, no, give me a supervisor. And I even made the supervisor mad because I used to get a lot of money teaching and critiquing customer service for big companies. And you'd be surprised to see how many companies just pass the call on to the next front level person who pretends for that call to be the supervisor. Anyway, I ask if the Joanne's lady was really a supervisor or just another front line worker, and she didn't really like that too well. But too bad I'm not calling to make her happy. Anyway, if you do request a supervisor mark down the time of the request, how long you were on hold to get one their name.

[00:08:02] If you got cut off and had to go through the entire process again, write down all the times and all that stuff. Now, by using this technique and being exact, exact, exact, you'll find if your claim is legit, you'll probably win most of the time. All right, so here's a bonus tip on bigger deals. One time I had a dispute with a really big company and was a lot of money involved. So I looked up all the executives of that company that I got off their website, and I paid extra money to LinkedIn to get to the level where I was allowed to email people that I didn't that weren't related to me. And I shamed the CEO and the COO and a couple vice presidents about the problem. And I got a call back the same day and they started taking care of the problems. So so there's some tips on CYA because you will get in disputes. And if you handle them properly and they're legit, you'll probably win most of them. Okay well there you go. And it's lucky that in my mentor program when you join, you don't have to talk to me in person and get sick. All right. So so although when you come to the retreat center, hopefully I'll be better by then. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check out greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. Catch you later.