Why you should always keep records of your customer purchases and activity

Recently, a disgruntled member of my monetized Facebook group complained about my rule against businesses being able to recommend themselves.

I don’t allow businesses to recommend themselves.

This includes businesses recommending themselves on posts where their type of business may be requested.

I don’t allow this for several reasons:

1. Many businesses would join my group and the only reason was to recommend themselves/advertise for free. They were not adding any value to the group at all.

2. Paying advertisers were upset that these non-paying businesses were skirting the rules in order to avoid paying my very reasonable advertising rates.

3. Just because a businesses recommends themselves doesn’t mean that business will do a good job. I definitely prefer to get personal recommendations from people who have used a business, as they’re much more genuine and likely to be solid.

Below is a screenshot of my rules. I had to add the second rule because people weren’t paying attention to the first one. We check them both when declining comments.

I still allow people to post something like “Sending a DM” – and they can privately send their business info to the inquiring member. There’s really no way to police this, anyway, and at least the advertising isn’t all over the group.

But wait! Further down her thread, Colette claimed she had used my advertising before and “never got any calls.”

Uh oh! Nobody wants an unhappy customer letting everyone else know they’re unhappy.

The thing is – her name rang a bell. I couldn’t remember exactly why.  So I started investigating. And I’m so grateful to have a system that keeps track of these things.

Sure enough, when I looked into my business management software, 17hats, I found out why I had remembered her.

Colette had in fact purchased my lowest price advertising option, which is $175 per year. It is a Premium Directory Listing, which is basically a public web presence on my website with images, a description, website, social media, etc, and the ability of its owner to update it at any time.

After she purchased this directory listing, Colette thought she was then entitled to post at-will in the Facebook group, advertising herself whenever and wherever she saw fit.

When my assistant deleted her ads in the group, Colette was furious!

My assistant then explained that she had not purchased this advertising option and that it was at a higher price point, and came with a lot more perks. But Colette was still mad.

I found the email chain in 17hats, and it was lengthy. She had basically harassed my assistant to the point where I refunded her after she’d had the premium directory listing for nearly 6 months. At that point, I had paid my assistant much more money just to respond to her entitled emails than it was worth.

So, needless to say, being able to find that info – which, by the way, was from three years ago – and respond like this, was absolutely glorious:

“You had a premium directory listing in 2021, which is our lowest priced advertising option at $175/year and does not come with business membership perks like advertising in this group. You then complained about not getting what you thought you were entitled to with that ad option, and we refunded you fully after a few months. Your listing is now the free version in our directory.”

I also love Colette’s response:

“ok”

I mean, what was she going to say?

This brings me back to the title of this post: Why you should always keep records of your customer purchases and activity.

As you may know, I have been using 17hats since I started my business in 2015.

It’s an all-in-one system to organize your clients, workflows, bookkeeping, emails, calendar, notes, and more. I cannot say enough good things about it! It is for “solopreneurs” like you & me – who have to wear 17 different hats in order to keep our business running smoothly.

If you’d like to check it out, please use my referral link so that you can save up to half off of your annual membership. I hope you like it as much as I do!

You can also check out my 17hats walkthrough here.

 

*This post contains affiliate links.